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Street Prophets: Winter days alone. I'm bingeing Time Team. What about you? [1]

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Date: 2023-12-24

Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour, the place where politics meets up with religion, science, art, nature, and life. Come in, have a cuppa and a cookie (or three!) and join us.

Tomorrow is our national gift-giving holiday, adopted by people of many religions or no religion at all. It’s a traditional day for families to gather.

But some of us aren’t near family. Some have no family, or no family they want to spend time with. And some of us avoid this holiday altogether. Whatever your reason for being alone, either now or in the dark winter days ahead, what are your plans? I’m going to pitch mine; add a pitch for your faves in the comments.

A couple of weeks ago Ojibwa posted a diary that included some mesolithic tools, and I commented that I’d seen Dr. Phil Harding creating just such tools on Time Team. That started an exchange with a number of people about the long-running ( 20 years, 200+ episodes) British series, where a team of maybe 80 people (that includes the off-camera crew) descends on an archeological site for 3 days, with a purpose in mind. I’ve become quite attached to a few of the people. Everyone’s favorites, including mine, are Phil, a field archeologist, and the late professor Mick Aston. Of course, that could be an age thing. Mick was born one year before I was, and Phil was born three years after me. Tony Robinson is the presenter, an actor with no training in field research but an enthusiast.

The program began in 1994 and ceased in 2013. Only Phil and Tony appeared in every single episode, although for one filming, Phil had a badly injured back. His medical team took him to the site every day by ambulance, where he stayed on the guerney until he was wanted in a scene. He’d go out and stand on the edge, “supervising” and commenting, and then return to his bed.

A couple of years ago, Time Team was revived as a crowd funded venture (see them on Patreon), with a longer format not limited by the television slots as the original programs were. They’ve kept a few of the old-timers. Tony makes the occasional appearance. Carenza Lewis, who was with the original from the beginning, is back. So is Matt Williams, who joined later as a very fresh-faced youth and is now matured. John Gater is still doing the geophysics. Stewart Ainsworth, landscape archeologist, is still around. Naomi Sewpaul made the transfer, as did Helen Geake. I was hoping to see Raksha Dave, but so far no luck.

The new presenter, Gus Casely-Hayford, is taking some getting used to. If that’s his natural way of speaking, maybe I’ll be accustomed to it in time. If it’s as affected as it seems, I’d really like him to dial back on the emoting. I’ve had another thought or two, also, about some of the “finds” being set up, not filmed in situ. But maybe it’s all growing pains.

Phil isn’t back. He’s still at Wessex Archaeology and has done some work there, also supported by crowd funding on Patreon. He barely changed through the 20 year span of the original program, maybe gaining a pound or two, but he’s definitely more mature now. Mick, of course, had a difference of opinion about the direction of the original series in its last year and left then, and he died the next year.

Here are some links to enjoy:

A Scotch Broch (any Outlander fans? This is what a broch is.) And the new team has a brief podcast commentary about that episode.

Reservoir Rituals They do get into the mud sometimes.

The dates of release aren’t the originals. It’s when they were posted on YouTube. So if it says “2 years ago” it might have aired on television anytime in the long run of the program. And programs have been released under various names, sometimes by Odyssey (part of History Hits network) and sometimes by Time Team Classics (from the new Time Team).

(I went on to Time Team because I’ve already exhausted all available episodes of “Fake or Fortune”, investigating paintings attributed to old masters and other famous artists. Check that out, too.)

So what are you doing?

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