Neil Oliver is draped languidly over a sofa in Glasgow’s Millennium Hotel. He is fully clothed and only doing the photographer’s bidding, but it is easy to see why the presenter of the hit series Coast has been dubbed the Naked Historian.

It’s not just a surname he shares with television’s sexiest chef. Both were “discovered” by screen queen Pat Llewellyn, of Optomen Television, and both exude that unquantifiable essence that can be detected only through the lens of a camera.

It’s partly enthusiasm, partly a lack of self-consciousness and partly hair. You could bet your last tub of Brylcreem that a bald Jamie Oliver, Alan Titchmarsh or Gordon Ramsay would be unable to command their multi-million-pound fees. Neil Oliver’s Jacobite locks — stereotypical among his fellow archeologists — give him an instant recognition factor on television.

“I’ve always looked like this,” he says while toying with a purple hair bobble on his wrist (he wears a ponytail when shaving). “I’ve stayed with this look through good times and bad. You are always the object of a bit of abuse.”

The director of Coast could be forgiven a touch of cursing. To get the sound right Oliver must stand with his back to the wind. “It’s terrible,” he says. “There are constant cries of: ‘Cut. Do that again without the hair in your mouth.’”

Doing it again has become a theme for Oliver, who graduated with a 2:1 in archeology from Glasgow University in 1988. Until recently he was a jobbing freelance archeologist — £30 a week and all the mud you can eat. Then he and his colleague Dr Tony Pollard were spotted by Llewellyn at a conference on the Zulu Wars and the series Two Men in a Trench was born.

That was five years ago. He can currently be seen on primetime terrestrial television most evenings. In addition to Coast, he has muscled in on the competitive field of televisual history and in February will present a new show for Channel 4 called The Face of Britain, a blend of archeology and genetics. Radio 4 has just sent him to walk the line of the old Iron Curtain and he is currently filming a third series of Coast, which will be broadcast in March.

It is surprising he has found time to present Scotland’s History: The Top Ten. The new BBC series panders to an insatiable appetite for lists and pitches a disparate procession of people, places and events — each championed by different academics — and all linked together by Oliver.

The series culminates in a one-hour special on St Andrew’s night when a group of historians led by Professor Tom Devine, the Sir William Fraser Chair of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh, will pit James Clerk Maxwell against Robert Burns, slavery against football, and Mary Queen of Scots against her father, to come up with their definitive top 10. The public will vote for an alternative list via the website.

The awkward-limbed, swivel-eyed academics are the perfect foil for Oliver’s jaunty approach and his tone is unashamedly populist. “The opinion of the person outside Greggs in Arbroath as to what is Scotland’s most important historical event is just as relevant as the opinion of Tom Devine,” he says.

It’s not a view one would care to extend to other specialisms — brain surgery, say, or architecture — but it chimes with the anti-elitist zeitgeist blowing through Scottish academia. Oliver denies his democratisation of history champions ignorance.

“It’s about making people remember their own history,” he says. “I’ve been surprised by the number of people who, when asked to name the most important person in Scottish history, have said: ‘My gran — because she epitomised what is great about Scotland.’ A woman from poor circumstances who raises eight kids and makes something from nothing typifies the Scottish character. For most people their gran is a more formative person in their history than William Wallace.”

It’s an attitude that would make David Starkey’s hair stand on end. It makes academics vacillate between despair and envy. “I’m not an academic historian,” says Oliver. “I’m an archeologist. I came into the programme to represent the popular vote and I’m interested in what people think about the past.”

Times Recommends

• Milk: do we need a dairy godmother?
• DIY: the women doing it for themselves
• First double portrait of Princes unveiled