We’ll have to wait a few hours for the overnight viewing figures to find out how many of us were prepared to give Bonekickers a second chance after last week’s execrable opening episode, but judging from the comments on the review at the end of that link, there won’t be many. With an enthusiasm born of desperation, some viewers decided the unintentional humour was worthy of a repeat visit and watched it for that alone. So…did you get a laugh?

This week’s story started off in the mud of the Bristol Channel, where several sets of human bones had been found along with associated manacles, leading the team to suspect the bodies belonged to slaves. Bit of a leap that – could they not have been convicts?

Anyway, “Dolly” (>sigh<) just happens to be digging a couple of hundred yards away from the rest of his team, which is Jolly Lucky because it’s Exactly The Right Place to find the ship’s bell and learn that the men were being transported on the Somerset. Which is a bit of a mystery as according to the shipping records the Somerset’s last cargo was molasses and she was then chopped up for firewood in Nova Scotia. Well, it does get very cold in Nova Scotia you know. But it’s a warning to other ships not to get too close lest they be set on by hordes of frost-crazed Bluenosers armed with axes looking for something to warm their homes with.

And if you think that’s surreal, let’s return to the show, where four black guys are standing on the quayside performing a strange ritual dance and chanting. Turns out they want the bones returned to Africa. Well you would, wouldn’t you. “If you don’t know your past, how can you know your future?” their leader asks Viv, with the first laugh-inducing line of the show. One that tries to sound really deep and spiritual but ends up just being bollocks when you think about it. Whether you know your past or not, you can’t know your future, and knowing your past is no guarantee of a different future, so, as I said, bollocks. But delivered very well, I thought. Like he meant it, you know? Even if he didn’t know what it meant. Which is a clever trick.

Meanwhile, in America, a black Senator is running for president. I know! This show just gets madder and madder! No but seriously, I couldn’t decide if this was an attempt to be topical, or if the writers had an attack of uncanny prescience, given that the script may well have been written before the real-life drama of the US primaries started to unfold. Anyway the Senator stares meaningfully at a brass button on a chain. You know it has some significance because he keeps on staring at it. Then, a little while later, he stares at it again. There’s that familiar Bonekickers sledgehammer again – leaving all subtlety aside and nothing to the imagination.

To cut a very long and boring story short, the manacled “prisoners” were the (white) crew of the ship. We discover they were white through some clever forensics and then, just in case we’d missed the revelation they were white, Gillian repeats the fact – twice – in conversation with her boss. He doesn’t believe her. They were white, no they weren’t, yes, they were: they were white. It’s like being back in the playground. The crew members (the white ones) were chained up by the slaves – Maroons – who escaped and fled to Jamaica and America, helped the Americans defeat the British and whose leader is a direct ancestor of the button-wielding Senator.

I could say I lost it when George Washington came into the picture, but in reality I’d lost interest way before then. I mentioned last week that maybe the actors would grow into their roles. They did, to an extent. I wrote that maybe the scriptwriters would develop a sense of familiarity with the characters, and the dialogue would improve. It did, a bit, although the script is still peppered with woefully clunky lines and pointless repetition – not to mention the astonishingly far-fetched Mystery of the Virginia Creeper (“My God! It’s a door!”) which, if you were still awake by then, provided the second laugh of the evening.

But even in the face of these small improvements, the sad truth is that I simply don’t care about any of these characters or whatever antics they get up to. I can’t engage with them. To be fair, the story was marginally more interesting and believable that last week’s (I did say marginally) and had a more satisfying, if slightly melodramatic ending, but that’s small compensation for an hour spent in the company of some of the most hapless, helpless, clueless and essentially boring diggers in the history of archaeology. God knows they chose a hard enough subject to make exciting, but so far it ain’t working for me.