History, said Henry Ford, cutting to the chase, is bunk. The word comes to mind when addressing Bonekickers, the sexy new drama about archaeologists that arrived last night to entertain us over the wet summer. But let's give Bonekickers a chance to explain itself. It is has, after all, been deposited by the pens of Ashley Pharoah and Mathew Graham, who wrote Life on Mars.

“You know what history is, mate?” said Adrian Lester last night, contradicting Ford. “History is layers.” Lester, whose own history includes a spell as the best Henry V of his generation, plays Dr Ben Ergha, a “forensic archaeobiologist”. He was addressing a stupid builder who wanted to bulldoze a site that contained, goodness me, the Cross of Christ.

Bonekickers is layered. Layer 1 is the team of groovy academics from the “University of Wessex”, assembled so as to 0resemble those teams of specialist detectives we see everywhere else on BBC, in Silent Witness, Waking the Dead, Spooks etc. As ever, they are a cod-family. Mum is Gillian Magwilde, played by Julie Graham from ITV. She is a crosspatch with a heart of gold, masculine but sexy, a maverick, natch. Dad is Gregory “Dolly” Parton, historian, all cravats and Barbour hats. He likes a pint and women's breasts. Hence his nickname. Some day someone is going to cast Hugh Bonne-ville, who plays him, in a part worthy of his talents. The dull older son is the above mentioned Ben, captain sensible, who takes in hand the team's newest recruit (its teenage daughter), the idealist intern Viv. Gugu Mbatha-Raw's modest chest attracts Dad's sinister attention. Above them is an annoying boss, Daniel Mastiff, who wears bow-ties and whose crime is to write populist history books.

Beneath this festers the next layer, the forensic crime drama, CSI, Silent Witness and all that. To make this aspect work requires hard work from the writers, since the crimes, if any, uncovered by archaeological investigation tend to be centuries old. For the first ten minutes, as the team dug trenches and unearthed old coins, I thought I was watching the most boring piece of popular fiction since Rosemary and Thyme.

But eventually we reached the bottom layer, otherwise known as the pits. This was Indiana Jones-level fantasy, in which the Knights Templar were mixed up in a plot to secrete the Holy Cross in Hereford. The climactic scene had our heroes descend on ropes into a pit where hundreds of year-dot crosses lay undiscovered. Sensational though this find would be in real life, for action-thriller plot reasons the academics were compelled to set them all on fire. Safely back on the surface, a bad guy incinerated, Dolly spoke for viewers everywhere: “Now, please, please, for the sake of Jehovah may we go to the pub?”

To say I was surprised that a plodding forensic science series went round the bend into Hollywood fantasy puts it mildly, but there is a gigantism going on in television drama at the moment: the stakes are always too high, the body count too many, the appeal to plausibility too slight. Bonekickers pretends to find history intriguing but has no real faith that we viewers will. So it manhandles the contemporary into its orbit. Last night it was the turn of the evangelical Christians to be dragged in. The script, I thought, slipped into serious bad taste when one of their loony-tune number lopped off the head of a law-abiding Muslim. I am not a Christian, but if I were, the demonisation of evangelicals, not to mention the casual “miracle” pulled off by a splinter left by the rood in a nurse's finger, would make me cross. For the rest of us, Bonekickers is, regrettably watchable, bunk.

I had forgotten, until Imagine reminded me, that Anthony Minghella had scripted the first Inspector Morse. The Dead of Jericho remained the favourite of Colin Dexter, who invented the character. A small lesson was here contained in how mature popular TV drama can be and also of how Minghella, an intellectual who directed Beckett in his spare time, relished addressing the middle brow with intelligence. He was far too nice a man for anyone to do anything but praise him in last night's tribute, but the programme did hint that something happened to him after his stressful period shooting Cold Mountain. There should have been plenty of time after Breaking and Entering and The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency for the director of The English Patient to find his stride once more. This warm edition of Imagine merely re-emphasised how tragic it was that it turned out not to be.

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