WHISPERING SMITH: Still time for Tony’s team to seek out our relics

Yet another garden centre and restaurant? Another food retailer when we have Tesco at one end and Asda at the other, with Morrisons and a new super-sized Sainsbury’s in between? LA certainly does not need it with our Waitrose, Lidl, Iceland and Sainsbury’s stores already in town.

It may bring new jobs, but how many existing jobs will the heavyweight competition cost? The main impact would be, I imagine, on Rustington, an excellent, highly-regarded and compact shopping centre already under threat from the south coast superstore invasion. No, for many reasons Arun needs to think very carefully on this one and not just grab at short-term and moneymaking gains.

THAT old saw, that bad news travels swiftly, isn’t really true. For instance, I have only just heard that Channel 4’s long-running archaeological show Time Team which is, at various times, exciting and at others soporific, has been cancelled.

It first aired in 1994 and there are a few more episodes to be shown before it vanishes. Who could forget Phil Harding and his cowboy hat filled with delight at finding a piece of worked flint the size of a fingernail, Tony Robinson rushing hither and thither in an effort to give urgency to the three-day dig or consultant Mick Aston’s often windswept and worried look?

Aston left before the show was axed, thinking it had been “dumbed down” and that there was “a lot less archaeological content and a lot more pratting about”, referring, I guess to the re-enactment side of things, with Harding often playing the clown.

Was the team ever in our area? Yes, at Blackpatch on the Downs above Long Furlong, to reassess the work of amateur archaeologist John Pull, whose discovery of a prehistoric site was rather ignored and later bulldozed. Also at Alfoldean near Slinfold, a little way up the River Arun, to explore the site of a Roman settlement.

On a sad note, I always believed my two young children enjoyed the show but in later years they admitted they watched it only to please me. Deceitful little beggars! The team ought to have returned to LA one more time, as there are still a few old fossils around here that would bear closer examination!