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It has been announced that after some 20 years on the air, the once-ground-breaking and highly popular archaeology 'reality show' Time Team is being wound down by its producers, British TV sytation Channel 4 (Tara Conlan, 'Channel 4 consigns Time Team to TV history', The Guardian, Saturday 20 October 2012). There will be one more season of 13 episodes running into 2013, and then production will cease. There is a response to the news from its originator and producer Tim Taylor here. The show was always controversial, but there is no doubt that it brought 'dirt archaeology' into the public consciousness in a way other programmes had not.
Of course the problem was that many people thought watching a few episodes was suffice to understand all about archaeology. The programme also attracted criticism in some circles because it did not always follow the PAS-script and talked openly of the erosive effects of artefact hunting and the difference between hoiking out metal objects when a box of electronics beeps and real archaeology. A typical example of tekkie grouching can be found in comments on the Past Horizons website by one Jerry Morris:
It has been announced that after some 20 years on the air, the once-ground-breaking and highly popular archaeology 'reality show' Time Team is being wound down by its producers, British TV sytation Channel 4 (Tara Conlan, 'Channel 4 consigns Time Team to TV history', The Guardian, Saturday 20 October 2012). There will be one more season of 13 episodes running into 2013, and then production will cease. There is a response to the news from its originator and producer Tim Taylor here. The show was always controversial, but there is no doubt that it brought 'dirt archaeology' into the public consciousness in a way other programmes had not.
Of course the problem was that many people thought watching a few episodes was suffice to understand all about archaeology. The programme also attracted criticism in some circles because it did not always follow the PAS-script and talked openly of the erosive effects of artefact hunting and the difference between hoiking out metal objects when a box of electronics beeps and real archaeology. A typical example of tekkie grouching can be found in comments on the Past Horizons website by one Jerry Morris:
Metal detectorists can show the public more finds over a very much shorter period than Time Team and got very little thanks for their contribution when they tried to participate. If Metal detectorists did find anything Time Team latched on to the find like leaches as if it was theirs [...] Best Wishes to any new style productions and perhaps its worth having a look at the old "Two Men in a trench"serious. that took advantage of the knowledge and finds of responsible detectorists.The metal detector is a tool (one of many) and there really is no need why the TV programme should be fawning over its users any more than a mechanical excavator driver, mattock user or the girl with a tube of glue that sticks the pots together. It seems to me that the PAS and its "revealing secret treasures" approach has a lot to answer for in Britain as "archaeological outreach" when it becomes reduced to a race to see "who can show the British public more and more findds" hoiked from the archaeological record.
