On Sunday BBC Scotland's biggest, most expensive venture begins - the landmark, multimedia series Scotland's History. For £2million plus - the price of but a few jokes from Jonathan Ross - the ten-part, two-year initiative sweeps 2,000 years of history, bringing a fresh perspective to what we think we all know.

It promises much. And the man upon whom its success depends is the amiable, long-haired archaeologist turned presenter Neil Oliver, one of those TV faces who can apparently do no wrong.

Two Men in a Trench, The History Detectives, The Face of Britain, Coast and now this. Even an embarrassing blog entry on Google, shouting: “Does anyone else find this guy as scrumptious as I do? Phwooar!”

Not bad for a 41-year-old who might - if an editor of one of the Scottish newspapers, for whom he freelanced in the mid-1990s, had offered him a job - have become merely a journeyman journalist.

In fact his whole career happened by serendipity. He studied archaeology at Glasgow University, but says he could never have made a career out of it. “I'm not an academic. I was just a digger, I liked digging holes. But I realised I was going to be 40 one day and wake up arthritic and poor, so my friend Tony Pollard [now director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at Glasgow University] and I started a project for fun on the Zulu battlements.”

The two former university flat-mates, who had always had a boyish craze for the film Zulu, started their scheme in 1998. Until then, Oliver had been reporting for a range of newspapers, from The Sun to The Scotsman, hoping that someone would offer him a job.

No one did. But along the way, Oliver and Pollard's Rourke's Drift adventure came to the attention of Pat Llewellyn, from Optomen TV, creator of Two Fat Ladies, The Naked Chef and Gordon Ramsay, who had development money for a new project and asked the two to make a series on British battlements.

“What telly is good at is finding people who are good at being interested in something. They saw we were excited about Michael Caine and the Zulus,” Oliver said.

Two Men in a Trench aired in 2002 on BBC2 and his gift for communication, plus his infectious enthusiasm and the fact he's easy on the eye have ensured that Oliver has not been out of work since.

His approach, he says, is as a storyteller. “I'm an archaeologist and I've come across a lot of history but I've never had a lecturing style. It's more, ‘I've heard something fascinating and let me tell you about it'. That's the way I talk. And if I sound excited about something, it's because I just found out myself.”

Coast, which began in 2005, made him a star. “When we were making it, I didn't realise it would be as popular as it was, but we're filming series four and five now.”

Its secret, he says, was that sense of learning about a foreign country - although in Britain the coast is never more than a few miles away. “People's response is: ‘I had no idea.' It's that exploration feel. The beauty of it is that it's Britain, you can get there on the bus.”

In many ways, Scotland's History mirrors the concept of Coast: that sense of lifting the veil on the familiar. It is public service broadcasting with bells and whistles on, but it is also a fresh, alluring story.

The series, which starts on BBC One Scotland with a network screening on BBC2 to follow, is being co-produced with the Open University and is linked with radio, the internet, an interactive game, audio walks, concerts and events going through to late next year. Oliver has written a book to accompany the series, although the script was audited by historians.

“We are going into areas even a lot of historians don't know,” he said. “It's history with a small ‘h'. You can't have THE history of Scotland, it's A history and we think it's the best.”

To illustrate that sense of changed perspective, he described how the crew went to Finlaggan, on Islay, to film the story of the head-to-head rivalry between the MacDonalds and the Stuarts. “You talk to people, you talk to Gaelic speakers, you do realise there's another country up there that's the other half of Scotland.”

Oliver said that he wanted to dispel the myths that have “cursed” Scotland's past and uncover the real characters and events that have shaped its history.

“The series begins with the birth of Scotland, a birth that was far from inevitable. For centuries, our mountains and lochs were home to a patchwork of disparate peoples. So how was it that this loose confederation of tribes in the northern third of Britain, came together to create a kingdom with its own culture and identity?

“Scotland is my country. The story of this place - and the people who've lived here during the last 10,000 years or so - means more to me than any other. For as long as I can remember I've wanted to understand more about how we got to where we are today.”

When not filming, he lives an unstarry life in Scotland, changing nappies on a six-month-old baby and a toddler. His eldest child is five. He has been with his partner, Trudi, since 1986, when, at the Societies Fair at Glasgow University, she was a fresher and he was president of the Archaeology Society.

“I saw her coming in the room and I had the perfect excuse to approach her and say, ‘Do you want to join the Archaeology Society?'”

Like the rest of Britain, it seems, she couldn't resist his charms.

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