The Dig: Part 1

The story opens on a rainy night in the Yorkshire village of Strenton, where a stranger arrives. Daggers are drawn in the village by the arrival of a planned bypass, and the road leads to murder when a body is found by an archaeological team digging in its path. The BBC's own line for the night is shorter: a body is found in a village at war over a new bypass.

The dig is a university team led by Dr Janet Rix, excavating the route before the road builders arrive because she believes the site holds the burial of Queen Cartimandua. What the team uncovers is a body buried only about six months earlier. The site becomes a crime scene and is closed to both the archaeologists and the builders, which turns an argument about the road into a physical confrontation: after a row in the local pub the workmen wreck the site, set fire to the archaeological equipment, attack the volunteers and use a JCB to crush the archaeologists' vehicle.

Surveying the wreckage the next morning, the police find the body of one of the workmen, known as Tarzan, bludgeoned to death in his caravan. DNA puts Clive Jacobs, a convicted murderer only recently released from the sentence Dalziel himself secured, at the scene. Jacobs insists he is innocent, and the story's pressure on Dalziel is that his first major conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice. Pascoe's investigation uncovers a network involving a crooked councillor, a bent surveyor and the workmen. Dalziel's attention goes elsewhere, because he is taken with the pathologist working on the case, Dr Eleanor Brown. The aggregator synopsis for this part adds that the police initially assume Dr Rix or her colleagues are responsible for Tarzan's death, and that the team come to suspect more than one killer is at work.

No published source consulted describes the interviews in the village or the forensic examination of the buried body, and the resolution is left to the second night. The episode's most interesting element is the position it puts Dalziel in, because the man whose DNA is at the scene is the man he put away, and the story is arranged so that his certainty about Jacobs is the thing the evidence has to confirm or break.

The bypass gives the series a conflict it has not used before, since the village is divided over a road and the division produces a wrecked dig, a burnt vehicle and a dead workman before any of it is properly investigated. The archaeology strand supplies the story's central image, with a team looking for a queen's burial and finding a body six months old instead, and the site being closed to both parties turns a planning dispute into a confrontation the police have to police.