Ballet: the transformation from human to spinning top, from meat to feathers

There’s only one problem — Polina is in such demand that she won’t be able to attend any of the rehearsals. For the six weeks leading up to opening night, inexperienced Vadim will be broken in by the ENB’s senior principal ballerina, Daria Klimentová — who will then bow out at the dress rehearsal, leaving Vadim, and the glory, to Polina.

Daria is a sweetheart. Looking like a sexy, slightly nervous dachshund, Daria really isn’t a driven diva in the making. We first find her after warm-up, holding her ankle in her hand. “It hurts,” she says, with the calm of someone very familiar with pain.

Now 38, Daria is nearing the end of her career. She talks about her body in the same way that miners would talk about a coal seam that’s been mined to exhaustion, and which they are preparing to close down.

“I’ve had three operations on my knees, and one on my ankle; I’ve had a baby; I’ve been a professional for 20 years,” she says, with a resigned smile. “This body has been used and abused.” She kisses her fingertips, and then presses them to the ankle. The pain makes her eyes fill.

“Ach, look what you are seeing — an old ballerina crying. Tchoh.”

As the choreographer Derek stomps around like someone who has learnt how to be a choreographer from watching old Hollywood B-movies (“Ugh, listen to those shoes thumping — they sound like elephants. [Despairingly] Oh, and I have to look at this!”), and as young, nervous Vadim trembles, it’s Daria who keeps him going.

“I can say I am a shy person, and I am saying something wrong,” Vadim says, scuffing at the rehearsal-room floor with his shoe, cheekbones flecked with acne. A minute later, and he scissors through the sky towards Daria’s outstretched arms — looking like he’s able to bounce off the laws of gravity with a combination of youth, thigh and magnets. The transformation from human to spinning top is amazing. From meat to feathers. The wonder of ballet. But with two days to go before opening night Polina’s visa application fails. Derek comes to Daria, after a long day of rehearsals, and tells her that she must go on on opening night. Daria’s expression is that of Colin Firth when Edward VIII abdicates.

“Ah. I will fight Swan Lake one more time,” Daria says, stoically. “I fight one more time.”

Ten minutes before she and Vadim take to the stage on opening night, we find them sitting on the floor in a corridor, in tutu and tights, drinking champagne and laughing hysterically — the shy, spotty boy and the tired mother, leaning into each other, merged, at ease, like two limbs on the same body.

Captions at the end inform us that Daria and Vadim’s pairing — by accident, of opposites — has had rave reviews, and become one of the classic duos of the ENB’s history. This was a beautifully told and unexpected story. A very good documentary indeed.

Sunday, and the start of Niall Ferguson’s Civilisation: Is the West History? on Channel 4 — the advent of which on to the schedules was apt to prompt a long, low whistle, and an exclamation of, “Man, you gotta admire Niall Ferguson’s balls”. Civilisation is a hell of a title to choose for your programme — given that 1969’s Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark is, quite possibly, the greatest TV series yet made.

By way of quick comparison, it’s a bit like me calling this column “Clive James’s TV Reviews, 1976”, or David Cameron calling his Cabinet “Margaret Thatcher’s Historic Three-Term Rule”. It comes under “Don’t go there, young pup”. You just wouldn’t do it.

But writer-presenter Niall is not a man without confidence. For one, he’s a British historian with chairs and professorships at Harvard and the LSE, who was adviser to Senator John McCain during his 2008 run at the White House. And for two, he has a reet canny little ruse for taking history out of the hands of all the old squares — such as Kenneth Clark, Herodotus and CBBC’s Horrible Histories — and putting it into the hands of kids on skateboards, who smoke drugs and say “Nang”.

“What was it that gave Western civilisation its supremacy? We had six killer apps,” Ferguson says, with the air of someone who has prompted “Ooooohs” of excitement with this line in pitches before now.

Ferguson then goes on to list the West’s killer apps — competition, science, medicine, democracy, consumerism, the Protestant work ethic, Spotify Premium, NextBuses, Angry Birds and Face Mash. These, Ferguson says, were what caused Europe to pull irrevocably ahead of China in the 1400s and beyond.

At that point the Chinese may have had giant ships, gunpowder, printing presses, suspension bridges and clocks, but we were a bit chippy and generally got on with stuff.

Having introduced his apps conceit with a flourish, personally I was sad when Ferguson didn’t ride the analogy any farther. If you’re making a big-budget documentary series on the history of civilisation, based on the idea of Medieval Europe being an iPhone — and, therefore, presumably, ancient China being a Nokia — I want you to go all the way with it. Don’t be shy! End a link with, “As he closed the borders of his empire, Emperor Ming’s ideological ring-tone was clearly stuck on The Crazy Frog”. Go for it. Alas, Ferguson demurred.

But that wasn’t the biggest problem with Civilisation 2011. The problem with Civilisation 2011 is that if you watched it, then went and watched Civilisation 1969 on YouTube, Ferguson simply had his arse kicked by the long-dead Kenneth Clark.

Clark begins his Civilisation with a three-line quote from Ruskin about art, and bang! — he’s in, on Western art, architecture and politics that starts on the Île de la Cité in Paris, and within six minutes finds Clark on the blasted West Coast of Ireland, staring at beehive huts, where early Christian monks clung to the edge of Europe for 400 years, just waiting the Dark Ages out.

Ferguson, on the other hand, simply seemed to get kind of ... stuck in his first 15 minutes. He told us what the premise of the series was, and then of this episode — and then he told us again, and again, and again. China was technologically advanced, while we were all cuffing around drinking mud — but we pulled ahead.

Why? We had our killer apps. What were they? They were enough to beat China — even though, at the time, they had gunpowder. How did our killer apps beat gunpowder? It’s funny you should ask that, because the Europeans really did look like an inbred cousin sitting on a gate, shouting “Me marry cow!” at the time. Thank God for our killer apps. And so on.

It’s a common modern presenting trope: repeatedly telling the viewer we’re about to be told something rather than simply telling us the sodding thing. The narrative stalls, and repeats, like a download streaming in judders and spurts. On a bad day it feels like a perversion of time. On a good day it’s just ... dull.

Final score, then: Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: 1, Niall Ferguson’s Civilisation: 0.

Finally, Wonders of the Universe, with Professor Brian Cox. Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System was one of the great pleasures of 2010, despite its tendency to divide the audience over the subject of Cox himself. As is often the case with iconoclastic TV presenters, many simply took against Cox’s manner — wrong-footed by the odd, querulous feyness that the Lancashire accent often brings to pronouncements, which sometimes made it seem as though Cox was on the verge of ending a speech on gravity with “It’s dead magic, our mam”, giving a thumbs up and riding off the stage on a trike.

For myself, I liked Cox’s dreamy-eyed, post-club, come-down delivery: if you’re going to have big stuff, such as time, explained to you, then far better, I think, that it comes from someone who looks like he’s about to stick John Martyn’s Solid Air on, then offer you “some mellow smokes”.

This air of benign chillage was particularly welcome in episode one of Wonders of the Universe in which — in a winningly non-populist move — Cox had chosen to kick off the series with the destruction of the cosmos.

“We live in the stelliferous era — the age of stars,” Cox said, over cherryblossom starbursts of CGI imagery showing stars being born, and the Milky Way spurting into life. But fast-forward billions of years into the future, and this seething, life-giving star nursery will crumble, taking all life with it.

Cox showed us the end of the age of stars: blinking out, in order of radiance, the brightest leaving first — until the last lights in the cosmos are the grumbling red dwarfs, like baleful eyes in the night. Then they, and even the black dwarf stars, collapse into nothing but radiation, and the Universe doesn’t have a single atom left.

“All there will be is just black holes, and particles of light,” Cox said. A bit like post-close-down TV static, I guess, but for ever — with absolutely no prospect of BBC Breakfast or pages from Ceefax.

Given that Sunday evening is usually a bit of a downer at the best of times, by any normal reckoning Wonders of the Universe should have scored a clanging “No, Cox, no!” But, instead, Cox’s dreamy calm made it all seem rather glorious. “Life is the way through which the Universe understands itself,” Cox said — for a minute casting himself, and us, as just bits of the cosmos, all gathered together at 9pm on a Sunday.