Vikings, BBC Two, review - Telegraph History was best when things were simple, wasn't it? When I was 12 the concepts of relativism, revisionism, grey areas and flagrant bias were unknown to me. Simplicity was bliss: the Dark Ages were nice and dark, Henry VIII was a fat guy with a commitment issue and the peasants, to a man, were revolting. As for the Vikings? They were marauding savages in longboats and horned helmets who made being civilised and British look boring. Of course, the real history of the Vikings is a little more nuanced than that and it was the task of Vikings (BBC Two) to let me down gently. My jejune mythologising, compelling as it may be, bears little resemblance to the reality, explained presenter Neil Oliver. For a start, Vikings never actually wore horned helmets (devastating news for the entire stag party sector). And even more disappointingly, they weren't blood-crazed lunatics. Instead, as Oliver detailed, they were adventurers without equal, maritime innovators, traders and entrepreneurs of boundless ambition. The simple fact was that there was a limit to how much good land there was in Norway: who could blame them for wanting a bit of prime British real estate? This first episode of three was a Viking prehistory, showing how the lack of Roman influence made Scandinavians so different from those living in the rest of Europe. They worshipped different gods and the ones they chose were, frankly, cooler. Thor, for example, really did have a mighty hammer and a girdle of power, which makes our Christian God with his beard and his divine mercy look distinctly under-equipped. What's more, Norsemen believed that your reputation was much more important than any spurious notion of an afterlife. Which meant being a fearless combatant on the battlefield, and ideally getting yourself killed in the process - thus ensuring yourself glory on Earth - was your main aim. With Thor and Odin as their gods you can see why they turned York into Yorvik with such contemptuous ease in the 9th century. This was a thorough grounding in how a culture that is geographically so close to ours could have become so different. Unfortunately, while separating myth from reality is good history, in this case it made for dull television. Normally, I would be the first to criticise Disneyfied historical re-enactments with actors in pelts as superfluous. But in this instance, I would have happily taken a portentous voice-over and some overblown CGI. As Oliver slept in a sheepskin under the stars (in order to illustrate how Vikings slept in sheepskins under the stars); or as he boarded yet another train; or as he got hugely overexcited about another Bronze Age artefact that to this philistine looked like a small cat poo; the problem went from an itch to an ache. And the ache was that archaeology does not make for great TV (with deepest apologies to a decade of Time Team). Nothing moves, and television needs movement or it might as well be a photo album that accompanies a radio programme.