Time Team used to be good. Well, as good as a dumbed-down programme about archeology could ever be. It felt quite real. Lots of people would spend lots of time digging a hole. Then one of them would find half a potentially ancient pot, Baldrick would get excited to camera until it turned out to be an Ikea candle holder, then they’d all start digging again. Baldrick was quite sweet and funny, and sometimes he was an alchemist, making television magic out of meaningless bits of flint.
What they found has now been lost. Someone in a production office in Cardiff has obviously demanded more excitement, which was the opposite of what was needed. It was awkward enough crashing in on the final stages of some beardy bloke’s life’s work and attempting to force a TV-friendly narrative out of it. It was good when it was just a man digging in a ditch, but now they’ve tried to sex it up. Last week, there was a Time Team Special, Searching for Shakespeare’s House, and none of it felt real or exciting.
“’Ere, Kevin, owrrz it goin’?” says Phil, approaching a trench in the centre of Stratford-upon-Tourism.
“It’s going very well, Phil,” replies Kevin, the proper Birmingham University archeologist, who is doing his best not to kick himself for ticking the “Allow Time Team to film my dig” box.
“Cairnn oi carm doooon?”
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“Of course.” As if he was going to say: “No, Phil. Could you come back tomorrow? We’ve another six hours of digging ahead and your voice is really bugging me.”
Phil is one of the stars of Time Team, primarily because he wears a leather hat with a feather in it and says “looimeee moyrrrttrr” instead of “lime mortar”. His West Country accent, TV shorthand for “archeology”, has got stronger over the years. It’s the auditory equivalent of waking up in a damp barn with a cider hangover to find you’re late for a two-hour thatch-making demo. Confusingly, Phil looks as if he should have a proper archeology degree, but doesn’t, whereas Mary-Ann Ochota, Baldrick’s new co-presenter, looks as if she should be on a catwalk, but has a masters in archeology from Cambridge. Professor Mick Aston, another Time Team “character”, resigned soon after Ochota got the gig because he was “really angry”. The production people had sent round an email saying that the female co-presenter they were after “does not have to be overly experienced or knowledgeable as we have plenty of expertise within the existing team”. Ochota, despite being Countryfile pretty, is actually good. I know, weird. Pretty people can also be intelligent. We could cope with this sort of sexing up, but she’s leaving over the hoo-ha, so we’ll be left with ooh-ahhrr Phil and Baldrick.
Back in the ancient past, Tony Robinson used to bridge the gap between the academics who refused to speculate that a bit of balsawood might have been the helm of a Viking longboat, and an audience who demanded it. He was chief extrapolator. Now his monotone delivery sounds almost sarcastic. They found a wall, but it wasn’t the actual wall from Shakespeare’s house. Whatever. There was a floor, but it wasn’t the Bard’s floor. It might have been the laundrette. Who cares? And no amount of 3-D rendering and West Country burrrr could hide the fact that the dig was a dud.
“This could be the fireplace where he toasted his toes and maybe even wrote his plays,” Baldrick said at the end, an extrapolation too far even by Time Team’s standards. Poor Kevin tried not to roll his eyes.
Still, it wasn’t the worst thing on the box last week, not by a long way. That award goes to Love Life, a truly vomitous ITV romcom in which a commitment-phobic scaffolder returns from a 10-month trip to the Himalayas to find his girlfriend eight months pregnant by her boss, who is Alexander Armstrong. “Got the wanderlust out of your system yet? Ready to settle?” the scaffolder’s brother asked as they walked to the pub — because that’s how Mancunian scaffolders talk to each other in ITV romcoms. And, oh, what a surprise, the girlfriend’s in the pub. And it’s a complete shock that she’s up the duff, because nobody from this seemingly tight group of Cold Feetish friends noticed the bump and thought to text the scaffolder — maybe they thought she had indigestion, or that you can’t get reception in the Himalayas. “I always thought she was the bacon in your sarnie, or you were the bacon in her sarnie,” the brother said on the way home.
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I won’t have a word said against Alexander Armstrong. He’s a wittier Angus Deayton, he’s sold me a lot of Pimm’s and he actually makes the quiz show Pointless watchable. But playing the adulterous husband of an annoying wife who desperately wants a baby? It could be a sketch straight out of The Armstrong and Miller Show. The Adoption Sketch. Ha-ha-ha-ha. Except it’s not. He’s being serious. Three quick rules for ITV drama people: actors never make convincing scaffolders; using an echo to denote a flashback is cheesy; and the man-as-commitment-phobe story line has had its day. Newsflash: men love settling down, except when they’re on telly.
Men also love cars, apparently. Paul McGann certainly does. The “I” from Withnail & I is treating himself to a four-part series on the history of British motoring, and the first part was like watching metallic paint dry. Don’t we have enough grown men getting overexcited about cars on Top Gear? They do skidding and slo-mo and banter and skidding and music and more skidding. What more do you want? Not Petrol Age. There were some archeological nuggets buried in there. In 1907, they thought you might lose your mind if you went faster than 60mph. In 1927, they thought your body would explode if you broke the 200mph barrier. And who would have guessed that the AA was warning drivers about speed traps back in 1906? But McGann is too much of an anorak to be given the keys to this series. It would be like making Kevin from Birmingham University present the whole of Time Team. You need a Baldrick. Or a Withnail. Someone, anyone, to stop this becoming an hour of pedestrian conversation between a wax-jacketed actor and some tweedy people in car museums.
It really wasn’t a good week for television. It was the sort of week your regular reviewer would go to Bhutan to avoid. The BBC even ran a programme about a Chinese TV show, just to remind us that no matter how bad our mid-Lent telly slump might be, at least we’re not sitting on a sofa in Shanghai. Ding Yu, the troubling woman who presents Interviews Before Execution, has convinced herself that her macabre weekly show is providing a service. The apparatchiks who okayed the programme appear to have done the same. It’s about information, not entertainment, you see. Watch it and you will be less likely to knife your grandparents. All of which would be fine if each interview were treated with any degree of sensitivity, rather than being chopped up with dodgy special effects and melodramatic straplines, as if it were a police chase on KTTV Fox 11. Yu didn’t have a clue and, as a result, the documentary, like her show, was short on insight into the psyche of Chinese murderers or the system that processes them.
David Frost never used special effects in his interviews. He just used charm and cigar smoke, a technique Michael Heseltine admits was just as dangerous as anything Paxman could throw at you. Hidden away in the remote archeological trench that is BBC4, Frost on Interviews was the one treat of the week, tracing the evolution of the television interview from its sycophantic 1950s roots to the problematic position we have today. The classics were all there: Hancock showing cracks on Face to Face; Dennis Potter redefining the meaning of death to Melvyn Bragg; and, of course, Michael Howard avoiding the same question 12 times on Newsnight.
“On the surface, it’s a very simple format, two people having a conversation,” Frost says. “Underneath, it’s a battle.” Or an arms race. Robin Day started it. Then Walden. Then Paxman. Attack dogs demanding answers from probably lying politicians. Clive Anderson introduced this open hostility to the celebrity interview, and when the agents and bookers wised up, Ruby Wax found a subtler way to skewer her victims. The politicians turned to spin doctors and got slicker, the interviewers became more aggressive — and now we have stalemate. Time to return to the old ways, perhaps? “Prime minister, would you tell us again about your latest triumphs?” Maybe not.
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Time Team (C4, Sun)
Love Life (ITV1, Thu)
Petrol Age (Sky Atlantic, Thu)
Interviews Before Execution (BBC2, Mon)
Frost on Interviews (BBC4, Tue)
AA Gill is away