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| "So the Saxons did this? Sure it wasn't you?" http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ |
To me, Time Team (C4) is just about as perfect Sunday TV programme as you could hope. It is like Grand Designs but without the peril.
Since 1994 presenter, associate producer, Devil's advocate and agent provocateur of the show, Tony Robinson, has stood on a bit of field and explained that they only have "3 days" to dig it up. The programme then follows the Time Team digging up the field to see what was buried in it.
Tony is flanked by historian Mick Aston and archaeologist Phil Harding (and occasionally a posh guy who knows about Romans) and some of the other field archaeologists who have become minor players as the series' have rolled on.
Sure, it helps that Tony Robinson is clearly a time traveller - planting much of what the Time Team find (spoons, worked stones, bodies) during the ad breaks.
[Now I know what you might say here - Greville, Tony wouldn't need 4 minutes to go and plant things thousands of years ago as he is a time traveller and could return before he is gone. But I say, that that is not how Tony necessarily travels in time. And you might say, but Greville, the theory that Tony sees where a trench is going to be dug on the episode then sneaks off to 300AD to plant a pot in the earth is unfeasible. But I say, I may not know anything about quantum physics but is there really all that stuff underground? Come on! Look for the clues! What kind of fool do you take me for? He definitely does it.]
However, there is something about Time Team, that watching the discovery of a pot shard and listening to the debate as to if it was a wine vessel - in EVERY episode - which simply adds to its charm and success.
Above all, though, and this is important, Time Team is not sexy. Mick's jumpers are not sexy. Phil's greasy hat and odd, straggly hair is not sexy. Tony's 2nd trimester beer baby belly is not sexy. The arguments between these men and the guy with the resistivity meter about where to dig next are not sexy. Time Team is all about dirty fingernails and flaxen dress reproductions on windswept fields. The closest you get to sexy is the rarer than a iron buckle, field archaeologist's Thong Shot.
Not for Time Team is the desperation of trying to crowbar in some populist crackpot theory to make things more exciting. [I am looking at you Channel 5. "Mystery of the Vampire Skeletons", indeed!]
Time Team is not afraid to tell it like it is: Ritual or Trade route.
Not for Time Team is the use of CSI style computer generated shenanigans to piece together events of history [The Bone Detectives].
Time uses a man with map and another man who does pencil and oil illustrations.
Time Team has the balls to put out an hours worth of programming showing woolly jumper academics enthusiastically pointing at different toned clay in the ground and claiming it is a castle.
Time Team is informative, slight entertainment viewing. I doubt anyone sets their TiVo box to record an episode but at the same time it is hardly likely to cause anyone to demand it is removed from the schedules. Even when they do those Specials [in that they talk to an archivist and blow the bigger budget on a re-enactment - otherwise it is just the same] and it crops up on a Tuesday night at 10pm.
But like all great spanning, risen Empires there has to be a Fall. Or a Fall-out. And like all great dynasties it was a decision to sex-up the whole shebang that has been the cause of it.
Mick Aston left, citing the plans to "cut down the informative stuff", the letting go of some of the field archaeologists an increase of "pratting about" and a general reduction of the show to "pap".
It is true, the most recent series has tended to see the Time Team enjoy themselves a little too much away from considering putting in a Trench 4. Perhaps most damning of all is the introduction of a new co-presenter, model and Cambridge qualified history babe, Mary-Anne Ochota [This in itself is an outrage as everyone knows it should have been more qualified historian and Time Team alumni Bettany Hughes or nobody] that may have contributed to Aston's "Keys and Gray" pique of anger.
Nothing sexes up and dumbs down a history show like a nubile history geek girl in frame. Time Team viewers do not wish to be distracted from the artifacts by her white teeth, shaved ankles and summer blouses. Time Team viewers only want their strange, curved structures plotted on the geophyis results. Will this be the moment that people will point to signifying the end? Time will tell.
But this very week Mary-Anne has posited that things "didn't work out" and has left the show. So far details beyond this have been sketchy. It will be interesting to see as the series goes on if what went wrong is detectable, or she will be coldly sentenced damnatio memoriae.
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| An iron age hill fort http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/totty-presenter-mary-ann-ochota-quits-679815 |
Are we looking at the final throes of the Time Team age? The men behind the success are becoming fragmented, the tensions are hinting at secret conspiring and disruptive intentions? Are we staring at the era of Time Team where the bourgeois stand in public houses with their real ale toasting the day and sing folk songs into the night as the trenches outside lay in waste and back-fill? Are we looking at Tony fiddling as Rome burns?
That he totally did do, by the way.
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