Tony Robinson

ARCHAEOLOGY – IT'S THE NEW ROCK 'N' ROLL!
Interview with Tony Robinson By SALLY BECK, Summer 1997

Thanks to Channel 4's Time Team, archaeology is no longer seen as the baffling pastime of raking over dull-looking fields with a teaspoon. And part of the success is down to presenter TONY ROBINSON, whose enthusiastic on-air explanations have been so successful in demystifying the process that the science of digging up the past has reached cult proportions. And last Bank Holiday weekend, the Team's success was rewarded with nine LIVE shows.

'We haven't cheated, we haven't stuck a spade into the ground to check that something is there,' said Tony. 'We've got three days and if the worst comes to the worst it's going to be several live programmes about a rather large empty hole in the ground.' He doesn't seriously think that will happen though as evidence suggests more archaeological thrills. 'The strongest evidence we have is evidence from the air. You can see the outlines of old buildings and it does look as though there is a Roman villa there. There is a Roman villa seven miles in either direction along the same old Roman road, so it is quite likely that this is another one. There have also been finds cropping up on the surface of the fields with the kind of regularity that makes people think there's been habitation there. All the evidence says that there is something very exciting there.'

'Hopefully, what we'll be able to do is really give people the feeling of that moment-to-moment discovery that you get when archaeology is going well.'

The real excitement for Tony however, is not finding priceless relics, but being able to understand our history. 'Finds are romantic and wonderful and you get an extraordinary buzz when you dig up a gold brooch or just a bone ring which came off someone's finger, then you really do feel that you're touching the life of someone a long way in the past.

'In the UK, almost more than anywhere else, virtually all of our landscape has been continually worked and reworked by human beings for thousands of years and it's all in layer after layer after layer. Our country is like a big trifle of history. It's extraordinary how patchy our knowledge is about any period in history. If you think about it, you know what life is like for you and you've got a lot of jerky films of what was happening about as far back as the First World War. Even with that, it's very hard to imagine what life was like in 1915.

'The imaginative leap back 2,000 years is an impossibility. It's not as though people left huge amounts of details around about what ordinary life was like. They thought about posterity in very grand terms. The ruling classes would want people to know what great rulers they were, who they captured and what fine art they had. But things like how long they boiled an egg for and what nationality the servants were are elusive. We know about the life of the good and the great because they were the only ones who could write about it. Most important for me is what Gloucestershire was like 2,000 years ago. To me, living just down the road in Bristol, it's absolutely fascinating.'

'Invariably, when you excavate a building like the Roman villa we are going to, new evidence comes out that we didn't know about before. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. It's not like, "Oh, we've dug 17 Roman villas so what's the point in digging the 18th." It's like finding that piece in the jigsaw puzzle that you've been looking for.' Far from encouraging people to head out on their own with a spade in search of hidden treasure, Tony is keen to stress the responsiblity of dabbling in Britain's archaeological heritage.

'What we constantly want to underline, is that when you dig into the ground it's just like any other piece of the environment. As soon as you break into it you've destroyed it, it's dead. While it's under the ground and virgin, it can look after itself. It's already stayed like that for hundreds of years and it can stay like that for hundreds more. As soon as you expose it to the light, the heat, the dryness, you've killed it.

'The most that we can possibly learn is by doing the least damage to this site, so that in 100 years time, other archaeologists with more knowledge than us can go there and find we haven't destroyed it all.'

'When Tutankhamen's tomb in Egypt was first excavated by Howard Carter, as soon as they opened the doors and he saw all this fabulous stuff he said "right, let's dust it and polish it and sweep it all clean so that we can get the photographers in so that everyone will know what wonderful finds we've got." Actually, what he did was destroy 3,000 years of dormant environment. We would have known so much about Egypt if he hadn't cleaned up. Even if he'd swept up and kept the dust in a little jar, we would have learned far more about Egypt that we have from all the golden chariots that are now in the British Museum.'

Archaeology can still sound like a crusty and boring hobby, but thanks to Tony's simplistic approach of making all the archaeologists explain exactly what they are doing, Time Team has become phenomenally popular even if Tony does drive team leader Mick Aston nuts in the process! 'I could kick him up in the air,' says Mick. 'But Tony is vital to stop the programme turning into unintelligible gobbledegook which only professors can understand.' 'The success of Time Team is extraordinary when you come to think about it,' agrees Tony. 'An archaeology series for Channel 4? When they offered it to me I though, 'yeah, alright, I'll do that. I'll do one because I'm interested in history and it'll been seen by six people and a dog,' but by series three, Time Team was consistently in the Channel 4 Top Ten. By series five, we were doing eight shows a year. Now, we're doing the live show, Time Team is the biggest interactive show on Channel 4. It's really taught me that the best television is about those real unguarded human moments. That's what people want to see.'

'On Time Team it doesn't matter if we end up feeling absolutely frustrated because that's life. In the old days, when we first started, I would be disappointed when we all got terribly tetchy with each other and ended up not finding out what we set out to find. The big learning curve has been that that doesn't matter as long as you really see the tetchiness, as long as you understand how rattled and tired and wet and pissed off people are. The audience adores that. In the early programmes, we used to hide the upset, now I'm disappointed if it's not there.'