And where were women? A few references to Dorothy Wordsworth, Teresa of Avila and the cult of the Virgin Mary. There is, in episode six, a powerful encomium to the great art of what Clark calls "the female religions" contrasted with the lack of religious imagery in Judaism, Protestantism and Islam, but that was it. This was a series about a small number of male geniuses, from Giotto to Beethoven, who were the great creative figures of Western art. These were the dreaded DWEMs — dead white European males — who became such figures of contention in late-20th-century humanities departments, and Clark was their great spokesman.

And what a spokesman: posh, old (Clark was in his mid-sixties when the series was filmed), patrician, in those immaculate suits. He spoke in the tones of Edwardian Winchester and interwar Oxford. Perhaps this is why so many of the best-known presenters who followed Clark and Cooke were foreign: Bronowski, Galbraith, Robert Hughes and Carl Sagan. The only other English presenter, David Attenborough, who came from a later generation, was a grammar school boy from Leicester, born in the mid-Twenties. Not a Savile Row suit in sight.

Art historians had other criticisms. Where were the close readings of individual works of art? They were unhappy with Clark's generalities, such as when he asks, "What is civilisation?" and answers, "I think I can recognise it when I see it," gesturing airily towards Notre Dame. Where were the explorations of the connections between individual works of art and their social and historical context? Clark's sweeping generalisations rankled. For example, when he says in the programme on the 18th century, "From Bach to Mozart, music expressed the deepest thoughts and feelings of the time, just as painting had done in the early 16th century," isn't that a little soft as art history? And his hierarchies, that run confidently through Civilisation, are now viewed with great suspicion. For example, the moment in the opening episode when he says, "The Apollo [Belvedere] surely embodies a higher state of civilisation than the Viking prow. The northern imagination takes shape in an image of fear and darkness. The Hellenistic imagination is an image of harmonised proportion and human reason." This kind of art history does not sit well in present-day lecture rooms.

So when Tony Hall calls for a remaking of Civilisation, he doesn't just mean a huge new watershed arts series. He also means one which will include — perhaps foreground — women and other cultures, and which will sound less posh and exclusive. Somewhere on his list of possible presenters will be women broadcasters like Mary Beard and Lisa Jardine. He will certainly be thinking of the inclusiveness and range of Neil MacGregor's Radio 4 series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, beginning with the mummy of Hornedjitef and the Olduvai handaxe, continuing with a Maya maize god statue, the statue of Rameses II and Chinese Tang tomb figures, and ending with the credit card and a solar-powered lamp and charger. This is a long way from the Apollo Belvedere. Clark, it may be worth noting, did not get a mention in MacGregor's series.

But should we be so quick to drop Clark in the trashcan of history? Clark was a far more complex figure than this strawman image suggests. First, he was not Eurocentric. "What is civilisation?" he asks in The Other Half, the second volume of his memoirs.

It was lunching with Georges Salles [director of the French Musées Nationaux] . . . The walls of his sitting-room were lined with books to the ceilings. The pictures, as is usual with French amateurs, were on easels — examples of Matisse and Picasso . . . and a superb late Renoir. On the tables were Maya carvings and Islamic pots, and there was a splendid mask from the Torres Straits, which had been given to Georges by Guillaume Apollinaire, and had been the inspiration of Picasso's tête nègre period.