Britain's Got Treasure Episode 4

Britain's Secret Treasures episode 4:

"Once again Michael and Bettany are joined by a host of guest presenters including Kevin Whately, Mariella Frostrup, Katherine Jenkins and Vic Reeves, to explore the stories behind each item and to meet many of the members of the public who discovered them".

Well, the ones that did not want to be anonymous. In episode four, not a single one of the finds was made with a metal detector showing the use of this tool is not indispensable to the task of "finding history". The programme concentrates on Northern Ireland (Ulster Museum). Historian Kate Williams travelled to Belle Isla near Enniskillen to rather pointlessly dunk her dress in the water on a boat in order - we are asked to believe - to find out more about a gold torc, discovered in a bog by an anonymous finder. Then diver Frank Madden recounted how he discovered treasure from the site of the Armada ship ‘Girona’ a cameo valued by Sotheby's at 55-60000 quid. Then there was a rather pathetic musical interlude with two people puffing away at replica horns which we are asked to believe allowed them to replicate "Bronze Age music", yeah (if that is the case, we have an explanation of the transition to iron technology). Bettany Hughes gesticulated wildly and made weird facial expressions at bits of the Clonmore Shrine found in bits on the banks of the Blackwater River near County Armagh. It’s the oldest piece of Christian metalwork ever to be found in Ireland.

Basically a programme full of fluff, without any real substance. It remains unclear what the point was of all this, except to show a lot of glittery things and make up some trite story about them. How we know what torcs were "for" remained - like much else - unexplained,  as did how we could explore prehistoric music was not discussed, and the Clonmore Shrine could have been given some substance and been the subject of its own programme. Mercifully then, the PAS was not behind this one, but it seems from the format and presentation that Ulster has also drunk from the same poisoned chalice.