What happens when real metal detectorists watch the greatest TV show ever made about metal detecting?
Detectorists on the detectorists brings together some of the UK detecting community's most beloved voices to do exactly that. Watch, rewatch, and lovingly dissect the BAFTA-winning BBC series Detectorists, episode by episode.
Hosted by Katie from the Detecting History Podcast, each episode features a guest presenter from the real-world detecting community sharing their take on the show that captured the heart and soul of the hobby like nothing before or since.
Featuring guest presenters Emma (Instagram: @emloveoldstuff), Ross (Instagram: @detectorosst), Karl (Instagram: @thementaldetector), and Ellie (Instagram: @miss_detectorist and YouTube: Miss Detectorist).
Whether you're a detectorist who sees yourself in every scene, or a fan of the show curious about the real community behind it, this is the podcast for you.
Part rewatch pod. Part love letter to the hobby.
If you enjoy this show, come and find us over on the Detecting History Podcast for interviews, finds, and the history behind the hobby. Available on all major platforms and on YouTube at Detecting History.
Discover shows related to Detectorists on the Detectorists, based on actual content similarities. Explore podcasts with similar topics, themes, and formats, backed by real data.
There is no related content for this show.
No links shared by this podcast
British Birds, Not Including Seagulls
Saturday, May 23, 2026 • Duration 54:12
The finale of The Detectorists on the Detectorists. All four guests are together for the first time: Emma (@emloveoldstuff), Ellie (@miss_detectorist, Miss Detectorist on YouTube), and Ross (@detectorosst) join host Katie to review the 2022 feature-length special of the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, and to reflect on the whole series.
The special opens with Andy and Lance in a field tossing a ceramic cup between them, neither wanting to keep it. By the end of the episode, they think it might be a reliquary connected to the Last Supper. Ross notes that it felt less like a film that tried to be a TV show and more like a long episode, which is exactly what it needed to be. The drone shots give it a quality of being watched from above, in keeping with the eerie presences that have run through all three series. Art and Paul, welcomed into the gang so warmly at the end of series three, double-cross everyone over the gold from the nest. Lance goes full Gollum, hides the coins from Andy, and it takes Tony to suggest the obvious solution. By the final scene, Andy and Lance are a team again, sharing a quiet look that says everything. The special also carries real weight: the house that Becky and Andy worked so hard to win at auction has burned down, and Veronica is gone. Diana Rigg had died in 2020, and Rachel Stirling, who plays Becky and was Rigg's daughter in real life, is understood to have brought the storyline to Mackenzie Crook herself.
The gang then run through their overall thoughts on the series, covering what made the Detectorists feel authentic to real detecting life: the range of actual machines, the correct techniques, the Searcher magazine on the bedside table, the permissions culture, the lunch break conversations. Ellie notes that she first watched it as a non-detectorist for the British countryside and the characters, and that watching it again as someone who swings a coil revealed a whole second layer she had missed entirely.
The episode closes with a twenty-question pub quiz on the whole series, which dear listener can play along with at home. Questions cover the DMDC logo, Art's 1978 Orado, the number of pints of strong European lager Becky pours over Sophie, Lance's lottery winnings, the name written on Andy's hard hat, and what Sheila orders at band night. Ross disputes this result on grounds that have not been fully articulated lol.
Find Emma at @emloveoldstuff on Instagram, Ellie at @miss_detectorist on Instagram and at Miss Detectorist on YouTube, and Ross at @detectorosst on Instagram. For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms. Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.
Series 3, Episode 6 of the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook. Host Katie and guest Ellie(@miss_detectorist, Miss Detectorist on YouTube) review the series finale, and it is a moving one.
It opens with Andy convinced he has found a Bronze Age spearhead. He runs to find water to clean it, Lance gets excited alongside him, and they both realise it is a broken fence spike. Lance claims he knew all along. The apartment switcheroo is complete: Kate is moving her things onto Tony's canal boat, announcing it as my very own ship, while Lance stands on the towpath unable to even look at it. At the Scout hall, Terry produces the proof copy of The Common Buttons of Northwest Essex by Terence Seymour. Print run: 45. Russell suggests his copy be left unsigned to make it worth more. Andy announces the club is invited to join the last day on the permission. Terry has a brand new gazebo, three metres by nine.
The scene in the White Horse pub is one of the best in the series. Art and Paul are sitting against the back wall, arms folded, and Art delivers his well well well look who's come crawling back. Paul, increasingly the steadier of the two, clocks immediately that they are not really interested in bats and asks what they have actually found. It emerges that Art and Paul have been barred from NCMD digs since the troubles. Andy makes them honorary DMDC members for the day. Art fights back tears. They just wanted to be part of the gang all along, Ellie observes. Hurt people hurt people.
The rally arrives and it is everything. The whole gang comes over the hill with their detectors in a scene directly referencing the barn-raising sequence from the 1985 film Witness, complete with a version of the score woven through Johnny Flynn's theme. Terry gives his briefing, thanks Andy and Lance for opening up the permission, and welcomes their new friends Paul and Phil. Lance tries to shoo everyone to spread out. Nobody can hear him. They all have their headphones on. Varda finds a bronze finger ring in the soil, tries it on her finger, finds it too large, and walks over to Louise. From across the field, Andy and Becky arriving from the auction see Varda on one knee. Andy returns to tell Lance he is a homeowner. Lance only hears the first part. Becky outbid everyone in the room while Andy's legs stopped working, with Veronica's money behind her. Lance and Art swap machines. The Garrett Orado, it turns out, was built in 1978. Same year as the TR7.
I Think Hedgehogs Were Flat
Season 3 · Episode 5
Saturday, May 23, 2026 • Duration 46:45
Series 3, Episode 5 of the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook. Host Katie and guest Emma Youell (@emloveoldstuff) review the penultimate episode of series three.
Art and Paul open in camo gear with binoculars, watching the field. They launch a drone to get a better look. It will not stop ascending. The batteries last twenty minutes. It crashes back down a foot away from them. Meanwhile a solar energy worker arrives, flings the farm gate open and walks off leaving it swinging, which prompts a real conversation between Katie and Emma about ancient trees, the Sycamore Gap felling, and why the lunch tree itself is now under threat from tree clearance. Andy's solution: bat boxes. If bats move in, the tree is protected. He cannot make one without his shed.
Kate visits Tony on the canal boat, unsure whether she needs to be invited aboard like a vampire. They talk about Lance and Maggie, Kate promises to move out and give them their space, and leaves telling Tony she loves her ship. Andy, now on litter picking duty, rescues a hedgehog from the road. His workmate Steve thought hedgehogs were flat. He has only ever seen them on the road. Andy takes the hedgehog into nearby woodland, stumbles on a derelict thatched cottage with an auction sign in the window, no reserve, Colchester, 22nd July, and takes a photo.
Andy climbs the lunch tree to install the bat box and gets within a foot of the magpie nest without looking in. Lance accidentally reaches Paul on the phone while calling the Bat Action Trust helpline, Paul plays along and produces his official bat ID badge, and for one brief moment stands his ground against Art before Art tries to trade bat protection for the field permission. Sly bastards, corrupt conservationists, says Lance. Back under the tree, they hear it. Metal on metal. Coins shifting directly above their heads. The episode ends.
Featuring: Andy (Mackenzie Crook), Lance (Toby Jones), Becky (Rachel Stirling), Veronica (Diana Rigg), Tony (Orion Ben).
Find Emma at @emloveoldstuff on Instagram. For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms. Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.
All Right Lollipop
Season 3 · Episode 4
Saturday, May 23, 2026 • Duration 51:35
Series 3, Episode 4 of the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook. Host Katie and guest Ross Carpenter (@detectorosst) review an episode that earns its place as one of the best of the series.
Lance is sleep-deprived and obsessed with the magpies. He dismantles the tent to build a catching net, places a two-pound coin as bait, hides in the long grass and falls asleep. The magpies arrive, flip the coin to tails and leave without taking it. Andy, meanwhile, is back on verge work, filling his sprayer with water instead of weedkiller because he cannot bring himself to kill the wildflowers. Veronica, driven past in a car, clocks him immediately.
The episode belongs to Maggie. Tony arrives at Lance's flat to find Maggie answering the door half-dressed, calling herself his current, looking Tony up and down and calling her Trevor. The empty wine bottle Tony gave Lance as a reward for the hypnotherapy is sitting on the table. She leaves. Later, Maggie comes home from the shops unaware Kate is sitting on the bed, starts sifting through her drawers, and Kate says what are you doing. A text message from Maggie's ex reveals everything. Kate tells her to get her spells and potions out of her room and her bony ass out of her dad's life. The boys end the episode under the lunch tree with Kerplunk and Connect Four, while the camera pulls up through the branches to reveal the magpies' nest stuffed with gold coins.
We commentate on the brilliant series with characters: Andy (Mackenzie Crook), Lance (Toby Jones), Becky (Rachel Stirling), Veronica (Diana Rigg), Tony (Orion Ben), Terry (David Sterne), Sheila (Sophie Thompson).
Find Ross at @detectorosst on Instagram. For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms. Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.
The BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, opens its third episode of series three with Lance detecting in warm sunshine alongside Linda Lusardi. It is, of course, a dream. The beeping that pulls him out of it is not his pinpointer but his alarm clock, and he wakes up in his bedroom with a smile on his face and a stack of neatly arranged Searcher magazines on the bedside table. By the time he is loading the TR7 and peeling a single leaf from the bonnet, the day has barely begun and everything still feels possible.
Host Katie is joined by Ellie (@miss_detectorist, Miss Detectorist on YouTube), fresh from her own Roman adventures and the recent discovery of an Edward the First hammered penny. The episode wastes no time establishing its stakes. The morning begins with what Mackenzie Crook's script describes as the most painfully slow car chase ever filmed, as Lance and Andy find themselves stuck behind Art and Paul's moped on a single-track country lane, unable to pass, watching the clock. When they finally do overtake, the slipstream ripples a couple of blades of grass at the roadside and they high five like they have won something significant. In a way, they have. They get first pick of the field.
What Andy finds there changes the episode entirely. A handful of pottery sherds, blackened not just on the outside but inside, which he identifies as consistent with a Roman cremation burial urn. Ellie, who has been picking up similar material on her own permission and researching exactly this question, digs into what it means: the cremation pyre, the ashes interred in a pot, and the implication that what the show has been building toward from the very first episode is a grave with goods. Two magpies watch from above as Andy makes his case. Two for joy. Meanwhile, across town, a JCB has gone through the mosaic Andy found last week. His boss lets it happen, apologises briefly, and tells him he should not have lifted the flagstone. Andy quits on the spot and is told calmly that the paperwork will be sorted. He does not tell Becky. He goes to see a clinical new-build flat with her instead, admires an inaccessible shed through the kitchen window, and says nothing.
Lance, returning from a night shift, walks past Maggie emerging from his bedroom in a sort of exhausted fugue state, says hello, carries on making his tea, then registers what he has just seen and drops to the floor in pure horror. Maggie has let herself in, gone through his letters, slept in the flat and, by the end of the episode, drunk the bottle of wine Tony had given Lance as a reward for his hypnotherapy. When Lance calls to explain that the weekend is off, he stands in the pub garden leaving a voicemail full of small untruths. Slippery slope, mate, says Andy. He does know.
Can Children Get Migraines
Season 3 · Episode 2
Saturday, May 23, 2026 • Duration 52:55
Series three of the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, is already building its tension quietly and well. This episode opens with the magpies watching from above as Lance attempts to detect a footpath, interrupted every thirty seconds by a rambler wanting to know if he's found any gold. There are fifty of them coming. The boys pack up, head to the lunch tree, and find that the Roman grots and party facts accumulating in their pouches are starting to suggest the field they are about to lose is finally giving something up.
Host Katie is joined by Emma Youell (@emloveoldstuff), fresh from a Norfolk weekend that produced a Roman duck brooch with traces of red and blue enamel still on the back. The two of them move through an episode full of escalating pressure. Art and Paul arrive at the lunch tree in suspiciously generous mood, waving a white flag and offering to share permissions. Lance and Andy respond with the Jimmy Waffle. Chinny reckon, says Paul, and off Simon and Garfunkel trudge.
Back at the flat, Lance is waiting to have a word with Kate. She distracts him with the reappearance of the tennis player poster, mentions there might be a squirrel, and disappears to work. Lance spends a considerable amount of screen time going room to room with a broom. It is Tony who immediately clocks Kate was winding him up, and who then suggests hypnotherapy for his seasickness. The session that follows is a masterclass in Lance being Lance. He cannot be on a beach because he burns. He cannot sink into a carpet because he lives on the first floor and Mrs. Morris downstairs will not be happy. He is eventually given an umbrella. When he emerges, he tells Tony he was out like a light. Tony notes the doctor had her head in her hands.
The episode closes with a development that changes everything. Terra Firma, the newly renamed Dirt Sharks, have quietly offered obstruction clearance services to the solar energy company and landed the permission on the boys' own field. Art and Paul arrive on a tiny scooter. Solar John, magnificently unimpressed by all of them, tells them to share and let the first there have choice of field. Lance and Andy stride off. I know you are but what am I, Lance calls back over his shoulder. The magpies watch them go. Stay for the post-credits scene.
Featuring: Andy (Mackenzie Crook), Lance (Toby Jones), Tony (Orion Ben), Terry (David Sterne), Russell (Pearce Quigley), Louise (Rachel Stirling-Watson), Sheila (Sophie Thompson).
Druids, Romans and a Scaffolding Clamp
Season 3 · Episode 1
Saturday, May 23, 2026 • Duration 01:02:55
It doesn't appear in the transcript -- no episode title is mentioned. So I'll use a custom title. Based on our earlier discussion I'm going with Druids, Romans and a Scaffolding Clamp as it's Lance's best line and the perfect encapsulation of the episode. Here's the full description:
Druids, Romans and a Scaffolding Clamp The Detectorists on the Detectorists | Series 3, Episode 1
Series three of the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, opens not in a field but in a glass tower above London. A solar farm pitch is being made in a boardroom at the Shard, complete with a biscuit joke that doesn't land, and for a moment you could be forgiven for thinking you've pressed the wrong button entirely. Then a drone sweeps over the Essex countryside, finds a yellow TR7 parked at the edge of a field, and everything is exactly as it should be. We're back in Dainsbury. Two years have passed since we left.
In this episode, host Katie and guest Ross Carpenter (@detectorosst) settle into what is immediately a series with more weight to carry than its predecessors. Andy and Becky are living at Veronica's, saving for a deposit, and Andy has taken up vaping so he can stand alone in the garden for ten minutes of an evening. Lance has his daughter Kate installed in his flat, sleeping until quarter to one and cutting the cheese at the wrong angle. Both men tell each other everything is fine. Neither of them means it.
The episode's best line arrives early, when Lance pulls a scaffolding clamp from the ground and rather than complaint, offers something closer to philosophy. Druids walked this land. Romans. Saxons. And then he holds up the clamp. It is the thesis of the whole series in a single gesture, and Ross and Katie spend some time with it, as well as with the cheese scene that follows, which manages to say everything about Lance and cohabitation without a word of direct explanation.
Away from the domestic arrangements, Andy is on a dig with a new employer, played by Tim Key, whose motives for directing the trench work are genuinely difficult to read. The BWDC meeting brings the solar farm threat into sharp focus for the whole group, and a throwaway moment with a prison badge from HMP Chelmsford unravels thirty years of a widow's assumptions about her late husband's time in Colombia. Russell and Hugh remain magnificently themselves throughout.
A Wild Animal Trapped in a Cage
Season 2 · Episode 7
Saturday, May 23, 2026 • Duration 50:29
Lance is alone in the British Museum, standing in front of a glass case. The label reads late Saxon gold, finder: Lance Stater. He asks a passing stranger to take his photo with his old SLR camera. Before he can tell them he is the one who found it, they walk away. Andy should have been here. The script notes he leaves looking very small and sad.
Your host Katie is joined by Ellie (Instagram: @miss_detectorist, YouTube: Miss Detectorist) for Series 2, Episode 7 of the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, which aired on BBC as a Christmas special in December 2015.
Back in the field, Lance is sitting in the mud with a wasp circling his tea when Andy appears, back from Botswana, worldly wise and looking well. He refers to Botswana as home without quite meaning to. They almost hug but don't. Lance tells him the astell looked a bit like a wild animal trapped in a cage, and that he hasn't found so much as a signal since he handed it in.
At the Tuesday club meeting Lance gives his slide presentation, swollen cheek from the wasp sting, and the final slide is the photo of him at the museum. Everyone claps. Then Sheila points out the hooded figure in the background with the very long hands. Before anyone can say much, the projector catches fire and Russell unleashes the fire extinguisher on the entire room. That's the thanks I get, he says. Terry does not approve of the language.
In the pub by candlelight, Sheila is certain she saw something. A journalist from the Eastern Daily Press arrives, calls Lance Slater instead of Stater, asks whether the find contained any diamonds and gold, and when Lance mentions thinking about a trip to Dorset writes down Australia. Lance gives up. The next morning at the work yard, he discovers Jim the mechanic is no longer with us. He was your dad, wasn't he, Lance says to the new mechanic Tony, who has just slid out from under a vehicle and was clearly not expecting the dead parrot routine. He was. You've got his same pause hands. Tony gets on with the carburetor.
Terry sends Lance back to basics with Hugh's VK30. Hugh takes the CTX out with its enormous coil. Lance finds nothing. Hugh finds his first hammered coin and is thrilled. Lance watches and says sorry. A conversation about Tutankhamun and curses and how the curse was only broken when the mummy was returned to the tomb sets something moving in Lance's head. He visits the coin dealer opposite the British Museum. Then he goes alone to a field, digs a hole, and tips out a velvet pouch of brand new gold sovereigns bought with his reward money. He fills the hole. There is a breeze. The birds are very clear.
If in Doubt, Dig It Out
Season 2 · Episode 6
Saturday, May 23, 2026 • Duration 01:05:02
Lance finds a ring pull. Possibly Quattro. Andy has Stanley in the papoose. It is a gentle opening to a series finale that earns everything it is about to do.
Your host Katie is joined by Emma (Instagram: @emloveoldstuff) for Series 2, Episode 6 of the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, which first aired on BBC4 on the 3rd of December 2015.
Walking off the field, Andy finally says it out loud: he doesn't know why he has this compulsion to keep secrets. Lance, transformed since Kate came back into his life, offers something unexpectedly wise about ambition being overrated and letting Becky take the lead. At home, Becky is in a Victorian flower seller costume, bonnet and shawl, and the veins are practically visible in her neck as she says please don't make me lose my temper, not while I'm dressed like this. She goes to her mum's.
Rally morning on the mayor's farm. Terry gives the kickoff speech. The DMDC fleeces are not shifting, there are 132 left. At the crash site, Russell discovers that Hugh is thirty-two years old, has been receiving pints of Coke this entire time, and has never bought a round. Russell says he feels like he's been groomed. Peter turns up in a red hoodie and Terry strides down the hill to meet him, tells him he's a liar and a nighthawk and scum of the earth, and then phones his old police contacts on a flip phone when Peter walks away.
Kate shows up beside the TR7 and Lance explains the hobby to her in the manner of David Attenborough: detectorists are usually solitary animals, but at certain times of the year they gather together in vast herds. He produces a comically wrapped metal detector from the boot. She's going to come back and open a present each visit. They've got a long time. Meanwhile Andy and Becky switch sides on the phone simultaneously outside a Dickensian school fair, she apologising and he insisting they go, both lowering their phones at the gate. He is a day past the deadline. She accepted on his behalf, just in case.
In the final field, Lance tells Andy he's going to apply for Mastermind. Andy asks who will talk bollocks at him while he's in Africa. Lance says he'll probably just keep talking, not bothered if anyone's listening. That's good, Andy says, because half the time he isn't. Sophie marks an X in the dirt and says she'll see him there in a year. Lance lingers at the X after the others leave, hears something on the wind, turns back, and switches on his detector. The signal is immediate. Andy says leave it, it's junk. Lance says no. He digs. If in doubt, dig it out. The camera pulls back. He finds something. He rubs the dirt off. And after two series of waiting, Lance Stater starts to dance.
Not in This House
Season 2 · Episode 5
Saturday, May 23, 2026 • Duration 59:27
A trampoline is rolling down a hill towards two men who are trying to detect in a gale. Bishop drives past and asks if there's a child in it. He says potentially.
Your host Katie is joined by Ross (Instagram: @detectorosst) for Series 2, Episode 5 of the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, which first aired on BBC4 on the 26th of November 2015.
Sitting in the tractor furrows with their sandwiches, Andy very casually drops that he got the job. Lance immediately clocks he hasn't told Becky. Andy opens up about what he's actually scared of: taking his family to a malaria zone when he has no idea what he's doing once he gets there. Lance, newly philosophical since Kate came into his life, says sometimes in life we have to step off cliffs. Andy says he's heard all that before. Where? Oprah Winfrey. Back off. He reaches for the letter to check the deadline and it's not in his pocket. Must have fallen out. It's a sign. Lance says there's no such thing as signs. Andy says there are when you want there to be. Back at the house, Becky finds the letter on the floor, reads it, and says nothing.
At the pub, the barman has Peter's wallet. Lance goes through it despite Andy's protests, finds a driver's licence in the name of Peter Bauman, and then tips the wallet up and a gleaming gold coin spins onto the table. It's German. There's an eagle. It's holding a wreath. Lance covers it with a beer mat and will not touch it. The word for what it is cannot be said in Terry's house, and Terry makes this very clear when the emergency meeting assembles in the operations room, Sheila in her rockabilly swing dress having laid on a buffet and pressed lemonade on everyone. She says she'll get the door before the doorbell rings. She has done this before.
Sophie arrives ruffled, having learned from Peter that he's leaving and it was nice to meet her. She shouts at the club and storms off. That evening by the campervan, Simon and Garfunkel arrive in full night hawking gear and she finally sees it. The stakeout that follows is organised by an ex-copper coordinating by walkie talkie from outside a Lindy Hop, with nobody positioned to see the actual site. Lance has night vision goggles. This is his third stakeout. The first was a marrow. The second was an ex-girlfriend, which Andy says is stalking. Art's beloved Arado detector is run over by a police car. Russell talks in his sleep and says margarine. The mayor steps out of the darkness. It turns out he was in it too.
As the shadows lengthen and the gazebo comes down, Lance gives Andy the speech. Archaeologists gather the facts, piece together the jigsaw. But detectorists pick up the scattered memories, fill in the personality. They are the storytellers. Detectorists are time travellers. Andy considers this. Yeah, all right, he says. I'll give you that. They walk back across the field. A drone shot rises. The magpies have a scuffle in the lunch tree and the gold coins begin to rain down, glinting in the late sun, landing at their feet. Johnny Flynn sings a new verse, heard for the first time. Hoard me in the highest bough.
Detectorists Characters: Andy (Mackenzie Crook), Lance (Toby Jones), Becky (Rachel Stirling), Veronica (Diana Rigg), Tony (Orion Ben), Terry (David Sterne), Sheila (Sophie Thompson), Russell (Pearce Quigley).
Find Ellie at @miss_detectorist on Instagram and at Miss Detectorist on YouTube. For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms. Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.
The episode ends with one of the great cruel jokes the show has ever told. Lance finds a coin in the field. There is an unmistakable glint of gold. His camera battery is dead so he goes to fetch Andy, and a magpie arrives at the open hole. By the time they run back, in slow motion, it is already gone. In the pub, Lance tells the story and the group struggles to keep straight faces. Sheila, as ever, has the only line that matters. The tale of the magpie, she says, and the greedy man. Lance and Andy end the episode camping under the lunch tree, looking for Orion, quietly in the exact field that holds everything.
Featuring: Andy (Mackenzie Crook), Lance (Toby Jones), Becky (Rachel Stirling), Tony (Orion Ben), Terry (David Sterne), Sheila (Sophie Thompson), Maggie (Lucy Speed).
Find Ellie at @miss_detectorist on Instagram and at Miss Detectorist on YouTube. For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms. Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.
Find Emma at @emloveoldstuff on Instagram. For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms. Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.
The episode closes with the discovery of a hawking whistle -- a bronze falconer's call, centuries old and still working -- and then the camera pulls back through time. A Roman burial in a Dainsbury field. A pot of gold coins placed in the ground. Magpies, a plough, the coins scattered into the soil. And finally Andy and Lance, walking directly over the spot with their detectors over their shoulders, heading to the pub. Ross notes that it would only have been modern agricultural machinery deep enough to bring those coins close to the surface, and the discussion that follows is exactly the kind of exchange this show inspires in people who actually swing a coil for a living.
Featuring: Andy (Mackenzie Crook), Lance (Toby Jones), Becky (Rachel Stirling), Veronica (Diana Rigg), Tim Key as himself.
Find Ross at @detectorosst on Instagram. For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms. Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.
Back at the yard, Tony has fixed the TR7. It wasn't actually her dad, she says. She was joking. Would she like a cup of tea? Go on then. One sugar. He takes one sugar too. As he walks away the lights come on.
Featuring Toby Jones as Lance and Mackenzie Crook as Andy.
Find Ellie at @miss_detectorist on Instagram and YouTube.
For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms.
Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.
Featuring Toby Jones as Lance, Mackenzie Crook as Andy, Rachel Stirling as Becky, and Aimee-Ffion Edwards as Sophie.
Find Emma at @emloveoldstuff on Instagram.
For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms.
Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.
Andy gets home late to a furious Becky who points out she has a three-month-old baby and says I've got, not we've got. He tells her they caught three bad guys and one got away. She tells him she got on the BSO scheme and she and Stanley are going to Botswana. He lies about the letter once too often and she says it plainly: you're too spineless to take it. She fell in love with him because he's a dreamer, but when it comes to the crunch he won't act on those dreams. If you don't act on your dreams, there's no risk of failure or disappointment. She walks out and leaves that in the room.
Featuring Toby Jones as Lance, Mackenzie Crook as Andy, and Rachel Stirling as Becky.
Find Ross at @detectorosst on Instagram.
For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms.
Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.
