Hello. Here is the link to a three part series about early A.D. Britain from Channel 4 if you are interested.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/britain-ad-king-arthurs-britain/4od

Thanks, I hadn't spotted that before! Should be interesting.

I finally got around to watching this. It is a three-part series from 2004.

I cannot recommend episode 1. It is a bit confused and not very interesting. This part shows its age the worst, I think.

Ep. 2 deals with the supposed backslide of British civilization after the Roman withdrawal. This episode argues that this backslide never was, on the contrary: Britain was the Island of the Blessed, a civilized and highly literate camelot in a world full of barbarians. I am not entirely convinced.

Ep. 3 is about the Anglo-Saxon invasion, which, it would appear, did not happen, or at least not the way it was assumed to have happened. This has been at the centre of a bit of a historian’s dispute for the last ten years or so. Francis Pryor, the guy in this series, has been a strong proponent of the „never happened“ theory, and he has some good arguments. (You can imagine my astonishment when I heard this the first time.) The jury is still out on this one, as they say. Historians, do your work! I hope to see this riddle solved before I die.

Episodes 2 and 3 are worth watching, but don’t expect anything about King Arthur. His name features mostly in ep. 1 and gets invoked whenever Francis Pryor is tossing around some rhetorical smoke grenades. Putting the name into the title of this series was an obvious marketing move; I suspect the entire first episode of being a marketing gimmick.


While I am at it – another series I can recommend is Neil Oliver’s A History of Celtic Britain, produced by the BBC, from 2011, a.k.a. A History of Ancient Britain series 2. Mr. Oliver’s enthusiasm is catching. In fact, I recommend the whole show. It has some peculiarities, though.

[Edit: Some of those peculiarities get pointed out and mercilessly mocked in this blog post: http://structuralarchaeology.blogspot.de/2011/07/is-post-processual-archaeology-new-age.html ]

I share you view that the first episode was rather tedious and uninteresting, I'll be sticking to the books for the considerable future.

Any non-British people can watch the first part on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLpgVEfy4mQ

I don't know if any of the other parts are shown there. Hope it helps. This series seem great!