Time Team… sadly missed

While I was doing the ironing I scrolled through the channels to find something to watch while I did the deadly chore, and came across a repeat of a Time team episode where the archaeologists, led on this occasion by Francis Pryor, were looking at an old photo of crop markings which might indicate that there was a Roman temple in the field. It was near St Albans, Verulanium, so it seemed likely, and it wasn’t far from Watling Street, the old Roman Road. The Time Team team aren’t always successful; i remember one programme where they spent three days exploring the bottom of a dried out reservoir and found nothing but mud, and when they were on a bleak hillside, and found jut the bleak hillside… However in the programme i watched tonight they found not one, but four Roman temples on an interesting temple complex site.

What struck me, yet again, was how ridiculous it was that this programme was taken off the air. It ran for twenty series but it never dated either in its format or in the enthusiasm of the team. How many thousands, tens of thousands, of people of all ages from young children, to older children making subject choices in school and university, to people wanting a new career or new hobby, or those who are no longer working have been inspired to take an active interest in archaeology? How many people have been informed about the past, and the past of people who made the tools or the pots or the weapons, not just the tools, pots and weapons?

However, the programme was more than just a group of enthusiast pursuing a particular thing; it showed a team of people who worked together and who worked hard, who had fun, who were enthusiastic, who faced success with glee and disappointment with wry good humour, who were able to disagree with each other, laugh at each other, help each other, praise each other… experts of all ages and backgrounds, historians, archivists, engineers, crafts people, geologists… The programme was giving the audience more than just factual information about a process of discovering the past, it had a relevance to today’s world.

Every so often an archaeological programme is broadcast by Channel 4 with the ‘Time team’ tag attached to it, a special, or a one-off, but ti doesn’t quite capture the original. It’s probably too late to bring it back now… but oh how we miss it!