Inside Alice Roberts’ life after BBC Digging for | UK News

Fans of BBC‘s Digging For Britain have been left disillusioned when long standing host Professor Alice Roberts announced in February she was stepping down from the a standard archaeology sequence after 15 years. In her assertion she said: “All good things come to an end. I’m kind of sad and melancholy about this but at the same time it’s the right time…it’s not the end of archaeology on TV for me. I’m looking at fresh new exciting ways of doing that. But it is the end of Digging For Britain for me.”

The organic anthropologist, creator, and broadcaster (and The Detectorists visitor star) is still extraordinarily busy though. Alongside her educational commitments she is also getting set to head out on a 15 date tour around the UK in November. Called from Cell to Civilisation the blurb guarantees to, “…take you on a journey through 4 billion years of evolution in one evening, blending evolutionary biology, genetics and archaeology and using theatrical sound, light and imagination to bring the science to life in a way that you’ve never seen before.”

It might have all been very different as despite her glittering showbiz profession Alice never wished to be well-known and was an educational teenager who initially deliberate to be a medical doctor – a surgeon in fact.

“When I was 11, I knew I wanted to be a medical doctor. So by 16 I was on that course of learning,” she told the Big Issue in 2023. However she explained she was sidetracked into academia which led to her current profession. “I didn’t stay in medicine and sometimes that’s a sort of regret for me… I did what I anticipated would be six months at the University of Bristol teaching anatomy. But that turned into 11 years.”

She grew to become hooked on the work and the “massive collection of medieval bones” that are saved in the basement of Bristol Royal Infirmary. This would lead to work on the archaeology TV show, Time Team, initially as a bone professional and later as a presenter.

Other TV jobs adopted on exhibits such as Coast, Britain’s Most Historic Towns, Extreme Archaeology, Britain’s Biggest Dig, The Day The Dinosaurs Died, Food Detectives, Origins Of Us, and Fortress Britain, among many others. Alongside her presenting work she is also a best promoting creator of books such as Antatomical Oddities, Buried, Ancestors, and The Incredible Unlikeliness Of Being.

While her skilled life appears to be working easily her personal life has proved far more erratic. A really public atheist she was introduced up in an intensely non secular household from which she would grow to be estranged. In 2018 her mom Wendy wrote to The Sunday Times claiming she was “embarrassed” and “upset” by a marketing campaign by her daughter to withdraw public funding for religion colleges. Alice subsequently told the publication she was unhappy about her mom’s public declaration.

During an look on Radio 4’s All in the Mind she mentioned why she did not attend her mom’s funeral. “I’d almost thought, ‘Well, I shouldn’t be feeling sad, because I instigated the separation.’ But the sadness is, again, about a relationship that I never really had,” she explained.

In a 2024 interview with The Times she confessed: “I’ve been completely estranged from them for many years.” she expanded additional admitting: “It’s very difficult, because it’s very difficult to decide to become estranged. But I think that it’s allowed me to recognise, really recognise, the importance of other relationships. I have relationships in the wider family that have actually always been important and I’m very lucky in that respect. My cousin is like a sister. We are very, very close indeed — and my aunt. My aunt has always been an amazing person in my life and a huge source of emotional support and warmth and love.”

She also has a joyful home life to fall back on. Since 2009 she has been married to fellow archaeologist David Stevens, who she met in Cardiff in 1995 when she was a medical scholar and he was an archaeology scholar. The couple have two youngsters, a daughter born in 2010 and a son born in 2013.