Civilisation: Is the West history? @ 8pm, Sundays- Channel 4- 7 out of 10

On TV these days, historians fall in to two distinct groups. On the one side, we have the all-action historian (well, as all-action as you can get with a PhD) who demonstrate history by doing stuff that people in the past would have done, like chiselling primitive Stone Age weapons or running for miles at night time in forests in army gear or riding a horse in full battle armour or shooting a Catholic in the face with a musket or stealing people's land and giving them influenza in return and so on. These are the Dan Snows and Neil Olivers of this world, trying to impress the viewer with their manliness and ability to do what people in the past did, albeit in a sterilised environment. These are generally the younger historians on the block.

On the other side, there are the historians who demonstrate history by telling you stuff whilst stood looking thoughtful, or walking silently towards the camera, in a location that is somehow linked to the subject on which the historian is talking about. These historians have a strong sense of conviction and booming rhetoric and will hope to make you think that what they are saying is true, not their opinion, through sheer force of will. These are generally the older historians, such as Simon Schama and David Starkey.

Professor Niall Ferguson sits somewhere in between as he is young enough to do the action historian role (he even takes the replicating our ancestors bit into real life to; by having sex with many different women http://tinyurl.com/39c6vwj *warning*, link contains traces of Daily Mail) but he also does the rhetoric part rather well, as his new series Civilisation: Is the West History? shows.

The series revolves around Ferguson's theory that the reason why the West dominated the world for 500 years or so from the 1500s to now is due to their six 'killer apps' and now that the rest of the world can 'download' these 'apps', is this the end of Western superiority? Aside from the patronising and frankly embarrassing semantic field, the theory is an interesting one.

The 'apps' that Ferguson cites are competition, science, the property owing democracy, modern medicine, the consumer society and the Protestant work ethic with each 'app' (I'll stop saying it soon, I promise) being covered in its own episode, with each 'app' being linked to another civilisation which the West gained superiority over, for example, competition allowed the West to advance ahead of China, science ahead of Islam and so on. The theory is very convincing although shoehorning the 'apps' into six categories does seem to simplify the idea too far, as each episode tends to head off on another important tangent at times, such as the episode on medicine focused on the Scramble for Africa which also was only possible through the growth of mechanised transport, a point Ferguson concedes.

Ferguson's style of delivering his message is, at the same time, convincing and unconvincing. He displays his research well through showing off documents from centuries ago in places such as Turkey, the USA and Senegal to show examples of the decline of science in Muslim countries or the birth of property in America but, at times, neglects to tell us the source of some of the information and facts he comes out with.

His ability to bring alternative arguments to historical debates is outstanding, such as his partial justification of colonialism, particularly of West Africa by the French, by showing the benefits it bought the colony, such as the right to French citizenship and healthcare. His general emotional detachment from everything is something of a wonder too, as he casually sits next to a pile of bones from a German concentration camp in Namibia

Whilst history programmes should not be aesthetically pleasing, it does help and the production values for this series are rather high with powerful imagery from the past juxtaposed with contemporary filming of key locations and building, plus the obligatory shot of the presenter staring thoughtfully out of a train window.

Overall, Is the West history? is a well put together, thoughtful programme that is perhaps out of place on a Sunday evening that might now get some more viewers with Dancing on Ice finished as I'm sure the target market of the respective shows are largely the same.