Quotes from Tony Robinson

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 so few people that didn't want it messed around with.

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

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

I believe that any politician has to be constantly challenged. It is very easy for the rest of us to seduced into thinking they're smarter than us, or that they are privy to more information.

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 aspirations in life - theatre was still a posh thing, a middle-class thing, something for an elite.

I've spent so much of my life in what can be quite solitary professions, particularly when you're fronting television programmes. I've been all over the world doing that on my own, to be able to enjoy that in the company of someone you adore makes it five times as good.

If you were going to protect Buckingham Palace, you wouldn't put a tunnel in halfway down the Mall. If you wanted to protected Wembley Stadium, you wouldn't put a tunnel halfway up Wembley Way.

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

The work that I do doesn't make me feel uptight, It energises me.

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.

Politicians have been downplaying the importance of history as a subject in our schools but, if they had bothered to have a better grasp of history themselves, they might have avoided costly wars. Instead they act like children. The only time that they think matters is their own.

The paradox is that when you can get into right versus wrong bickering in personal relationships -- even if you believe you have won -- you have lost.

What's the alternative to being right? Maybe it is being well. Not trying to control others, but practicing self-control and self-containment.

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 of you exists, but when you're 17, you can't have a debate with yourself about authenticity.

My job in many ways has been to navigate interesting routes around subjects people think are dull.

I have always felt that the rise of what became known as alternative comedy was born out of the loins of the alternative theatre movement.

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 another aspect to that.

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 thinking it was educational.

Fifty one per cent of 'Time Team' viewers are not of my gender. And that surprised me, because I thought it'd be at least 60 per cent male.