Tony Robinson

“I hate the word educational! I mean, 'Downton Abbey' is educational in that you come away from it knowing so much more about that period than when the show started, but you don't come away t...”

“As a child actor, you haven't been allowed to be yourself for most of your life; you've been constrained by the demands of your job, your parents, directors. A fictional or amplified version...”

“A chap was digging a pond for his carp in the garden behind his terraced house in the small town of Raunds, when he unearthed remains of an Anglo-Saxon body. Because he'd seen 'Time Team', h...”

“I can't see much purpose in archaeology unless you can find out the narrative about that place, or even realise that nobody actually knows what the narrative was.”

“I've never really seen archaeology as being any different from history. What I love are the stories of human beings that were around 1,000 years ago and how they lived - archaeology is anoth...”

“There are huge pluses in Scottish archaeology that you simply don't get elsewhere. Partly that's to do with the tragedy of the clearances, and that so much of the landscape has been owned by...”

“I was about 40 when I got a glimmer of the wonders archaeology can offer, and I want kids to be able to have that for their whole lives, not just in middle-age.”

“Ancient barrows get cleared away. Legislation is pretty much 19th century. Global warming means there is an awful lot of erosion, exposing new archaeology, there is not the funding around to...”

“As anyone who has watched Time Team will know, the context is all in archaeology.”

“Virtually all my conscious life I had been involved in theatre - I had been a child actor - but as a young man who had experienced the 1960s, British theatre seemed remote from my aspiration...”

“I love the Pembroke coastal path. Whenever I've been there, it's been sunny, but slightly bracing. So you're happy to keep walking, but you'll get a bit of a tan. The wildflowers and the ins...”

“Both my parents developed dementia in their old age. Everyone I know whose parents had dementia feel that they didn't deal with it very well.”

“Time Team' is by definition very static. Once you're in that field and you've dug your trenches, that's it.”

“I didn't have much of a formal education myself.”

“A naughty part of me thinks, how come Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and Tim McInnerny have all done really good parts in a film, whereas I've only ever done bits and bobs? Before I die, wouldn't...”

“If I go to posh parties, I hover by the kitchen so I can get as many nice canapes as possible.”

“It's not that I think every late 19th-century man with a beard who saw something shimmering in front of him was actually seeing his dead aunty. What I'm saying is: lighten up. This isn't wei...”

“A lot of sitcoms don't last more than four series. You could say it's mystic.”

“For a long time, the paranormal was a legitimate area of explanation for quite a lot of people.”

“The founding of Graeae by disabled actors was a huge political statement that you forgot at your peril.”