From iron age tunnels to YouTube: Time Team’s ‘extraordinary’ digital renaissance | Archaeology

TThirty-two years ago, a small group of archaeologists gathered for a weekend in Somerset to make a television program on a field in Athelney, the site where, 1,200 years ago, King Alfred the Great rallied resistance to the invading Viking army.

There weren’t many concessions to the glitz of showbiz. Instead, a group of unruly-haired blokes and a few women walked across a field, chatted in the pub and, at one point, gathered around a dot-matrix printer to watch it slowly disgorge some results. The most interesting artifact they found was a piece of iron slag. No soil was spilled.

From these unpromising beginnings, however, a television juggernaut was born. This first episode of Time Team, broadcast on Channel 4 on January 16, 1994, launched a remarkable 20-year run of more than 200 episodes, before declining ratings and an ill-fated revamp led to its eventual cancellation in 2013.

But as any archaeologist will tell you, just because something is in the past doesn’t mean it will stay buried. In 2021, at the request of a group of dedicated fans, some of the original Time Team experts came together again to film a dig, this time to release on their own YouTube channel.

Four years later, Time Team has 350,000 subscribers on the platform, where its films regularly attract up to 2 million spectators. More importantly for the bottom line, 11,000 people pay every month to support him on Patreon. This financial leverage means Time Team is making archaeological waves again: next summer it will fund new excavations at Brodgar Ness in Orkney, after a chance discovery by the programme’s resident geophysicist John Gater suggested “something quite extraordinary” at the Neolithic World Heritage site.

Even original presenter Tony Robinson returned for some films, after initially admitting to not knowing how the format would work on YouTube. The program’s rebirth was “like one of those bulbs that you plant in the garden and forget about, and then five years later blooms again,” he says.

A comedy favorite in the early ’90s for his work as ruthless sidekick Baldrick in Blackadder, Robinson says he was initially offered the presenting job “because [Channel 4] thought: “This is such an obscure subject. Who should we have to present it? Obviously we should have the person who epitomizes stupidity on television. » In fact, the actor already had a keen interest in archeology and was a friend of Professor Mick Aston, who was the programme’s lead archaeologist.

Carenza Lewis – a veteran of that first episode – was a postdoctoral student in her 20s when she was approached to participate, agreeing because “I thought it would be something I would regret if I didn’t do it.”

“I remember arriving during the very first scene we did, and Mick had decided it would be a good idea to relax everyone by bringing a few bottles of wine. It worked, but it meant it took us forever to do the first scene.”

Lewis, now a professor at the University of Lincoln, was dropped from the program in 2005 after 12 series – “I never really had a clear explanation” – but in the long interval before she joined the YouTube renaissance, Time Team never left her side. She remembers delivering a paper at a conference in Moscow more than a decade after leaving the program, when she was introduced with a reference to Time Team. “And there was a murmur of grateful recognition, in a room full of Russian archaeologists. I really didn’t expect that Time Team had even reached Russia.” Around 40% of its audience on YouTube and Patreon now comes from outside the UK.

For Gater, who is also part of the original team, YouTube offers flexibility that its previous incarnation didn’t allow. “The three-day format was great, it created tension and so on. “, he said. “But it was getting more and more expensive, and Channel 4 was struggling to justify funding all the post-excavation work.

“The beauty of crowdfunding is that our supporters recognize that it’s not just about the TV programme, it’s also about archeology – and they support that. We’re going to the Ness of Brodgar for a month – we couldn’t have done that with Channel 4. “Time Team will ring in the New Year with a three-hour show on Sutton Hoo – equally inconceivable on linear television.

YouTube also brings new challenges, says Time Team senior producer-director Emily Boulting, who first joined the program in 2003: Persuading cautious archaeologists to adopt “acceptable hyperbole” to make their videos stand out online is one. But the public doesn’t necessarily demand glitz: a popular new approach is to use a still camera showing uninterrupted footage of a trench excavation. “People loved the idea of ​​sitting with moving wallpaper – it’s a bit like watching a test match,” she says.

The program wants to grow – by expanding its supporter base, of course, but also investing in community digs and potentially a children’s component. Brand partnerships would be welcome, but they don’t see much benefit in partnering with another broadcaster, says Boulting. “It’s hard to imagine the right solution at this point, because we love our freedom.”

That Time Team is still thriving three decades later is “extraordinary,” says Robinson – so how does he explain its enduring appeal? “I think archeology is like magic. It’s the ground we walk on all day, every day. And yet, if you cast the right spell, you can go down there and find something extraordinary from another era. It’s mind-blowing, isn’t it? What better thing to remember than the fact that there are wonders beneath our feet?”