Metal Detectorist Discovers One of England’s Earliest Gold Coins in a Farm Field
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/jan/28/detectorists...
Mackenzie Crook's recent Worzel Gummidge adaptation has a similar vibe, although obviously more geared towards families.
Obligatory BBC Shipping Forecast, because it seems right up this crowd's alley: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CxHa5KaMBcM
Recent: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qfvv/episodes/player
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/tracking-movements-isoto...
Also: Did you see University Challenge last night?
Something I realized watching Detectorists is that there aren't many realistic adult drama shows (or American movies) these days that aren't about crime or similarly extreme subjects, or that aren't historical dramas.
Detectorists is technically a "dramedy", of course, but it's basically a realistic, truthful depiction of everyday life, with some observational humour thrown in here and there.
For some reason Hollywood has indoctrinated the world into thinking that fiction can't be true to life, because life is somehow boring.
A similar American drama that comes to mind is Lodge 49, which is absolutely fantastic. On Becoming a God in Central Florida has a similar vibe, and is also excellent.
Off the top of my head, I'm struggling to think of many other shows. Better Things, Transparent, Togetherness, Succession, Mozart in the Jungle… any other good ones?
I personally found it to be none of those things.
Often, we experience a piece of art as being something when really much of our experience is defined by what we brought of ourselves to it.
It's an urban feel-good fantasy, clearly not intended to be realistic. There are tons of shows like this, though Ted Lasso does it better than many of them.
There are a lot fewer shows like, say, Togetherness, which shows the raw, unpolished reality of ordinary middle-class people living very ordinary, albeit dramatically interesting, lives. I would argue that everything in Togetherness not only happens in real life (and the characters also talk like adults do in real life), it also has. Whereas pretty much nothing in Ted Lasso has ever happened, at any time, anywhere.
There are different levels of realism in art. Guernica is not a realistic real life portrayal or what a war scene would look like if photographed.
The more interesting question to me is whether it conveys the subjective experience of war in a meaningful way to the viewer? In other words, say person A has a first-hand experience with war and comes away from it with belief X. Then person B looks at a work of art and also comes away from it with belief X. Then in some sense, the art is a realistic portrayal of war because it caused the same change in the viewer that experiencing war does. The fact that it doesn't aesthetically look like it is not particularly relevant. It's an artifact.
Togetherness is profoundly unrealistic because it is a series of two-dimensional images shown at a fixed frame rate from a viewpoint that spontaneously and instantly jumps from place to play with wildly varying focal points. It is very far removed from what it would be like to be in the room with the actors. Not to mention short pieces of music spontaneously being heard from no appreciable source in the scene.
But you accept that those kinds of unreality are not important for your appreciation of the work.
The kinds of unreality that bother you about Ted Lasso are in the set of things that I don't consider important. The behavior of the characters (especially in the first season) rang true to me.
Obviously all art is "unreal" in terms of being separate from our own subjective reality, yada yada yada, but that's neither here nor there. Within the realm of "things that are filmed and projected within the medium of TV", which is what we are talking about, there are degrees of naturalism which we can describe and compare, irrespective of what kind of artistic "truth" you think is conveyed.
You didn't say, "I want", you said, "it's a saccharine, deeply unrealistic fantasy bordering on self-parody" and "it's objectively unrealistic".
If you'd said "the level of naturalism Ted Lasso chooses doesn't do anything for me", there'd be no argument. But you clearly claimed that there were intrinsic properties of the show itself that were "objectively" unrealistic.
https://www.youtube.com/c/TimeTeamClassics/videos
If you want an absolute banger of an episode to evaluate, try this one...
Well that's nice. Feels like the ultimate win-win all-round. Nice that's it's not disappearing into someone's private collection, never to be seen again.
In the US, many high-value coins are sent through professional authenticators and graders, and they will mark a coin as, say, "Mint State details, but cleaned". that "but cleaned" can knock hundreds or thousands off the sales price.
In the past century, gold has underperformed U.S. equities and has not, in any case, held its value very well. It's been quite volatile, e.g. falling 30% in 2013.
The article doesn't say how much gold this coin contains, but its value is essentially 100% numismatic.
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/gold-price-history-3305646
[2] https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-a...
I've been tempted to start, since I live in a village that dates from the 1200s (but likely had Romans passing through long before) surrounded by farmland. There's bound to be something interesting buried here and there.
A coin used earlier in the Roman province of Britain, even in the same location, would have a picture of the Emperor in Rome on it.
That's what makes it "one of England's earliest gold coins". One of the earliest coins of "England as a state".
http://www.kenelks.co.uk/coins/roman/roman.htm
I think the significance of this coin to English people is that Henry III is king when the Magna Carta is negotiated and the royal domain across the channel is severed. This places the coin in a context of when what was to become modern England became identifiable.