TV/book review: Seven Ages of Britain

THE BBC's new primetime history series, fronted by David Dimbleby, is a bold attempt to tell the nation's story through objects. It's an inspired idea for television – to find the artefact, be it a royal diadem or a misshapen boot, that makes the past come alive.

This beautifully illustrated book contains seven essays by eminent historians and curators. However, some focus too much on conventional art history at the expense of the ordinary or eccentric objects – the nit comb found on the Mary Rose, the waistcoat worn by Charles I to the scaffold – which connect us vividly to our ancestors.

In his introduction, Dimbleby writes engagingly about his encounter with the Alfred Jewel, an intricate piece of gold and enamel work thought to have been commissioned by King Alfred. Suddenly, he writes, the legendary "king who burned the cakes" became a real flesh and blood figure. Such is the power of the object. The challenge the writers face is to convey this immediacy in each period.

Archaeologist Martin Carver is one of those who succeeds. He makes a powerful case for The Age Of Conquest (roughly 500BC to 1000AD) as a busy, cosmopolitan era. Far from a Dark Age to which the Normans brought progress, the Britain of 1000 was multicultural and full of invention. Its image-makers, he argues, were not savages chipping away at stones, but artists at the top of their game. The Picts captured the forms of animals in their carvings with a fluency not seen again until Picasso.

Carver is matched by architectural historian John Goodall on the Middle Ages. Taking as his starting point the magnificent shrine to St Thomas Becket at Canterbury (the destination of Chaucer's pilgrims), he challenges the conception of the Middle Ages as "synonymous with barbarity, bigotry and religious zealotry", pointing out that most medieval art has been lost, and most of that which survives reflects the interests of the rich and powerful.

Until the 20th century, whether under Henry VIII, who burned monasteries while creating his own iconography of power, or Oliver Cromwell, or even Queen Victoria, British art served the powerful, while lacking the artistic innovators who shaped movements in Italy or the Netherlands. Where we did innovate, argues John Styles, writing colourfully on the 18th century (The Age Of Money) was in business. A nation of entrepreneurs, we not only drove forward manufacture on an industrial scale, but promoted the skills of our craftsmen. Furniture-maker Thomas Chippendale owes his fame to the publication of his book of designs as much as to the success of his workshop.

The theme-based approach of the book has its faults. By styling the 19th century as The Age Of Empire, the important Arts and Crafts movement is eliminated. But Lawrence James' disconcerting chapter demonstrates powerfully how the arts disseminated the idea of Britain as benevolent coloniser.

Art historian Frances Spalding faces the challenge of telling the story of the 20th century and its art in one short chapter (cryptically titled The Age Of Ambition). She makes a valiant attempt to catalogue movements, from the Camden Town Group to the YBAs, and chart the advance and retreat of the avant-garde.

However, in claiming that the journey of art in the 20th century is about broadening its appeal – making "art for the people in a people's age" – she fails to do justice to its complexity. The conundrum of the avant-garde is that, while seeking to engage more deeply with the realities of life, it may have created a greater gulf than existed in the days of Hans Holbein's portraits, or King Alfred's jewel.

Seven Ages Of Britain, Sunday evenings on BBC1 from the end of January