Without Turner there could have been no Monet no Matisse without Constable the first painter to make a place

Without Turner, there could have been no Monet, no Matisse; without Constable, the first painter to make a place his own, the first painter to restrict himself deliberately to the landscape of his youth and affections, the first Expressionist, and the first Action painter, there could have been no Cezanne, no Van Gogh and no Jackson Pollock. Constable's great masterpieces are hung at the V&A as if they were a study collection, when they are among the most powerful, disturbing and radical pictorial creations in Western art. British art institutions have done a tremendous job of opening the eyes of the public to the painting and sculpture of Italy, Spain, France and America; but their track record in awakening people in this country to the achievements of British artists is far less impressive.Turner is one of the greatest artists of all time (a much more brilliant and original artist than his follower, the brilliant but deeply indebted Monet) - yet his pictures are hung, at the Clore Gallery, in a way that makes him look like an academic artist. Many extraordinary and brilliant exhibitions have been staged in recent years.

Yet while we live in a golden age of exhibitions, here, too, there is enormous scope for improvement when it comes to British art. The problem lies deep within society, and it is reflected in the fact that the history of English literature is taught in every school, while the history of art is taught in very few. This is all the more peculiar in the light of the huge growth, in recent years, of general interest in the visual arts.Some remedy has been made by our museums and galleries, where much has been done to supply the large gaps in most people's knowledge of art. It is odd, but it is also part of the pattern of national neglect and ignorance about the visual arts. This ignorance is still very much a part of our culture: I know lots of people who can talk in a reasonably informed way about the works, say, of Jane Austen, and their place in our cultural history; but I know very, very few people able to discuss the works of Reynolds, Gainsborough or Stubbs with much intelligence or knowledge. In any other country, Schwitters's great masterpiece would be treated like a national treasure - but not here.It may seem odd, to some, that the British Broadcasting Corporation should have taken so long to get around to making a series charting the history of British art.

Many of my abiding memories from the journeys through British art that I have made during the past three years are memories of seeing tremendous things treated with astonishing neglect. I remember visiting Westminster Abbey's great medieval retable painting of the 1390s and finding that it had been slapped on a wall behind an ageing blue curtain of synthetic 1960s design, hung on white plastic runners; I remember coming across what I now regard as among the finest surviving examples of English 15th-century figurative stone carving in the vestry of a church in the West Country, simply piled together in some vegetable crates marked with fine irony "They're fresh, they're British" (they still languish there, unseen and unknown); I remember coming across great works of art by Stubbs, by Constable and by Turner - works that might well revolutionise the general public's view of those artists - which have not been placed on general exhibition for years; I remember finding one of the great masterpieces of European Dadaism, created by the naturalised Englishman Kurt Schwitters in the 1940s, hidden away in a kind of broom cupboard in Newcastle University's Hatton Gallery. An air of abjectness and a consciousness of failure has for centuries hung over the discussion of art not just in England but in Britain as a whole. Having spent more than the best part of three years working on A History of British Art for the BBC, I now consider myself an expert in preconception on the subject. A few pages later, Douglas Lord concluded a yet briefer piece with the remark that "there is no tradition of English art, no continuity: but occasionally a meteor blazes its trail across the sky." Lord was referring, I think, to Turner.