On TV

Time Team Special: Britain's Lost Roman Circus (C4)

JUST before the 1997 general election, Paul Daniels was reported to have said that if Labour won he would consider leaving the country. The uncharitable response is that we have the pint-sized magician to thank for Tony Blair's landslide, but if anyone has a similar aversion to Bob Geldof as Daniels has to higher taxes, then perhaps now would be a good time to pack their bags.

After Saturday's three hour two-part documentary on Live Aid, you can guarantee this modern day saint - Geldof, not Daniels - will be barely off our screens in the run-up to next month's Live 8, subjecting everyone in earshot to an expletive-ridden harangue.

In years to come, grandparents will tell of how they knew Geldof when he was a musician. Now, in a nod to his previous life, he's billed in the Radio Times as a "humanitarian rocker", although it's safe to assume that was just a mishearing of his Irish brogue.

But even those who find his self-righteousness irksome will have discovered something to enjoy in Geldof in Africa, the first of a six part series charting his journey across what he tells us is misleadingly called the dark continent. In fact, he says, the first thing you notice about Africa is the light. "It has the most extraordinary, beautiful and luminous places on our planet," he says, accompanied by stunning shots of shimmering landscape which show he's not exaggerating.

He travels to Somaliland, a state created by people sick of the warlords who have devastated Somalia, but unrecognised by every other country in the world. There he sees the Pigeon of Peace roundabout, a huge model bird sitting on top of a bunch of giant twigs, and sits with a group of elders who are Somaliland's equivalent of the House of Lords, including a man with a beard so orange it would put Lucozade in the shade.

But if light has helped define Africa, it has also hindered its progress, favouring a nomadic subsistence which is contrary to Western ideas of development. Just as much a hindrance has been the Western insistence on drawing arbitrary national boundaries across land which has been traversed by hundreds of tribes for thousands of years before the white man ever set foot in Africa.

Standing on the continent's north-eastern shores, Geldof was left to ponder how the 50 people who left that spot thousands of years ago became the ancestors of us all. How man left Africa to colonise the world, only to find the world coming back to colonise Africa.

In 2002, archaeologists investigating the site of a proposed housing development in Colchester came across a few coins and horses' jawbones. Intrigued, they dug further, and unearthed what was later identified as the only Roman circus ever found in Britain.

Time Team Special: Britain's Lost Roman Circus, charted the discoveries and how the evidence was pieced together, interspersed with an attempt to recreate a Roman chariot, which turned out not at all like Charlton Heston's in Ben Hur.

Shorn of its race-against-time approach, it was more sedate than the usual Time Team, although there was a twist in the tale. After the archaeologists had scratched around for a bit, it was all going to be covered up so the houses could be built on top. Excitingly, the housing company boss told us, some markers were going to be put in the ground to show the outline of the circus. Building on ancient ruins wasn't the twist, though. The twist was, apart from a little sarcasm from Tony Robinson, nobody seemed at all surprised.