Saxon Hoard BBC2

Saxon Hoard, a documentary fronted by television historian Dan Snow, told the story of the hoard of Saxon gold discovered by a metal detectorist in Staffordshire on farmland adjacent to the A5 - the Roman Watling Street and the Saxon Mercian stronghold of Tamworth.   This should have been much more interesting than it was. 

For a start the programme was too long at an hour given that the assembled experts could tell us very little about the hoard, where it came from, who had buried it and what it represented.  The glimpses of the artefacts were so brief that it was barely possible to examine let alone admire them and very little information was given as to the actual size or what the items were supposed to be. I was disappointed that it was not linked at all to the historical context - for example the fact that the British had been expert metal-workers for centuries before the Saxons arrived and that many of the designs on the weapons such as linked knotwork and animal motifs were carried over from Celtic art.  There was a facetious suggestion that this was so good because it was German which is not only flippant but historically inaccurate.  Indeed the 'experts' had very little to add that any member of the audience could not equally have well deduced for themselves.

In the end the programme ran out not only of ideas but also of comments and ended up re-running the not very enlightening comments it had already shown.  It was clearly a half hour programme which had been commissioned at twice its natural length.  I am all in favour of programmes about archaeology and history but too often this is the case making what would have been an entertaining and interesting half hour an hour-long bore.  Documentary makers please note - if you have nothing much to say stringing it all out for an hour and repeating everything three times to fill the time-slot does not make for a good programme.  On commercial channels there is the even more irritating habit of repeating everything before and after the commercial break as if we will all have forgotten what the programme was about while we went to make a cup of tea.  Kindly stop it!