History Hunters

History Hunters was a spin-off from the successful Channel 4 series Time Team. Channel 4 deleted the original site some years ago - all that's left is this summary page - but luckily I found the archive on an old CD-rom (that hadn't rotted) and decided to preserve it for posterity.

It was a sort of local history/geneaology programme in which two teams competed with each other to solve a mystery! The pilot episode was at Marshfield and at that time the proposed series was called Hands on History, later changed to Time Team Roadshow. It was my first experience of telly and it was very daunting, as presenter Tony Robinson would often cut to me pretending to type on my computer! (I sussed pretty soon that as it wasn't going out live, I didn't actually need to do any work on site, apart from scan images that wouldn't be available to me later - all the coding was done later at home.) The scanner and other stuff was usually transported by writer Nancy Duin in her car. Digital photographer was Simon Williams. For Marshfield, I hired a Mac laptop for the weekend at great expense - for later episodes I bought a G3 Wallstreet for just over £3,000. It was all great fun and should have gone to a second series, but it went out at a bad time on Saturday afternoon instead of the better Time Team Sunday slot.

I also worked on all the annual episodes of Time Team Live except the very first one, from August 1998 at King's Lynne until 2001, but that's another story. I also visited sundry regular Time Team digs (when it was still trendy to have a webmaster tapping away in the background) and worked on Tim Taylor's own Teamsite, which has also disappeared from the internet.

So, dive in - and enjoy! It's exactly as it was - tho it was designed to fit into a Channel 4 template - and some things may not work!