Archaeaologist Max Adams has a pretty uncompromising view of TV history programmes - and that's one reason why he's presenting his own.

Archaeologist and historian Max Adams doesn't own a television set, but that doesn't stop him having strong views on the current boom in history programmes on the box - or fronting his own shows.

The latest has been made for The Hothouse, the Tyne Tees series of pilot dramas and documentaries which, it's hoped, will become series.

"I don't have a TV, but I've watched it. If I did have one, I'd watch all the time. But I do have a view of what I would like to see on TV," he says.

In Heroes Of The Revolution, the plain-speaking Adams says that the history books have got it wrong as he names the people who were the real inventors and heroes of the industrial North.

They include John Steel, a one-legged break boy, who built the North-East's first locomotive long before Puffing Billy and The Rocket. He also claims that Sir Humphrey Davy's name has become attached to the miner's lamp, although William Martin of Wallsend designed a much better one. And then there were the American spies who came to the North-East in the 19th century to steal the region's industrial secrets.

This, he says, is the Max Adams view of history. "I was an archaeologist for 25 years and in archaeology there aren't any famous people," he says. "You're only looking at ordinary people because they're the people who leave the rubbish behind."

The current trend for TV history does not, you gain the impression, meet entirely with the approval of the Gateshead-based history man. "I've always been slightly anti the Simon Schama view. It's perfectly valid but doesn't interest me," he says.

Based in the North-East for the past decade, he believes the real people who built this region have been forgotten. "It's not that I want to write famous people out of history," he insists. "George Stephenson did what he did. I don't want to do them down and say they're nothing.

"There are a lot of people we don't know about, who made the North-East the centre of the world for a while. Because we're so used to hearing about the decline of industry, we don't realise that for 100 years the area was the most productive place on the planet, not just for industry but for agriculture."

Adams, who has featured as The Landscape Detective in Tyne Tees Television news programmes, jumped at the chance to present his own series. His academic background gives him authority, while he describes his presenting style as ironic and offbeat.

"If something makes me passionate, all I hope is to convey the interest I feel on stories you get by lifting up a rock and seeing what's underneath," he says.

"They're all stories that turn me on. You come across little stories in the library and think, 'why doesn't anyone know about them?'.

"If I can't make them fun and interesting I shouldn't be doing it. I'm not someone who spends ten years writing a PhD. All I can say is, 'this is the past, and if you like it, fine, and if you don't, OK'."

Heroes Of The Revolution doesn't feature the reconstructions and people dressed up in period costume favoured by other history programmes. "We don't show a single picture of a person. It's irrelevant to us. It's the story that matters. We use locations to trigger people's thoughts about the past," he says.

Adams knew he wanted to be an archaeologist from the age of nine. He stopped doing it because it didn't live up to his hopes, and because he disapproved of the way the past is dealt with by academics.

So he says that Channel 4's Time Team is "great television but disastrous archaeology", equating it to an open heart surgeon being asked to perform a tricky operation in just an hour.

He doesn't see himself competing with others presenting TV history shows. "I just do what I do and, if it's different to everyone else, that's fine. I'm only going to do what I want to do, when I want to do it. If that's not flavour of the month, it won't get taken up."

What he does have is a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship to write a book and make a TV documentary about North-East hero Lord Collingwood, who assumed command of the British fleet at Trafalgar after Nelson's death.

"He was Nelson's best friend and yet many people haven't heard of him," he says. "I guess I'm one of those people who, like the underdog and eccentrics, are almost always unknown.".

* Heroes Of The Revolution: Tuesday, Tyne Tees Television, 10.30pm.

Published: 26/07/2003