Codename: Ainsbrook
A Time Team Special
First screened 14 January 2008

Secrets, lies and videotape

In twenty five years of making television programmes this was one of the strangest. Brendon Hughes talks about the obstacles to making Codename: Ainsbrook.

It all started in Durham on a wet and cold October night. I went there to meet with two detectorists, and one of their wives, to talk about a hoard of treasure they had found. But we didn't talk about the hoard. We talked about me, about what I had done, and about what I might do.

The thing is, though, I had no idea what I might do as I had no idea really what this story was all about.

And so it was to continue. Eventually we all agreed. The hoard was important. We should make a film about the forthcoming dig.

Real negotiations
Then came the real negotiations. What we could do and what we couldn't.

The site is an important one. Everyone, and there were a lot of interested parties in this at the start, everyone agreed that this site should be kept a secret. I was fine with that. But keeping it secret was actually quite hard.

To start with I couldn't tell anyone where it was. Apart from saying it was in Yorkshire.

And so it was that Karen, my assistant producer, and I drove to Yorkshire every couple of weeks for a year, stayed in an hotel in York, and then set off early, mostly very early, in the morning to get to the site for 8am.

Surreal
The whole thing felt surreal. First of all we were to tell the diggers that we were shooting this for the archaeological unit. That lasted about half a day. The people there knew that there was something going on, and we were fairly quickly outed as Time Team people. Which was okay.

It is an enormous site. And filming it across a year we got to know it intimately. But the secrecy did take its toll. It meant travelling a fair old distance every day from and back to our hotel. We had to bring all our food and drinks on to site every day, and spent a lot of rain-soaked days sitting in the car trying to chomp down another sandwich.

Getting Tony on site
In the midst of filming I really wanted to get Tony on to the site. After a lot of discussions it was agreed that he could come on, but only if we could get him on without him being seen, and only during the lunch break, when the archaeologists wouldn't be digging. We ended up hanging around a field of potatoes, peering over a tall hedge, watching the diggers walk to their hut for lunch, and then sneaking Tony along the hedgeline so we could do one piece to camera by the trench closest to the hoard spot.

To this day Tony still maintains that he has absolutely no idea where the site is. So that bit worked then.

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