The BBC aired eipisode one of its new drama ‘Bonekickers’ this week. The first outing of ‘Time Team’ meets ‘CSI’ reminds me more of that 1970’s stable of tea-time TV, ‘RentaGhost’. I fear that it’s an attempt at drama rather than a satire on the CSI genre – even if genuinely the latter, it fails on script, action, CGI and narrative.
That aside, there was a kernel of an interesting plot. A group of archeologists discover an important Christian relic that becomes the focus of attention for a wealthy Christian extreme-fundamentalist. Throw in some psychotic followers of this brand of Christianity, who have no compunctions about using violence to impose their religion on the public, and you’ve got a heady mix of conflicting ambitions, spiritualities and characters.
The plot of ‘Bonekickers’ – 1 might just have worked as a full-length feature film with enough time to explore the darker corners of Christianity were hate of the other is legitimsed by a particular use of apocalypticism. The power of wealthy extremist Protestant Christians when given the opportunity to exercise influence (should, for example, an important relic be discovered) is always worthy of critical consideration in a movie.
The extent to which extremists within the Christian sphere are representative isn’t the point. It’s the influence they can wield through judicious use of their wealth that is of much more concern.
Sadly, ‘Bonekickers’ missed a trick by trying to cram too a big a story into such a short programme slot.