If you've heard of Dr Gillian Magwilde of the short lived BBC series Bonekickers then there's a good chance you discovered it through internet critic Diamanda Hagan's vitriolic reviews. The vitriol is well deserved the cast is inexplicably good, especially considering the content, but even they can't save a script which includes modern day Christian fundamentalist "crusaders" complete with broadswords, Excalibur, evil cultists and a team of archeologists who despite discovering history-changing artifacts and often more recent corpses every week are neither on the news or in jail. If Bonekickers was a film it'd be two hours of explosions with the odd reaction shot thrown in for emphasis. There is zero consistency in Bonekickers: the youngest member of the team is either the smartest or stupidest member as the plot demands, the team constantly do the exact opposite of what their boss tells them but never face any repercussions, and things like scuba diving or rock climbing equipment appear in the back of their 4x4 every time they have to unexpectedly abseil into a cavern or drag a lake. Even time doesn't move consistently with episodes set at Christmas, then Valentines Day, then Halloween back to back but with no indication that any actual time has passed. Not only does Magwilde destroy almost every historical artifact her team uncovers, but she compares Stonehenge unfavourably to the Colosseum as though history is a competition, uses centuries if not millennia old weapons for self defence and casually tosses ancient artefacts around like they mean nothing. Watch five minutes of Bonekickers and it is painfully obvious that neither she nor the writers know anything about history. At all. Watch ten minutes and your brain will leak out through your ears, and that's a scientific fact.
Kate Taylor has a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing and an MRes in Creative Writing. Her nonfiction, reviews and other articles have appeared on Cuckoo Review and Mookychick as well as WhatCulture. Her fiction has been published in Luna Station Quarterly, Eternal Haunted Summer and in anthologies by Paizo and Northumbria University Press. She is 23 and lives in the North of England.
