Point of info, I'm not anti metal detecting, just anti the way it's done.

I had a little rant about this programme last year, but not in the way you might exoect -

"We British can forget the snooty distain. Hundreds of mass detecting rallies take place over here and a lot of the loot is secretly not reported or openly flogged. So what’s different? Well, we do it worse. Here, archaeologists ATTEND such events and don’t openly admit they oppose them. That doesn’t happen in the States. And as for TV programmes, we’re way ahead of the Yanks. Years ago we televised a mass detecting rally on a Roman site at Water Newton. On several occasions. Nationally. Live. At peak time. And archaeologists were present, lending it a false veneer of respectability, and it reeked of heroic triumphalism and the local archaeologists who bitterly opposed it weren’t put in front of the cameras. Whereas none of those things are happening in America. They’re merely crass over there.

So it seems to me – and I’ll be happy to be shown how I’m wrong – that far from looking down on them we need to regard their crassness as something we British can only aspire to. God Bless America, where an entrepreneurial or vandalistic spade is called just that, where people dig destructively for money or self and make no bones about it, where archaeologists object to them doing so and make no bones about it and where detector manufacturer Minelab has just donated $41,000 to fight attempts to prevent the destruction and makes no bones about it.

How much less morally repugnant that is than the public hypocrisy that blights Britain – where detectorists all claim they report all their finds even though most of them don’t, where archaeologists pretend to believe them despite knowing the statistics show it’s not true and where not Minelab but you the taxpayer pays not $41,000 but £1,500,000 a year to sustain the activity in it’s current unacceptable form. And to employ a battalion of archaeologists who, whenever the subject arises, tell your hapless fellow citizens it’s just fine to let absolutely anyone (including ex-professional wrestler Rick Savage – why not?) onto their fields so long as they say they’re “responsible“! "