Time Team S16-E09 Mystery of the Ice Cream Villa: Colworth, Bedfordshire 

For the people bashing Tony, he is there to act as a go between from the archaeologists to the common viewer. I highly doubt that his attitude at times is genuine, it is to provide the archaeologists a chance to respond to the viewers who may be thinking something similar while watching making the show more accessible. Without Tony's attention to detail in that regard, many people who may otherwise think what archaeologists do is a bunch of guess work and making stuff up out of nothing have a chance to see reasoning behind it. Because archaeologists working in their field go on the assumption that the people they're working with understand all that, but Tony just reminds them to explain it to the people at home and rather than just saying "explain that to the viewers at home" he finds ways of making it entertaining with is attitude.

Tony is the link between the archaeologists and us. His humour makes this show special. An INFOARCHIENTERTAINMENT SHOW. Pure magic!

When Tony said they had a whole week I was like YA!... and then he says no, 3 days. :P

Thanks so much for posting.

This was a great episode! The tosses between hope and dispair, the banter and the sheer joy of even the tiniest finds ❤

What many commentators here don't seem to appreciate the plow damage that occurs to these sites. In America, the earliest structures were either pole buildings or buildings on piers. Once the buildings are gone, plowing removes most all traces of the building. I read a book back in the 1970's about a town built in 1618 and destroyed by 1623 in Virginia. It was found accidently when there was an archeological test of a site for the expansion of a parking lot. They had to scrape all of the topsoil under the tar that was below the plow depth to find the signs of the post molds. What amazes me is that the "Diggers" whomever they are never wear knee protection/pads. Im my plumbing business, we did a lot of digging. I provided knee pads to all of my employees and demanded that they wear them. Which they did. I watch these episodes and get sympathetic pains in my knees just watching them. For less than $15.00, you can buy really comfortable knee pads that don't cut off the circulation on your knees. Plus, they keep your knees warm and toasty in the winter time.

AWE! Tony got me. I was " A whole week yaaay!" awwwww...lol...just kidding

Tony is just doing his job. I love the attitude he brings to the show. I wish all of these 20 years of shows were available on American TV. I love all the characters.

30:16 John always solves the problem with his car keys.

When I read that title, my first thought was "Vanilla Villa". And at 0:48 when Tony said "This time we've got a whole week to find out", I nearly fell out of my chair. I mean, with a whole week to work with, Phil would probably find a tunnel from England to New Zealand. Just using his trowel.

Laurie, I completely agree, Tony binds the programme together and his fake grumpiness and criticism is part of the entertainment and keeps the pace. In addition, you know he is close to the other members of the team because of the constant ribbing and p*ss-taking. Maybe it's a British thing, we may often seem very rude to each other, but it is really a sign of familiarity, respect and good friendship. Let's not forget, this show wouldn't exist unless Tony had driven it from concept to 20 years of reality.

Hats off to Tony and Mick and the producers for doing the show Timeline and then pushing the idea of saying , let's not just show history in documentary style, but let's dig it and find it and see what makes this history so important, thus the show Time Team was born out of it. That's what makes a good show, when the effort of exploring the ideas turns into reality.

I love when Ian the digger driver picks out something in the ground to look at. He seems so funny too because he is this guy who is an amateur Archeologist but doesn't get the credit.

On a serious note, the Romans, and even the folks before them, paid attention to what's under their buildings. Those are fantastically solid foundations or what we call footers. I don't know about GB but most houses in the States have been thrown up on the cheap in recent years. Expensive ones too. A lot of bling above ground but the foundations can be very suspect. I recently had to pay several thousand dollars to have structural piers driven down to bedrock to support the lower side of my house. Pitiful, the footers only went down inches in some areas. Before I buy another house I'd like to have Time Team examine what's under it!

Yay ! Eggnog icecream time, team !

Easy to spot from the square water reservoir alongside: 52°13'37.9"N 0°34'40.4"W

LoL! Tony has me laughing, even as the team totally whiffs. Let's hope day 2 is better. Day 2: Panic! and punt.

I love Tony in this episode lol!!!!

I love Tony’s attitude he is a real talent

As often happens, the only downside is that 3 day limit - and on such a promising site. Just when they're starting to get somewhere, they have to pack up and go. I hope the local archaeologists put the geophys maps to great use and were able to make great finds in the future.

I was SO hopeing that you had a whole week. what you can do in 3 days is amazing what you could do in 4 more days would be Earth shattering

It's Tony's job to be a misery guts. I think he's hilarious. During the whole run of the show, did he EVER once get to say he had a cunning plan?

Gotta love Tony calling Phil's empty trenches "deseltry", funny when Phil says , i'll have to look that word up. Or when Tony calls Phil, Fred Flintstone because of Phil's love of flint lmao, too funny. They all loved each other, every one of them, those little jabs were just showing how comfortable they were with each other.

Just discovered this show a few weeks ago,, darn shame they cancelled it...

Tony got me for a minute when he said they had a week for the dig, 😂

I think it would be fun to consider ice cream types for these hard working archeologists. Such as Tony, a little salty with sweetness almost like salted caramel mixed with raspberries. Phil would be like a rumor and cream. Helen would be strawberry cheese cake.

Lol Sir Tony and his jokes! It's always 3 days lol

Good title for a future TT biopic: 'A Ditch Runs Through It'. Could also use Robbed -Out Wall or Trench...

Right. Hay-fever......... Tony sounds more like it got late at the pub🤔😉

There have been some episodes of this great series where I wouldn't have been surprised that dear Tony didn't end up in the backfill.

I always found Neil Holbrook to be hopeless in trying to find a Roman Villa and seems to be chasing shadows

Francis, Mick, and Guy are conspicuous by their absence. 😁

WHY does everyone enjoy bashing Tony??? He's just a guy doing his job. HOSTING. He's the narrator, not the scientist! We all LOVE Tony. He cracks us up. He's been our favorite character since the shows beginning. All of you who jump on board the Tony bashing bandwagon are just at a loss for something better to discuss. Like the actual archeology. THATS what the show is about!

I vote for putting the little ring on! 8D And be nice to Tony - he's got to drive the Banter Bus! That's not an easy job.

Is it me or does John Gator know how to read the archeology better than the archeologists at times?

Love it!

I love the jet ring.

Don’t make me excited like that!!!

Dr. Mick Aston RIP

Damn, Tony had me. Was elated when he said a week...then crushed to find out it was the normal 3d Edit: Sorry half the team got sick 😢 but Tony has been especially funny this episode 😂

The ice cream technician looks like he was in Status Quo

The local shows them photos and where it was. But they decided to follow geophys and dig elsewhere. Why didn't they try where he said?

Mick! Mick!? Some how I think Mick could have kept this dig a bit more focused. I wonder if he watched this episode with his head in his hands.

Even the failures on TT are just as much fun (not for them of course), as their successes. Cheeky lot!

The hobnails and coins make sense in a tile production site often run by the Roman army. 😋

i love how they use qtips to gently clean something but they dig with heavy machinery haha

On second thought, let us not go to the Ice Cream Villa.... it is a silly place.

I wonder why some people think shows like Time Team are scripted. Certainly there’s a lot of guidance from the director as he wants the consumers, us, to be informed about what the experts and most of the crew, even Tony, already know. It’s how we learn - that’s what the show is about! But you can’t script for the unknown.

Tony is the bomb!

I think we all deserve Ice Cream!

I half expect Neil to say.. "My brain hurts!"

Phil Harding always finds something at the last min to save the day.

It looked like Mind Craft!

I don't remember which episode: there was one where they found absolutely nothing.

I hope they were all rewarded with ice cream....

Tony is looking very well fed in this episode...

As Mick used to say, "Tony needs needs to go home and take a nap with a bag of frozen peas o his forehead.

Tony out did his usual snarkiness.🤣🤣

Gotta love tony jeezz lol

I can never understand why people give thumbs down?

8.04 minutes. i would love to get a name or link to that piece of music!!!!!!!!

Damn you, DuraFunk! I went back and looked! What has been seen cannot be unseen... bleh

Time team did not get ice cream from the guy calling them in? He seems to be a Dutchman (like me haha).

Aha... Raksha is here now... something will be found!!...

Burning but not enough for a kiln means a brewery to me. Malting floors often burned down. That would explain all the money year on year in a place where one does not expect a villa. It is industry, production of beer and wine where there may have been a Roman building not exactly a villa. More like a pub.

Where's Stewart looking for slight rises in the ground and backyard walls made of villa stone?

Neil is such a goofball! I do love him but miss Mick.

I love it when the Site Directors get down and dirty in the trenches.

0:48 week joke, Tony, very week joke.

Where all those findings go? Is museum built locally to bring in tourists or they archived never to be seen again? I wonder how the people that lived locally were able to obliterate the presence of the romans so completely after the legions left.

What did Helen say at 19:09 about boots and houses?

Who else was like, "Yes!" when Tony said they have a whole week to find out? Like, finally a decent amount of time! Then said, "Awe," when he said just kidding. I think they should have had 5 days for all these digs. Not 3. I wonder why production decided on 3? Many of these sites went on to be continued digs by other groups.

😢that was kinda messed up too do Phil I’d a whooped ya

Tony: "Were here for a whole week!" Me: "WHAT?!?!?" Tony: "Just kidding, 3 days" M: "Fuck you Tony."

What was wrong with Toni? If he was teasing, it all came out flat. The editors should have cut some of his “we got nothing” and criticism of those digging and choosing where and what to dig or just send him home.

Tony is part of the program. Each one have gotten on my nerves at one time or another. More often it has been Tony or Phil.

Is it just me or is Season 16 when Time Team really hit its peak. All these episodes are both interesting and entertaining.

They always seem to forget that up until the mid 19th century agriculture was big business. Britain exported shiploads of grain every year to Rome which meant a large cash income to the big landowners who grew it. I don't suppose they would be shocked to see a grand home or estate from the 17th or 18th century in some out of the way part of the country. Why would they be surprised at the Roman equivalent?

single coins, could be dropped anywhere, and, could have, been in circulation, for a long time ?

They *_do_* get excited , don't they, the little dears.

What amazes me is how well the Britts made most of the Roman structures disappear, man, they really recycled it all. It must have been a free for all, after the collapse of Roman domination.

Time Team made a bloody mess of that field without finding much.

Sarcasm Tony....... tsk tsk. rofl

Hm - quite a change in the direction of this episode. Lots of banter, lots of closeup camera work, and as someone below said, lots of thinly-veiled insults. It seems to me this is the first episode where we've seen that kind of artificial antagonism between the team members that;s been set up for dramatic tension. And whoever was right - you do rather want to smack Tony a good one and say "shut yer gob, mate!" (Actually I wouldn't say exactly that, because I'm an American, but I bet they wanted to.)

The clay found in the first trench may explain the whole site. You have tons of tile debris, which brick makers may have been using to make pottery and tiles, mortar cement, and so far you do not have enough Roman pottery to establish that a proper Roman villa ever existed there. You have signs of huge burning where they may have baked the tiles and bricks. Huge dumps of random roof and hypercorst tiles adds up to a production site that relies partly on recycling of demolition rubble from other places. The dark discoloration could mark where the kiln was and it would have been larger than others to produce a lot of tile and pottery at once. I think it is a production site, where coins would be dropped while customers are ordering new batches of tile or bricks. If there was only a timber building, when the Romans left the area, there may have been some violence against the few Romans who hung out there for management alone. The one coin you found was from the end of the Roman empire in Britain. Two days in and no one has mentioned the possibility that it could be a recycling center and production center for making tile and bricks. I think you should be looking for what looks like a huge garden supply center today, lots of different kinds of tiles stored outdoors or under a kind of lean-to roof, but it is wrong to look for an upscale building. Cobbled surface says tile sale center to me with possible trade connections back to Rome.

Does anybody know why John never _starts_ with resistance? Does it take longer to process? Because it always seems more reliable...

Where is Phil?

Louise Revell now that is a cutie.

neil is not a joy of certainty-wishy-washy.

Documentation: de.scribd.com/document/20372613/Yelnow-Villa-Bedfordshire

Too bad the Time Team didn't have a week at a time.

Find it interesting how so many posters bad mouth and complain about people's on the show. Wonder how their personality would look on videos to be "judged"?????

+1 to Tony the Nattering Nabob of Negativity being planted under some backfill. His snide criticism is becoming the major element in the show.

Again, looks like it's time for Tony to go home and take a nap with a bag of frozen peas on his forehead.

Have to disagree with them, I don't think there were stone walls. Probably timber structures mostly with stone foundations. Doubt there's enough building stone nearby to waste on walls. These seem to be romanized Britons spending their money on more practical luxuries like tile rooves, jewelry and nice housewares and furniture.

I like the show and often mute it when Tony is belittling and whining about the real archaeologists from their findings.

People need to understand that Tony worked from scripts. If you watch the specials, especially the "behind the scenes" ones, you can see him with a teleprompter, and I recall once he was speaking in the rain and laughed at his wet script. In about season 14 they started scripting more silliness and by season 16 Tony's been turned into a veritable gadfly.For those who find Neil Holbrook disappointing, I suggest you try turning on the closed-captioning (even though it's not very good) and Read rather than Listen to him. It's his style which distracts. I remember once Stewart said his mother spoke with great flapping gestures - as does Stewart himself - because she worked in a mill and it was too loud to be heard --- possibly that is Neil's background as well. Does anyone know where his dialect is from - sounds East Ender to me but what do I know? We tend to expect archaeologists to sound much more posh, more like Helen, and I had to work to understand Neil's speech.

What's the deal with calling the Roman roads "Watling Street" and so on? Surely there was an original name for the road. Why not call it that?

I wonder if some of the archeologists feel like dropping a few pieces of broken pot in their trench just to shut Tony up and get him off their backs. He really seems like a pest and a hindrance in this episode, not a presenter. I know it's his job, but sometimes he goes too far.

the only thing i think is kinda dumb this episode because they wasted time using a thing that looks like a rolling satelite probe and then they say its for not digging where not needed hahahaha funny