It's crucial that a presenter is passionate about their subject, especially if it's one the audience knows very little about.
That's what enabled Dr Janina Ramirez to engage her audience in Treasures of the Anglo Saxons, a programme about Anglo-Saxon art and treasure on BBC4. The brief episode when she visits the family who own the Finglesham Buckle is a good example.
Dr Ramirez found some great language to describe the purpose of many of the beautiful objects she examines: it's "warrior bling", she explains, that men wore into battle. But by the time you saw it close enough up to admire its intricacy, you'd probably be dying with a spear through your vitals.
I watched the programme a few days after returning from Orkney, where archaeologists (above) are excited by new finds from the Neolithic age, dating from about 3000BC. I know nothing about the period, and assumed our Stone Age ancestors lived beastly and primitive lives. Not so, it seems.I was struck once again by the importance of the ability of an expert to communicate excitement when I arrived at the Ness of Brodgar site in the heart of the Orkney Mainland. I was just in time to hear Dr Nick Card, who is leading the work there, give one of his daily updates on the dig to tourists visiting the island. He described how - just days before - his team uncovered the first painted stonework to be found in Northern Europe. A local journalist runs this daily blog.
Dr Card is convinced the site was a major focus for ritual and ceremony in Orkney, and could offer much to support his theories.
He also set the context in a compelling way. These Stone Age people were not scrabbling out a miserable existence: they had surplus food and labour enough to invest their effort in the massive structures emerging at the site, and sufficient skill in stonework and delight in aesthetics to make structures far beyond the merely functional. What exactly the ceremonies and rituals were, the experts have yet to determine. But Dr Card conjured up a vivid picture of a much more sophisticated society than I had ever imagined. Someone should sign him up!
