Lion Television Preps New Mideast Doc

TV Real Weekly speaks with Richard Bradley about Lion Television’s series East to West: The Untold Story of Civilization.

For centuries there has been a rift between the West and the Arab world, a rift which, since the terrorist attacks on September 11, has widened into a clash of cultures.

Today, in the Western media, most references to Muslims and Arab countries are connected to violence, bombings, wars and terrorist groups. Just because Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah grab the headlines, it doesn’t mean there aren’t many prominent Arab and Western scholars and journalists who aren’t interested in bridging the gap and fostering better understanding between East and West. In fact, East to West: The Untold Story of Civilization is the name of a six-part series produced by Lion Television and distributed internationally by ALL3MEDIA International.

Lion Television has had considerable experience producing historical and cultural series over the past ten years. “We’ve done a lot of work in China—contemporary and historical, from The First Emperor: the Man who Made China [to] The Great Wall—and we just we realized it felt like going through some great portal into another world; like going through the wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” says Richard Bradley, the managing director of Lion Television.

“That was really fascinating and through a number of different projects we started building up a bit of expertise at filming in the Middle East,” continues Bradley. “We did a series on the Crusades. Last year, Bill Locke with a team from Lion made an amazing series called Syrian School and had a team out in Damascus for an entire year. That was pretty incredible. I don’t think anyone had done a long-form documentary series in five hours looking at the modern Middle East through the eyes of young children and their teachers. Their attitudes were far more complex than we are used to seeing them in the media.”

Having gained expertise understanding foreign cultures and shooting in faraway places, Bradley, Locke and their team were open to a pitch that came from a couple of eminent scholars.

“We were approached by a Turkish cultural organization, MEDAM, Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, and a very distinguished academic, Professor Bekir Karliğa, who has looked at a lot of material and believes there is this obsession in the West about the Greek and Roman heritage and the Renaissance,” explains Bradley. “He said Western textbooks begin their recounting of history really late, skip a large portion in the middle and then come through to the Renaissance. He said he wanted to support an international TV series that looks at the earliest origins of civilization in the Middle East as well as the Middle Eastern origins of the Renaissance, what the Middle East has given the world.”

The professor approached Lion Television through Bettany Hughes, a historian who has made many programs for Channel 4 and the BBC, including documentaries on the Moors, on Athens, on the Spartans, which have been shown on PBS and around the world. “And Bettany would be quite honest in saying that she studied the classics at Oxford with a focus on the Greeks and the Romans and this has been an eye opener for her, too. She’s conscious of that gap in her education,” adds Bradley.

“In East to West we want to take the focus off the clash of civilization between East and West,” he continues. “We are calling it The Untold Story of Civilization because we think many people in the audience don’t realize just how much we owe to that part of the world. The series does not take an Anglo-Saxon, Euro-centric, Greco-Roman perspective, but rather looks at history from the other direction.”

The series will tell the story of the birth and flourishing of civilization in the Middle East and it’s huge influence on the West. The foundations of science, justice, monotheism, commerce, civil rights and artistic expression all find their origins in the Middle East, which acted as a bridge between the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe.

East to West will film in 13 countries: Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, Italy, Britain, Iran, Uzbekistan, India and Iraq.

“Baghdad, Damascus, Istanbul and Cairo, these were incredible cities,” says Bradley. “In the eighth century Baghdad was the international center of the world. You don’t get told that when you are a student.”

Nor are you told, for example, that the number zero reached the West though Baghdad. The Hindus had written about zero, and by camel or by foot, most likely due to commerce, the concept of zero reached Baghdad, moved westward and then showed up in the spire of a cathedral in southern England in the 13th century. Or that the maps Columbus used to reach the Americas were derived from maps drawn by Arab explorers. Or that Galileo got credit for scientific findings that were first discovered in the Middle East.

“One of the things that is quite unusual about this project is that we’re making the show but the Turkish scholars have appointed an executive producer, John Milius, the screenwriter and director who worked on Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian, Clear and Present Danger, and Rome and he’s going to be the executive producer for them and is advising us on scripts and the shape of the show. It’s truly an international show in the making of it as well, so we’ve got the Turkish team, the civilization center MEDAM and Bahcesehir University that came up with the idea, we’re making it for an international audience, so there is a great dialogue going on as we make it.”