Top 25 Tony Robinson Quotes

I think everyone is fairly fed up with mildly dysfunctional people being put under pressure and then behaving abysmally.

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

My parents taught me practical things, about how important hard work, discipline and the necessity of managing your own money were. Their values were very much the values of the postwar middle class.

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 it be nice to be the scheming old man in a movie?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I was an only child. Both my parents came from working-class families in Hackney, east London.

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 weird stuff. It’s interesting.

The confidence in my ability to be a performer, a steeliness about survival… I learnt all those things from my dad.

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.

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.

Digging sand is a bit like digging water. You take your trowel out and it all fills back up again, so there are a whole lot of different techniques that are required.

Intellectual and emotional curiosity is what I hope I’ve taught my children.

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

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.

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 insects are great and you’ll occasionally see a small mammal.

Always plan, but never plan on your plans.

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.

I am terrified of being pushed out of a plane at 10,000ft with my hands tied behind my back.

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

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.

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 deal with it.