The show itself is pretty standard 'reality television' where the same scenes are repeated over and over, with cutaways to the characters gesticulating wildly with stilted commentary. There's some pretty exploitative use of locals which didn't sit well with me too.
The subject covers some interesting history - exhausted and abandoned diamond mines in India, in an area about to be flooded with a huge dam - which spurred me on to do some googling about the history of the area (which was very interesting and could really have been covered in the show itself), and then onto the people involved in the show (interesting, in a different way)
Turns out, the main guy, Sam Speerstra, is not a treasure hunter at all - but is a self-proclaimed guru called Shyamsundar das, who ran up a huge debt of his local temples money buying fake rubies, and getting himself a replacement liver in dubious circumstances.
The premise that they are using his life savings, and he has 30 years experience, are simply fabricated. There are too many convenient co-incidences (stumbling across the abandoned mines no- one has seen for 300 years, just out driving, for example) but it's to be expected there would be some dramatisation, it is reality TV after all.
The team he has in seem a bit more credible (the geologist Steve Newbery appears to be legit, at least) but the show itself is mainly staged - with the "million dollar diamond" found right at the end an obvious hoax - there's no actual records of this diamond ever existing, and the team really struggle to even be convincing with their acting on this.
The subject covers some interesting history - exhausted and abandoned diamond mines in India, in an area about to be flooded with a huge dam - which spurred me on to do some googling about the history of the area (which was very interesting and could really have been covered in the show itself), and then onto the people involved in the show (interesting, in a different way)
Turns out, the main guy, Sam Speerstra, is not a treasure hunter at all - but is a self-proclaimed guru called Shyamsundar das, who ran up a huge debt of his local temples money buying fake rubies, and getting himself a replacement liver in dubious circumstances.
The premise that they are using his life savings, and he has 30 years experience, are simply fabricated. There are too many convenient co-incidences (stumbling across the abandoned mines no- one has seen for 300 years, just out driving, for example) but it's to be expected there would be some dramatisation, it is reality TV after all.
The team he has in seem a bit more credible (the geologist Steve Newbery appears to be legit, at least) but the show itself is mainly staged - with the "million dollar diamond" found right at the end an obvious hoax - there's no actual records of this diamond ever existing, and the team really struggle to even be convincing with their acting on this.
