On the screen there’s a couple of thugs, wearing T-shirts with an ancient Knights Templar emblem, using medieval swords to attack Muslims. There’s an oleaginous religious cult leader who is oddly reminiscent of Raef from The Apprentice. A nurse who gets a splinter in her finger and seems to acquire miraculous powers. And a dovecote filled with ancient crucifixes from the time of Christ.

It’s enough to make any discerning viewer rub their eyes in disbelief. Or even an undiscerning viewer, come to that. And it prompts a rather unlikely question: can this really be the long-awaited, much-hyped new series from the creators of Life on Mars? Really?

Of course, one of the after-effects of creating a ground-breaking, trend-setting, award-winning, critically acclaimed hit series such as Life on Mars is that everyone expects the rest of your work to be equally ground-breaking.

This is a reaction that Ashley Pharoah, a co-writer, is well aware of.

“If we go into a meeting now we always have Life of Mars behind us,” he comments. “We had done lots of stuff before that, but the change is that there is now an expectation that our new stuff is going to be really, really good.”

The new stuff is Bonekickers, a six-part series starting on BBC One next week and set in the unlikely world of archaeology. After the success of Life on Mars and its follow-up, Ashes to Ashes, Pharoah and co-writer Matthew Graham formed their own production company. Bonekickers is the first result.

It is a drama series that, like its predecessors, moves around in time and has a puzzle running through it. But it is a long, long way from Life on Mars. “This is more of an adventure series,” Pharoah says. “That was our starting place – a sort of English Indiana Jones was what we were thinking about.”

There is certainly a man in a broad-brimmed hat, but far from being an all-action hero, he is Gregory Parton, a widely read academic with a love of pubs. Played by Hugh Bonneville, Parton is known as “Dolly” to his friends – or “Google with a beer belly”.

He is one of four archaeologists at the centre of Bonekickers. Their leader is a sharp-tongued Scot, Gillian Magwilde (Julie Graham); her right-hand man is the cool heart-throb Ben Ergha (Adrian Lester); and the novice intern – whose job is to ask the questions a viewer might ask – is Viv Davis (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Apart from Bonneville’s character, a less convincing group of academics it would be hard to imagine. They seem more like a bunch of actors who have strayed on to an archaeological site on their day off.

The series follows the team as they unearth discoveries and each week get drawn into big historical stories, such as the slave trade, the First World War and the mystery of the True Cross on which Jesus died.

“We love the idea that under a school playground or an NHS Direct building there could be a Roman temple. History as everyday is what we like,” says Pharoah. “But it is how the past affects Britain that is interesting dramatically.”

This means that the series takes the historical stories and draws parallels with the present day. Which is why, in episode one, we have thugs who apparently think they are continuing the work of the 14th-century Knights Templar, “the Church’s SAS troops”, by terrorising Muslims. This is probably supposed to be sinister, but, frankly, they are so preposterous it is hard not to laugh out loud.

However, beyond the individual episodes, Bonekickers has an overarching plot that falls into place week by week. Pharoah says: “Each episode might seem a bit dislocated from the one before and the one afterwards but there is an archaeological theme that, at the end, will all be revealed.”

It is a tease to keep viewers guessing. “Audiences are very sophisticated now, they enjoy putting puzzles together. That’s what Life on Mars was really, a puzzle. And there is definitely that aspect to Bonekickers.”

There are other elements: a bit of Doctor Who fantasy, hints of a Da Vinci Code riddle and even elements of CSI,when the team head into their laboratory for a spot of carbon-dating. Much of the series is set in and around Bath, close to where both the writers live. “Because we are from the SouthWest we really wanted to do a show there. That was very important to us. And you can point a camera at anywhere in Bath, and it’s beautiful.”

Did the writers set up their own production company, Monastic, to get more control? “We were just getting a bit frustrated,” Pharoah says. “We’d like some say in casting, who’s going to direct our stuff, how it looks.

“It’s been a bit of a shock to the system. As a writer you have a lovely life – getting up late and starting at 10.

Now I get up at 7, or 6 sometimes, and there’s a lot more I have to do, like meetings and edits.”

It’s a shame to have to say this, but things might not seem quite so exciting when the reviews of Bonekickers come out next week. Life on Marsit ain’t. This one stretches credibility past the point of no return.

Which prompts the thought that, despite what Pharoah says, perhaps writers aren’t always the best people to produce their own work. Even the best may sometimes need outside controls and restraints – to save us from ludicrous thugs in Knights Templar T-shirts and a dovecote filled with ancient crucifixes.

Bonekickers, Tues, BBC One, 9pm

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