BBC 1, Tuesday, 9pm  

People like chocolate. People like beer. Not many people like chocolate beer. Stick with the analogy because it’s here to demonstrate why programme makers shouldn’t just take two things people like and combine them, as the BBC have done with their new drama Bonekickers. On paper it’s a good idea, but then so was communism. Take the popular rag tag band of feisty female, grumpy old expert and young ethnically diverse go-getter, mix in some problems with authority and then add some archaeology so that viewers know it isn’t Waking The Dead. 

In the first thirty seconds we know what realm we’re in. A furious medieval battle sequence is subtitled with the location ‘between the playground and the medical centre’. Then up comes feisty female (1) Dr Magwilde proclaiming ‘We’ve got a medieval mystery on our hands! Let’s get digging!’. Cue Professor ‘Dolly’ Parton, the grumpy old expert (2) who Magwilde describes as ‘Google with a beer belly’. He is basically Gene Hunt’s more misanthropic older brother and proceeds to beg to go to the pub with every other line. A new ethnically-diverse go-getter (3) shows up and makes a hash of things, and elsewhere the Knights Templar cut someone’s head off and there’s a fire in a dovecote. 

All told it’s the maddest thing on television, and it’s brilliant, like a Random Plot Point generator with a rampaging virus. It has the dialogue style of Life On Mars (and it’s by the creators so no surprise there), the science of the aforementioned Waking The Dead and some plotlines which Dan Brown would dismiss as ‘too absurd’. 

It’s already unpopular and derided by the proper TV press but this is precisely why I love it. In a world where every programme has to have interactive opportunities and a ready made viral audience and God knows what else, it’s refreshing to see a show which seems to have been vomited from the waste paper basket of the development office, with a stellar cast and a lot of advertising behind it. It’s endearingly half arsed and slightly ridiculous, and I’m kind of into being a member of its weird cult.  

If the BBC lets it survive to the end of the series in its current time slot, join me in Bonekickers’ padded cell, and fie to the doubters! 

Kirsty Walker