Victorian street somewhere. Indeed I recall once watching a now forgotten film in Bath’s Little Theatre which actually featured that very cinema!
So it was exciting to learn of a major new BBC1 drama series set in and around Bath, using (an un-named) Bath University as a major location. What’s more, the drama comes from the people who brought you Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, and has a first-rate cast including Adrian Lester and Hugh Bonneville.
Unfortunately, that series is Bonekickers.
It’s really quite impossible to explain how dreadful this series really is. It’s about a group of archaeologists who get involved in strange stories.
The series seems to have been conceived one Sunday when the creators, having been out to watch one of the National Treasure films the night before, they nursed their hangovers watching Time Team. Hugh Bonneville is supposed to be Phil Harding, a grumpy curmudgeonly character who wears a hat much like Harding’s. He doesn’t have the thick West Country accent, but that doesn’t matter as the series is shot in the West Country.
In and of itself, archaeology is full of drama as viewers of programmes like Time Team and Meet the Ancestors will know. When you can tie finds together with other known facts about an area you can begin to tell a story. What you can less rarely do (unless you’re dealing with recent history), is have some kind of modern day element to the story you’re unfurling. That’s particularly going to be the case if you’re dealing with the Knights Templar or slavery around the time of American independence as the first two stories in Bonekicker did.
In both cases, therefore, some kind of modern-day idiots had to be included to give some kind of danger and relevance. And this is where any kind of realism is left well behind. We get CIA shootouts with a Barack Obama-type presidential candidate and beheadings surrounding stories about the cross of Jesus.
The series is really, of course, the bastard son of The Da Vinci Code, but it’s so poorly done, you just can’t help but laugh at the ineptness. Things are pulled out of the ground with wild abandon; seemingly nobody bothers to photograph or record a site. And seemingly small stories are given massive significance – it’s no secret that Bristol became successful as a result of the slave trade, so if the bones of slaves were to surface in the Bristol Channel, I don’t suppose it’d really become a hot political potato. It’d just be a reminder of our past.
So OK, it’s not realistic, but does that prevent it being good drama? Well it doesn’t, but it’s terrible. The script is poor and tension really isn’t achieved, with little real character motivation – in particualr Adrian Lester’s character just drifts through procedings. The series is also shot in HD, but pretty poorly to my eyes on a non-HD set. It reminds me of the first series of Torchwood when they were still learning how to properly use the new characters. It appears smeary and feels very much like it was shot on video – which it was. That’s especially the case in low-light conditions of which there are many given the nature of the series.
Bath University doesn’t have an archaeology department, and they’re unlikely to want to set one up off the back of this series!
On another matter entirely can someone please explain this? The latest series to examine a dangerous job (following Ice Road Truckers and Deadliest Catch) is Ax [sic] Men. Like the aforementioned shows, this follows several groups of people in a dangerous profession as they try to earn a living in the logging industry. All very watchable, but can someone please explain why this is on the History Channel? That’s not just its UK home, it was a US History Channel commission, yet it’s only history if last summer is now considered history. Sure, the episode that I watched aluded to how logging was once done, but that was about it. But I suppose it gives them something to break up the endless programmes on the pyramids, the Romans and the Nazis.