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| Public institution accommodating TV archaeology 'viewer competition' hoax (Wikicommons) |
As preparations are underway for the second edition of a "Britain's Got Treasure" series that should never have been made in the first place ("we binned the proposal" the PAS are reported as saying), let us recall the way the first block of "Britain's Secret Treasures" misled the British public. The whole question of the background "partnership" of the PAS with artefact hunters in England and Wales was wholly skipped over. Anything the CBA was intending to say on the matter too was edited out (and in fact right after the CBA saw what was actually being put out on air issued an independent statement containing the sort of caveats which should have been in the broadcast). The PAS had thus skipped over their primary obligation to keep the public properly informed about portable antiquities issues.
Then we have the matter of emphasising that the objects shown were all found by members of the "Great British Public", when some of them were not. The "Happisburgh handaxe" was only placed in the context which made it "Britain's number one object" by a multi-disciplinary scientific project, including excavation, a fact that was skipped over. The Bosworth Boar (object number five) again was not found accidentally by "a member of the public" but as part of a multi-disciplinary archaeological research. How many more of the "100 objects" were similarly misrepresented in the interests of the programme's fluff-propaganda for collecting is anyone's guess.
But the crowning indignity is the faking of a viewer's' competition. Quite whose idea this was is unclear. Quite why nobody pointed out that such a competition was unworkable in the format of a brief week-long event is unclear. Quite who it was who, if it had been, decided to go ahead regardless is unknown. And why the professional archaeologists involved agreed to take part in the wilful misrepresentation of the truth in order to produce dumbed-down 'reality-show' entertainment is also not known. But I think we should be told.
The reported results of the "submit your own Treasures" competition (in which viewers were to send in pictures (only) of what they'd themselves found and was not reported) were thought-provoking. Of course we have no way of knowing now whether what was reported was in fact the truth (see below). The presenters claimed on air at the end of episode 6 that the 'competition' had produced over 1000 new reported "treasures", including archaeological material. The metal detectorists had no doubt been anxious to show their prowess and get their names up on screen.
The submissions to the competition ended on the Thursday. We were shown a sequence with the team of experts picking through the entries, apparently that afternoon. It was a bit unfortunate for this charade that one of the people supposedly in the panel on that day was in fact at the other side of the country tweeting his presence at a Welsh conference and cannot have been in two places at once on the Thursday looking through 1000 objects and discussing them with other panel members. Then a member of the BM/PAS team was sent out to the site of the discovery (which would have been Friday or Saturday in order to edit the film into Sunday's programme). In the film, the sky is blue, yet on both Friday and Saturday there was no sun and it was cloudy in the region and raining further west. The evidence shows, despite what viewers were told by the archaeologists, that this film had been made before the "selection" of this "object submitted to the competition". It was all a big sham presented as state-of-the-art instant TV.
The chosen object was a metal model book which Roger Bland narrativised by imaginitively linking it (for what reason is not stated) with some important medieval pilgrimage route running through the middle of this Derbyshire barleyfield. The real scandal is that this object, chosen as the winner of the viewers' competition, not only was not found in 2012, but long before, in 1997, and was already in the PAS database. It had been there since Wednesday 15th November 2000: HAMP527. The PAS lent their name to a fiddled competition by choosing an old object from their own database and cynically deceived the public into believing it was a previously unreported find (surely the PAS is encouraging people to use the database, not hoping they will not so their lie would not be detected).
Quite why the PAS (and the Director of the CBA) felt they had to engage in this unprofessional deceit is anyone's guess.
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