Tony Robinson

“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 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 have a passion for knowing stuff.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Always plan, but never plan on your plans.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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 often get very tired but I'll just have a good sleep and a day off and then I'm fine to go again.”

“The adrenaline of being somewhere no one has ever been before is, or at least not for thousands of years, is quite extraordinary and by and large that overwhelms the feeling of personal terror.”

“Most of us work so hard and live so hard. On the first day of the holiday I remain in work gear, it can take me some time to slow down and all that time I'm missing the serendipity of the wonderful things that are all around us.”

“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.”

“The great countercultural movement that we all know from the mid-1960s was epitomised by popular music. But within a few years another shift happened: the birth of alternative theatre.”

“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.”