His 13-part America: A Personal History of the United States, which appeared on the BBC in 1973, came from the same creative team as Kenneth Clark's Civilisation.
Down in Los Angeles the young thespians of the Hollywood Cricket Club, once a lonely oasis of Anglocentric civilisation, are now routinely trounced by visiting Indian teams from Santa Clara.Silicon Valley does business differently from other places.
"I actually feel it energises you," explains a fellow team member, Maureen McCullum, "when you get back to roots, when you get away from civilisation.
Zodiak Media, the French company which owns ALP, has been negotiating to sell the Swedish format, in which two teams are left in the wild and tasked with finding their way back to civilisation, to more international broadcasters.
Dr Matt Taylor, part of the team behind the ground-breaking Rosetta mission, may have been at the forefront of one of civilisation's greatest achievements, but at home he struggles to even park his car, his family has revealed.
Leading linguist Dr Banks is promptly pressed into service as an interplanetary translator, teamed with Jeremy Renner's tetchy-but-cute physicist Ian Donnelly, who insists that "the cornerstone of civilisation isn't language, it's science".
On a desolate planet, a team of 12 Xeno project scientists are conducting an archaeological excavation of the ruins of an ancient civilisation.
And when the team arrive at the forbidding outpost of Gruhuken island, illness forces Jack's two remaining companions to go back to civilisation.
In the early 1990s he described himself as an "advocate of civilisation, definer of civilisation, teacher of the rules of civilisation…leader (possibly) of the civilising forces".
Gil and his ministry team have an opposing theory: tough intellectual property law is a 20th-century idea and most of the blossoming of world civilisation has happened perfectly well without it.
