Using the verb “to dig” with the meaning to like or understand something was first identified by lexicographers in the late 1930s, coincidentally the era in which an Anglo-Saxon burial boat was uncovered by archaeologists at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Subsequently, British TV viewers have really dug shows about digs. Currently, BBC Two viewers are enthused by Digging for Britain, reporting from old and new excavations, and Britain’s Biggest Dig, in which the gouging out of England for the HS2 rail route finds the past beneath the grass.

The fact that these shows are on a network with an older demographic invites cheap jokes about fossils watching fossils that certainly won’t be made here and are, in any case, inaccurate because every network has spades in this ground.

Sir David Attenborough diversified from live animals to their old bones in Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard (BBC One, 2021) and Natural History Museum Alive (2014, Sky). Channel 4’s The Great British Dig: History in Your Back Garden (2020-23) saw Hugh Dennis leading a team knocking on doors around the UK, offering the prospect of treasures beneath the greenhouse. That was a continuation of the channel’s long commitment to the subject which began with Time Team (Channel 4, 1994-2014, YouTube/Patreon since 2022), in which Tony Robinson led a team spending three days looking for every splinter of history in a UK postcode.

My 5 has archive (TV’s equivalent of archaeology) editions of Digging Up Britain’s Past. And BBC Four memorably explored the comedic-dramatic aspect of citizen archaeology in Detectorists (2014-22). Even drama has been delving deep: Agatha Christie’s novel inspired by accompanying her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, on digs is represented on ITVX by Murder in Mesopotamia (2002), starring David Suchet as Inspector Poirot.

And the crucial new TV test of relevance and profitability - are streamers interested? - is answered in the affirmative. Netflix offers Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb, a documentary about the opening of a five millennia-old Egyptian site, and The Gift, a 2019 drama in which a Turkish painter finds crucial truths in an Anatolian burial mound.

A little digging into television history reveals that each era of the medium, for eight decades, had its own archaeological exhibits. Why has the subject proved so enduring? Archaeology is a grown-up version of the “show and tell” lessons that are an important part of early education, in which a pupil brings in an object and explains its history and significance. So when BBC TV began seriously to develop in the 1950s, it was logical that, in seeking formats that utilised the new medium’s advantages over radio, “show and tell” was a popular approach.

Launched in 1952, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? was a version of the interrogative parlour game. Three academics were asked to identify ancient items from a regional museum. Bow-tied host Glyn Daniel held a relic up to camera, which was then identified in a caption shown only to viewers as, say: “40,000BC - elephant’s toe bone”. A trio of academics would then be charged with naming the display.

That show is identified by Archaeology at the BBC, a fascinating curated box set on BBC iPlayer as the first (or at least earliest surviving) BBC archaeology series.

Three other finds from beneath the archival tundra include later projects also featuring Mortimer Wheeler, an eccentric moustached archaeologist known for excavations in the British Empire, who, on Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, filled the role of what would now be called “team captain”.

Clearly identified as the star of the emergent genre, Wheeler struck gold for a second time, again with Daniel in charge, in Buried Treasure (1954), which explored significant digs. He also led a group of scholars to great Greek sites in Armchair Voyage (1958) and explored the other key foundational civilisation in The Grandeur That Was Rome (1960), one of the earliest examples of the telly-lecture in which a chap (as it always was then) orated in enviable locations.

Dug up anew, these shows offer an intriguing counterpoint to our own viewing. The first line of each description - for example, “it’s a dull brown colour” - reminds us, like replays of early football commentaries (“Everton are playing in the darker shirts”) of a central frustration of pre-colour TV: this was a window on the world with the blinds down.

Daniel looks awkward on screen - the early 1950s was a period when radio broadcasters were adjusting to the younger medium - but had an instinctive sense of what television would soon want: he wrote murder mysteries (including The Cambridge Murders) featuring an archaeologist sleuth called Richard Cherrington, who was widely assumed to be based on his screen co-star Wheeler.

Fittingly, the ability to watch 70-year-old TV shows at our ease - a luxury unimaginable to viewers until recently - is an example of how the digital archive has turned viewers into broadcasting archaeologists. It seems likely that these 1950s and 1960s shows met a public interest in archaeology ignited by the uncovering and display of the Sutton Hoo grave boat, plus the 1942 unearthing of a huge hoard of Roman silver at Mildenhall in Suffolk. Regular discoveries in gardens of unexploded Second World War ordnance - underground shocks that, remarkably, continue to this day - may also have encouraged a sense in Britons of what lay beneath.

Baby boomers were fascinated by The Treasures of Tutankhamun, an exhibition that busted more blocks than any since. Running at the British Museum from March to December 1972, this world-touring show was the long consequence of British archeologist Howard Carter’s 1922-23 excavation of the burial chamber of an Egyptian boy-king. His gold death mask graced the front covers of the emerging Sunday newspaper inserts that were known as “colour supplements”.

The 1982 raising from the Solent of Henry VIII’s naval ship, the Mary Rose, was another headline archaeological event, as was the much-publicised discovery of the skeleton of Richard III under a Leicester car park in 2012.

Each new front-page discovery validated TV’s excavation franchises, with the genre further strengthened by new entertainments based on old finds. Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan starred in The Dig (2021, streaming on Netflix, Prime Video, Sky Store), while the re-emergence of Richard III also became a movie, The Lost King (2022, streaming on Apple+, Amazon Prime, Sky Store) – although it faces a defamation action from one of the real-life participants in the dig. Amazon Prime also boasts a documentary take, Richard III: The King in the Car Park.

What archaeologists of TV conclude from this huge array of exhibits is that the popularity of historical finds as news stories encourages a passion for the subject that TV is well-placed to satisfy. Toiling in the soil is adaptable to documentaries, dramas, sitcoms, gameshows and panel discussions.

As suggested in the title, coined 73 years ago, of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, what is returned from the earth can turn out, on television, to be one of a variety of things.

Perhaps, given the power of cosy crime, someone should look at televising the Richard Cherrington mysteries. You dig? They dig.