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Steve Platt interviews Tony Robinson in advance of the 2006 series.
You can dig up my garden any time
Tony Robinson says that as many people now come up to him and say, 'You can dig up my garden any time you like' as ask him, 'Do you have a cunning plan?' In other words, he's become as famous for his role in taking archaeology out of academia and into people's living rooms (or gardens) as he is for playing Baldrick in the comedy classic Blackadder.
It's an outcome that he never imagined when he and Mick Aston first discussed the idea of making a popular archaeology programme when they met up on an archaeological holiday on the island of Santorini in the 1980s. And a few years later, when Mick, who by then had already worked with Time Team creator Tim Taylor on a series called Time Signs, suggested Tony as the presenter for the pilot Time Team programme (made in October 1992), there was no expectation that it would last beyond the initial series.
Twelve series down, at least two more to come
Thirteen years on, with twelve series and getting on for 150 programmes under his belt, Tony says, 'Time Team has grown beyond the wildest dreams of any of us involved in making it.' It has spawned numerous offshoot ventures, including the Big Roman Dig in the summer of 2005 ('the most ambitious exploration of Roman Britain ever'), a wide range of books and other publications, and, most recently, the second Time Team DVD box set. Tony is contracted to make at least two more series, for screening in 2006 and 2007, and Channel 4 has an option to retain him for another in 2008. 'That would be 15 years,' he says. 'And after that, who knows?'
'Democratising archaeology'
What he does know, and is very proud of, is that Time Team has succeeded in 'democratising' archaeology in a way that he and Mick could only fantasise about back in Santorini. 'It's struck me in filming for the next series that virtually everyone where we're working gets what we're doing now,' says Tony. 'Archaeology is an arcane science in many ways. Yet archaeological procedures seem to have entered the public consciousness. We can talk about something like geophysics now, for example, without having to explain what it is.'
Some of the most popular Time Team programmes, which form the focus of the new DVD, are those that involve quite literally digging up people's gardens. Tony recalls, for example, the programme filmed in Raunds, Northamptonshire, for the 2003 series: 'It was a very modest house with a very modest garden, where the owners had dug a pool to put a couple of koi carp in and came down on a Saxon burial. In the past, they wouldn't have known anything about archaeology, but as a result of watching Time Team they knew exactly what to do. When I realised that this wasn't just a myth about the programme you can imagine how I purred with delight. They did a little investigative archaeology without moving anything to find out what they'd got and then they contacted their local archaeologists and worked with them before contacting Time Team. And what was really thrilling about it was the way they got right into the characters of the people buried there and really began to empathise with them.'
Rubbing up archaeologists the wrong way
Making archaeology accessible to ordinary people has always been at the heart of what Time Team is about, says Tony, and he has never tired of doing it – even when it has rubbed up some archaeologists the wrong way. This occurred to some extent, for instance, with the Time Team Big Dig a couple of years ago. Billed as the biggest archaeological dig Britain had ever seen, the Big Dig was based on getting people to dig one-metre test pits all over the country. It prompted scathing criticism from some archaeologists, who felt it sent out the wrong message that anyone could become an 'instant archaeologist' and dig up delicate remains willy-nilly.
Tony Robinson was equally scathing in his response. 'They were protecting their patch,' he says. 'There is a kind of archaeological practice that has been protected by the vocabulary and funding of academia for the best part of 100 years. Time Team opens up archaeology to people who are not within those hallowed walls and shares it with them. Inevitably that is going to make some people feel very threatened. A lot of the attacks are only a symptom of our success.'
A 'subversive programme'
'There's no doubt in my mind that Time Team is a subversive programme and it only works when it's being so,' Tony continues. He acknowledges that Mick has been 'very wounded' by 'vindictive and spiteful' criticism from some of his peers. 'One thing I've learnt is that while actors can be very catty, boy oh boy academics can do it in spades,' he says. But he has no personal regrets about attracting controversy from time to time. 'As someone who earns a living from television, I'm well aware that there is no such thing as bad publicity,' he says. 'Every time an archaeologist kicks up a storm I rub my hands with glee.'
He almost seems to be deliberately courting further controversy with his next remark: 'Time Team has published more scientific reports on excavations than all of the university archaeology departments put together over the past ten years. An awful lot of archaeologists have dug sites and not published reports, or published 20 or 30 years later, or have lost their finds, or have only half published, or whose publication is slipshod. It's beholden on some of those who criticise us to look at their own practice before charging out to battle.'
Academic plaudits
This combative streak hasn't prevented Tony from picking up academic plaudits, however. The latest include an honorary doctorate from the Open University, which he received in April, and another from the University of Exeter, which he received in July. 'I now have as many honorary degrees as O-levels,' he says – although he adds that 'this says as much about my lack of O-levels as anything else'.
Is he ever tempted to study archaeology formally, then, or to actually work in the field? 'Mick wants me to go to university and raises this with me at least once every third programme,' he says, 'and I would love to do a degree at some point.' It would be 'much less specific than archaeology', though. 'Probably something to do with how and why people have moved across the globe. Rather than dig for beakers I want to know about the Beaker people.'
Favourite moment
He also says that his digging is 'a bit like my scuba diving – I infinitely prefer it in the Seychelles to the Solent.' That said, one of his favourite moments on Time Team was at Dinnington, in Somerset, a couple of years ago, when he was allowed time out from filming to excavate a Roman mosaic floor: 'The privilege of being able to reveal a work of art that had been unseen for 1,600 years was just fantastic'.
The Dinnington mosaic is scarred by plough marks and Tony's campaigning instincts have taken him into battle against the many threats to Britain's archaeological heritage, including ploughing. His current bete noire, though, is metal detecting.
Metal detecting worries
'Metal detecting worries me greatly,' he says. 'To be honest, I think we're pissing about. The reality, according to Phil, is that there are likely to be no metal finds at all in the first foot of Britain's soil within 20 years. The only way we can prevent that happening is by legislation. I think all metal detectors should be licensed and to get a licence they should be required to abide by a code of archaeological best practice.'
'Everything we find, wherever it is, should be scrupulously and systematically recorded within its archaeological context,' Tony insists. He says that the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which involves the voluntary recording of archaeological finds, is 'great, and I support the people who do it, but in a way it's a policy of despair because it's saying yes, all these people are going to plunder our archaeology but what we'll do is try to persuade the nice ones to tell us where they found it.'
Legislation 'not too much to ask'
Tony doesn't think legislation on metal detecting is too much to ask. It's about developing a critical mass of support to change hearts and minds on the issue. We don't allow people to collect birds' eggs any more, for example, he says. 'Yet this is worse than egg collecting. There will still be kestrels producing eggs until we get down to the last half dozen kestrels but once you lose archaeological remains they are gone forever.'
You can sense a campaign coming on (Tony describes himself as a 'campaign animal'). This is provided, of course, that he can find the time to spare from his many other professional and campaigning activities – which have most recently included Labour's general election campaign as well as Make Poverty History and other development movement issues with which he has had a long-term involvement.
Labour's national executive
At least he's no longer a member of Labour's national executive committee, from which he stood down last September. 'I'd done it for four years and it had taken its toll,' he says. 'There was a limit to the amount of time I could devote to it.'
His departure was nothing to do with disillusionment with politics or disquiet over the Iraq war, he is quick to insist – although for once he seems uncertain, sighs and pauses and still stumbles over his words when talking about the latter. 'Did I agree with us going into Iraq? Erm, it, er, it, um… Although it worried me initially, I thought it was probably, erm, provided we could get a second resolution, a UN resolution, I was happy that we should do so. The longer it went on, the more worried I was and in the end I was very critical of our whole approach. But did I not stand again because of that? The answer is no.'
Tony says it was 'a real privilege to be party to conversations involving the most senior decision makers in the country' and that it 'developed my understanding of human history in a way that I couldn't have imagined. I realised how decisions had been made throughout the ages, how people get to where they get to, how and why wars start. It was a lot of hard work but I definitely got as much out as I put into it.'
Future plans
His focus for now is on 'letting that experience sink in, mulling it over and learning from it'. That and his professional career, of course. As well as finishing the next series of Time Team (not to mention several documentary specials), he has a new children's book coming out (his 18th at the last count), a second series of The Worst Jobs in History and a Worst Jobs Christmas Special being screened, and, in the spring of 2006, a new national tour and appearance at the Edinburgh festival.
He'll also be celebrating (whisper it quietly) his 60th birthday next August, but he shows no signs yet of being ready to settle for soft slippers and a spot of gardening, neither his own nor anyone else's.
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