This is a film about the excavations at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, of what turned out to be Anglo Saxon burial mounds. The excavations were initially done by Basil Brown, a local "amateur" "excavator".
I was attracted to this one as it's set near where I grew up, and also because we had seen a BBC video about the dialect coach who helped Ralph Fiennes with his Suffolk accent. The dialect coach is from Sudbury, and has the sort of accent I heard growing up. I was impressed that Ralph Fiennes wanted to learn the accent and dialect, and that the coach had an input into the script to make it more authentic. I was also in complete agreement with the dialect coach's comments about how inauthentic East Anglian accents in television drama and films usually are! (1)
One good recent Suffolk accent in a film was, I thought, that of Paul Whitehouse in the 2019 Armando Ianucci adaption of David Copperfield. And another is Mr Fiennes (although my mother knew he was actually born in Suffolk, and although he moved away at a very young age, that might have influenced his desire to get it right), and the actors playing his wife and some of the housekeeping staff in the Big House whose grounds contain the Sutton Hoo burial mounds.
Other things that struck me were, first, that Basil Brown is entirely self educated. He was not a "trained" archaeologist. But he had a house full of books, and had himself written a book for laypeople about observing the skies.
Second, the attitude of the museum staff from Ipswich (about 15 miles away), who felt entitled to be involved, even though the landowner wanted Brown to do it. Would they have felt entitled if the landowner had been a man? And once Brown and his assistants had started to find things, the attitude of the British Museum, who took over the excavations. Brown walked away, but was persuaded by his wife to return. He was proved right about how old everything was - he was sure it was Anglo Saxon, but the British Museum were sure it was Viking, although they changed their minds when they saw the evidence.
As I write the film is on a streaming service. That may change, of course, if you are reading this in the future.
Here are some places to find out more:
Suffolk Record Office and Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service has Basil Brown's archives. The catalogue, and a bit more about the archive, is on this page.
The story of Brown's work and what happened to the finds is told in an article in the East Anglian Daily Times and there is an interview with Ralph Fiennes in another article from the EADT.
The British Museum blog compares the film with what they know of the excavations.
(1) It was a frequent topic of conversation when I was growing up, how bad the East Anglian accents on the telly were. The big problem is that they were always made "rhotic" - that is, pronouncing the "r" at the end of words like "river" or before consonants like in the word "word". Scottish accents, and those from Somerset, to name two, are rhotic. Suffolk and Norfolk accents definitely are not.
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