"Time Team"

I've been binge-watching "Time Team" on YouTube, a British TV show which ran from 1994 to 2014. As with other British TV series, British people don't call it a series, but a programme. What we in the US refer to as a season of a TV show, the Brits call a series. So, series 1 of "Time Team" first aired in 1994, series 20 in 2013, and then in 2012 and 2014 several "Time Team" specials were the last of it.

Each episode of "Time Team" featured a team of archaeologists and associated professionals arriving at a site, usually in the UK, because previous digs in the area and/or local folklore and/or something else suggest it would be promising, and spending three days digging and analyzing what they dug up, whether it was Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, Saxon, Norman, Tudor or Miscellaneous.

"Time Team" has shown, explained, demonstrated, to millions of viewers all over the world, that showing up somewhere, digging for three days and then leaving again is a particularly stupid way of doing archaeology. It's not enough time. (I suppose Channel 4 turned down the programme title "Not Enough Time Team.") If an archaeological site is at all interesting, it will take years or decades of digging, or more, to find what is of interest which is buried there.

However, the archaeologists who appeared on "Time Team" are good at their jobs, so that the show's format may actually not do more harm to archaeology than it does good. After the three days are up, the "Time Team" team report their finding to other professionals not constrained by a three-day limit, and, one presumes, ordinary archaeology carries on from there.

What we Americans refer to as the host of a non-fictional TV show, the British call a presenter. "Time Team" was presented by Tony Robinson, a famous actor.

American audiences may recognize him from his years of portraying Baldrick, the lovable, stupid sidekick of the title character in the series "Blackadder," who was played by Rowan Atkinson, who is much more well-known as Mr Bean.

Over and over again, for twenty years on "Time Team," for hundreds of episodes, Tony Robinson, who either is lovable and stupid in real life as well, or pretended to be for two decades on a supposedly nonfictional TV show, got all worked up because he thought the archaeologists, historians and geophysics specialists were doing everything all wrong, only for the professionals to patiently explain to him on camera what it actually was they were doing and what they were finding, and why they were doing things the way they were and not how Tony thought they should have.

Either Tony actually never understood that he was working with pros, or the makers of "Time Team" thought it would be good for him to do the same schtick, over and over, for twenty years, and that viewers wouldn't catch or begin to find it repetitive.

There's no denying that Robinson has a certain charm: although middle-aged, he's always running around excitedly and waving his arms and shouting in a wide-eyed childlike manner, seemingly quite fascinated by what's going on, even if he never learned enough about it to change his standard, "Oh, we've only got [insert a portion of three days] left, and for the life of me I can't understand why they're still digging over there," and then the pros patiently explain it all to him.

Mick Aston usually heads the dig, and assumes the major part of the burden of explaining things to Tony, and therefore also to the viewers.

The show's archaeologists are all genuine successful archaeologists with prestigious positions apart from the show. However, the accent of one of them, Phil Harding, is really too much. Harding's accent is much, much more annoying that Tony Robinson's real or pretended buffoonery. It's almost annoying enough to make me stop binge-watching this otherwise-fascinating silly series. I am not the only one who has asked whether that accent is fake. I can picture actual Northerners (of which Harding is not one) asking, referring to Phil Harding's accent, "Oy, atsa bit much, doncha fink, oy? E zounds like a particularly bad bit player in a very annoying 1940's pirate movie, oy?" Harding's appearance offends me as well. Aston has very long hair, and it just makes him look mildly eccentric in the good British academic eccentric tradition, but long hair makes Phil Harding look even more hideous than he already would, which would have been much more than plenty.

And the accent, that God-damned accent -- it seems to me that it fades a little bit when Harding is intensely discussing archaeological matters, which Harding appears to do with intelligence, skill and deep knowledge. As a fake accent would tend to fade when its owner was thinking hard.

The show's other regularly-appearing specialists include archaeologists Carenza Lewis and Francis Pryor, archaeological geophysicist John Gator and archivist Robin Bush. I have no particular problem with any of them.