Tonight Jeremy Isaacs introduces three television landmarks from 25 years of BBC2. The Personal View series, wide-ranging and often spectacular visual essays on the arts, began in 1969 with Sir Kenneth Clark 's Civilisation. It became the most watched arts series of all time, subsequently playing on television networks all over the world. The Fallacies of Hope
'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive' wrote Wordsworth of the early days of the French Revolution. But the storming of the Bastille led not to freedom but to the Terror, the dictatorship of Napoleon and the dreary bureaucracies of the 19th century.
Kenneth Clark traces the progressive disillusionment of the artists of the Romantic movement, through the music of Beethoven, the poetry of Byron, the paintings of Gericault,
Turner and Delacroix and the sculpture of Rodin.
Produced by MICHAEL GILL and PETER MONTAGNON (R)