it was ultimately quite a gentle show and managed to do it without feeling like some contrived 'new sincerity' sort of thing.
That was what I was trying to get at when I said it avoided sentimentality.
I think what I liked most about it was the mood and sense of community.
Me too. And in a sense, it felt that the detectoring was almost like a mcguffin - I'm not sure you can use mcguffin in that sense strictly, but what I mean is, they could have been trainspotters or I guess birdwatchers - really any kind of uncool hobby that might be perceived as attracting eccentric countryside fringe types. Of course, by using detectoring they were able to tie in things about local history and so on, so it wasn't totally arbitrary, but I do think it was secondary in importance by a long way to the relationships between the eccentric characters who were linked by their treasure hunting.
When I went to visit my girlfriend's family in Chelyabinsk in, er, probably spring I think, I remember her brother drawing attention to a load of people who were fishing on the river ice. For a certain period it is strong enough that one can stand on it, in fact, put a teepee or something there, but at the same time you can drill through the ice and fish through it. And there are groups of men who do it every year, maybe camp out there for a few days with their buddies. If Dima is to be believed the fish aren't especially tasty and they are filled with bones that make it a lot of effort to eat, the point isn't fishing, it's getting away from the family and meeting up with your mates, passing vodka around in the great outdoors. And that's totally the same thing.
That's why I found something a little spiteful in the Lebowitz quote above, it's just people doing their thing. Most people scouring the beach for treasure aren't desperately trying to get rich, they're just hobbyists of one sort, a hobby that doesn't meet the approval of the intellectual elite cos it's outside and it doesn't involve books.
That final episode with everyone in the field together was such a satisfying way to end it
It seems we are on exactly the same wavelength here cos I remember thinking that that was a beautiful scene too. I remember feeling it was in some sense a very British scene that probably was idealised and even nostalgic but in a way that was inclusive and kind. Maybe I was reading too much into it but at the time, I read it as a riposte to Brexit in the way it showed that you could celebrate a nostalgic view of Britain positively instead of in the small-minded negative way of Brexiteers that saw a zero sum game in which things could only be raised up by pushing something else down....