It doesn't appear in the transcript -- no episode title is mentioned. So I'll use a custom title. Based on our earlier discussion I'm going with Druids, Romans and a Scaffolding Clamp as it's Lance's best line and the perfect encapsulation of the episode. Here's the full description:
Druids, Romans and a Scaffolding Clamp The Detectorists on the Detectorists | Series 3, Episode 1
Series three of the BAFTA-winning BBC comedy drama Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, opens not in a field but in a glass tower above London. A solar farm pitch is being made in a boardroom at the Shard, complete with a biscuit joke that doesn't land, and for a moment you could be forgiven for thinking you've pressed the wrong button entirely. Then a drone sweeps over the Essex countryside, finds a yellow TR7 parked at the edge of a field, and everything is exactly as it should be. We're back in Dainsbury. Two years have passed since we left.
In this episode, host Katie and guest Ross Carpenter (@detectorosst) settle into what is immediately a series with more weight to carry than its predecessors. Andy and Becky are living at Veronica's, saving for a deposit, and Andy has taken up vaping so he can stand alone in the garden for ten minutes of an evening. Lance has his daughter Kate installed in his flat, sleeping until quarter to one and cutting the cheese at the wrong angle. Both men tell each other everything is fine. Neither of them means it.
The episode's best line arrives early, when Lance pulls a scaffolding clamp from the ground and rather than complaint, offers something closer to philosophy. Druids walked this land. Romans. Saxons. And then he holds up the clamp. It is the thesis of the whole series in a single gesture, and Ross and Katie spend some time with it, as well as with the cheese scene that follows, which manages to say everything about Lance and cohabitation without a word of direct explanation.
Away from the domestic arrangements, Andy is on a dig with a new employer, played by Tim Key, whose motives for directing the trench work are genuinely difficult to read. The BWDC meeting brings the solar farm threat into sharp focus for the whole group, and a throwaway moment with a prison badge from HMP Chelmsford unravels thirty years of a widow's assumptions about her late husband's time in Colombia. Russell and Hugh remain magnificently themselves throughout.
The episode closes with the discovery of a hawking whistle -- a bronze falconer's call, centuries old and still working -- and then the camera pulls back through time. A Roman burial in a Dainsbury field. A pot of gold coins placed in the ground. Magpies, a plough, the coins scattered into the soil. And finally Andy and Lance, walking directly over the spot with their detectors over their shoulders, heading to the pub. Ross notes that it would only have been modern agricultural machinery deep enough to bring those coins close to the surface, and the discussion that follows is exactly the kind of exchange this show inspires in people who actually swing a coil for a living.
Featuring: Andy (Mackenzie Crook), Lance (Toby Jones), Becky (Rachel Stirling), Veronica (Diana Rigg), Tim Key as himself.
Find Ross at @detectorosst on Instagram. For more metal detecting chat, interviews, and the history behind the finds, follow Katie and the Detecting History Podcast on Instagram and YouTube at @detectinghistorychannel, and listen on all major podcast platforms. Shop at Regton and use promo code DHPODCAST for 10% off selected items at checkout.