Oliver's television debut came in 2002 with BBC Two's Two Men in a Trench, which featured Oliver and close friend, Tony Pollard, visiting historic British battlefields and recreating the battle situation using state of the art archaeological techniques. In addition to the TV series, Oliver co-wrote the two accompanying books.

In 2005, he wrote a tie-in book for the Channel 4 documentary, Not Forgotten which starred Ian Hislop. Oliver then became the archaeological and social history expert on Coast, then in the next series he replaced Nicholas Crane as the show's main presenter and remained as such for the third and fourth series.

2006 saw Oliver appear in two more documentary series, Channel 4's The Face of Britain and BBC Two's The Top Ten. As well as this, in August 2006 he appeared on the special "Big Royal Dig" edition of Channel 4's Time Team, in which he presented a dig at Holyrood Palace.

Oliver was a contributor to BBC One's The One Show in the summer of 2007. That year he also appeared as one of the presenters of BBC Two series The History Detectives.

Oliver's latest series A History of Scotland began airing on 9 November 2008 on BBC One Scotland and was broadcast throughout the UK in 2009. The series also has links to radio, online and Open University materials. Like Coast, the programme is a co-production of the BBC and Open University.

On 23 March 2009, Neil Oliver presented a programme on Cleopatra on BBC One.

He lives in Stirling with his wife Trudi and children Evie, Archie and Teddy.