We’re all going a bit doo-lally with excitement here at TV Scoop, and for once it’s not Doctor Who related. For when one chapter ends, as Doctor Who will this Saturday (nooooo!), another opens, and the chapter that is opening looks as though it will be a corker. Think Silent Witness and Waking the Dead meets Time Team with a bit of Da Vinci Code mixed in to spice things up. And look at that cast! If that isn’t enough to start the drool dripping over your chin, click through to find out what the first instalment is all about, and what’s coming over the next 6 weeks.

The team of archaeologists – Professor Parton (Hugh Bonneville) the history expert and part-time louche; Professor Gillian Magwilde (Julie Graham) the focused and driven team leader; Dr Ben Ergha (Adrian Lester) the forensic expert; and Viv Davis (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) the fresh-faced and naive intern – dig things up, basically.

But the things they dig up all have some kind of mystery attached to them, and they all have implications for the present day even though they may be hundreds or even thousands of years old.

In episode one – Army Of God – the team excavate the remains of 14th-century medieval soldiers alongside Saracen coinage in Somerset. The soldiers turn out to be members of the Knights Templar, and an analysis of a small piece of cedar wood from the dig proves it to be 2,000 years old, leading the team to speculate that it could be part of the True Cross.

Further investigation is rendered difficult when right wing religious extremist Edward Laygass buys the land and declares it Holy Ground, installing a group of violent modern day crusaders to protect it from the bonekickers.

Episode two (Warriors) leads the team into a confrontation with a Ghanaian academic when bones thought to belong to 18th century slaves are discovered in the Bristol Channel. The bones are linked with the ship The Somerset, and although Dr Adabankah insists that the bones are returned to their homeland, Gillian discovers there are no records of The Somerset carrying slaves. The accounts suggest the ship ended its days in North America, rather than the Bristol Channel, but pages from the ship’s ledger were tampered with in the Sixties. Things are clearly not what they seem.

Bonekickers: BBC One, Tuesday 8 July, 9pm for six weeks