This is what makes Civilisation great. It is the tension between belief in the greatness of art and creativity, from the Dark Ages to the present, and the sense of how close this has come to utter disaster. "It does seem hard to believe that European civilisation could ever vanish," he says at the beginning of the series, "and yet, you know, it has happened once."

Tony Hall and whomever is chosen to produce a new Civilisation should remember this. The false pieties and sentimentalities of our age should not be mistaken for confidence. There is something troubling about our own lack of conviction about our identity and traditions. Whom do we trust today to match Clark's erudition, his range of interests and enthusiasm, but also this dark sense of fragility and pessimism? Among scholars with comparable broadcasting experience, only Neil MacGregor comes close. Paxman, Marr, Mary Beard, Lisa Jardine, Waldemar Januszczak, even Simon Schama, are all either too narrow in their interests, are current affairs journalists and broadcasters rather than cultural historians or lack the sense of darkness that Clark shared with his directors.

Think of the great moments of Civilisation — the images of the Crucifixion in early medieval art, the Vatican Map Room as Clark walks away from the camera, Michelangelo's Prisoners, Rodin's sculpture of Balzac. They are not moments of confidence or grandeur. They are moments of supreme pathos or moments when that grandeur is fatally undermined. Perhaps such a series could only be made by people who had known the war and could think that a series about Western civilisation should begin with a programme called The Skin of our Teeth and end with Yeats.