A History of Celtic Britain

This is far inferior to the series that preceded it - History of Ancient Britain. That series took us up to a hundred years before the roman invasion, and then this documentary continues with the protohistory of Britain, i.e. What was written by the Romans about the native British people while the Romans were here for approx 400 years. And that's kind of the problem, this is largely a documentary about the romans in the end, for a documentary about what happened on this island before the romans then you need to watch the first series. This series relates less to the British celts even though it is meant to be the one that focuses on it more. So it's kind of a failure of expectations. On its own merit, as a documentary of the romans and what they observed in Britain during their time here then this is fairly good but, however, while there are few documentaries made about the British celts there is a wealth of work that has been done on the romans and this therefore is not one of the better ones in comparison. Neil Oliver is as good as he and his research normally is but that's the only merit.

This is a really interesting history programme, well researched, informative, and presented with authority and appropriate excitement and wonder by Neil Oliver.

There's some overlap with the previous Ancient History series which is a little tedious at the beginning, but it's a useful introduction for those who haven't already seen that.

The only real problem is the camera work. It's frequently shot with narrow depth of field - a technique that can be extremely effective, but only if you can keep the subject in focus. The subject drifts in and out of focus frequently, especially on moving shots, because the depth of field is too narrow and the cameraman is not sufficiently skilled to pull off this style. This is particularly irritating when the presenter is displaying a specific artifact, and the camera spends the time hunting backwards and forwards, crossing the focus point only occasionally - the result being that you don't get a proper look at the item concerned, and that's frustrating.

Still, the content is excellent, right up to date, and gives a realistic, broad view of Celtic life, and for that, I must still give a 7.

I look forward to more history presented by Neil Oliver - as long as he takes a different cameraman.