Me and Mr Jones

There are no Indiana Jones thrills in Channel 4's The Quest for the Lost Ark. Professor Tudor Parfitt's over-long documentary is more Time Team than epic archaeology Indiana Jones-style, laments Caitlin Moran...

Let me make one thing very clear: I am no Time Team basher. I love Time Team. I've spent more time looking at the geo-phys on a ruined Tudor piggery than I have the sonograms of my own unborn children. There's no piece of crud-encrusted Roman pottery hoiked from a dead dog pit outside Slough that I haven't got weak historical stims from. Every sub-Horace Goes Skiing graphical recreation of what some medieval drainage ditch “would have looked like, in its own time” is of innate interest to me. I love that stuff.

But let's face it - however interesting Time Team is, it hasn't done the overall image of 21st-century archaeology much good. Not like the 1980s, when archaeology was all about Indiana Jones razzing around looking unbearably hot and desirable. Christ he was hot. Believe me, there isn't a woman alive who doesn't go a bit funny thinking about Indiana Jones. Even Margaret Thatcher would have fancied him a bit.

Because of Indy, for my generation, being an archaeologist was up there with being an astronaut, a rock star or a whale-trainer as one of the all-time glam jobs. But then, alas, Time Team came along. In an epic rebrand, archaeology suddenly went from a) thrusting, sweaty, man-totty saving the world, to b) Womble-like academics in home-knits, sitting in craters, in Monmouthshire, in the pissing rain, wiping oomska off a brown tile with a hankie. Watched by Baldrick.

Given all this, then, what we need - what we all sorely need - is for archaeology to start thinking big again. Go widescreen again. Give up on the getting excited about finding a patch of scorched clay that indicates the possible existence of a Georgian kiln, and start going after the big stuff. The Colossus of Rhodes! The Round Table! Jesus!

And, just in time, here's The Quest for the Lost Ark, which is literally a quest for the Ark of the Covenant. You know - the Nazi melty box thing from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Presented by Professor Tudor Parfitt - a man whose name suggests he might be the long lost Poshest Man in the World; until you see the documentary is produced by one Sheldon Lazarus - The Quest for the Lost Ark attempts to follow a 2,500-year-old trail of clues, and discover the last resting place of the Ark.

I don't think I'm going to wholly disintegrate your day when I tell you that Parfitt doesn't actually find the Ark. Let's face it - if humanity ever finds what is essentially God's handbag, it's not going to be left to the TV critics to break the news. CNN, I think, might get there first.

What Parfitt does do, however, is trace - using DNA - the lost tribes of Israel, their flight into Africa, and the establishment of Jewish tribes in Zimbabwe that exist until this day. It's all quite reasonable and mildly diverting. Definitely worth, say, half an hour of your life; particularly if you're into African Jews.

However, having worked himself up into a big tizzy about his life-long quest for the Ark - “Five years went by without any leads,” he says, at one point, with almost incalculable weariness - and having been giving a whopping and, frankly, unnecessary 75 minutes to fill, Parfitt keeps on flogging the dead Ark horse to a point of mild dementia.

In the end, he becomes convinced that he's found the real Ark. The real Ark, according to Parfitt and not really anyone else at all, is not a sacred box, 80cm wide and high, lined inside and out with gold, topped with a golden lid, and two golden cherubs with outstretched wings, through which one can hear the voice of God.

It's actually - a drum. Yes, a drum. A knackered old drum from Africa. That's, erm, only 600 years old. That Parfitt eventually finds in a cupboard. In a museum. By looking through a card index.

Yes, I know. It's not quite grabbing-your-hat-from-underneath-the-closing-stone-door-having-just-outrun-the-giant-boulder.

So, mmmmm. Whilst it's great to see bone-botherers going for the big ticket historical items again - why settle for a submerged Neolithic toilet-area, when you could track down the intercom to God? - in this case, it doesn't really work, thrill-wise.

To be honest, you would actually get marginally larger cheapies watching Phil Harding eating a fried egg sandwich, in the rain.

The Quest for the Lost Ark, Mon, Channel 4, 9pm