Where did they Dig up Lily’s role?
HOW I looked forward to watching The Dig, a new British film based on a novel I’d quite enjoyed about one of the most enthralling events of our time. This was the uncovering in 1939 of an Anglo-Saxon burial site, crammed with thrilling relics of a mysterious past. If you have not seen the discoveries of Sutton Hoo at the British Museum, try to do so as soon as you can, because they will astonish you and then haunt you.
How disappointed I was. For a fee of, say, 30 shillings, I could have told the makers that ‘lemon drizzle cake’ and the Sunday Mirror did not exist in 1939. I could have told them that English people in 1939 did not say ‘Wow!’ Nor did they shout ‘For Christ’s sake!’ because they had missed a ferryboat. As for the character played by Lily James, a woman archaeologist, her job (there’s one in almost all such dramas) was to be the good, liberated modern character, an ambassador from 2021 among the ignorant, crabby relics of long ago. Yet the actual records show that women were prominent and respected in archaeology at the time.
The past was different, to be sure. But it was not a dark age.