Tony Robinson

Actor

43 Quotes

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.

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.

Always plan, but never plan on your plans.

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.

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.

A chap was digging a pond for his carp in the garden behind his terraced house in the small town of Raunds, when he unearthed remains of an Anglo-Saxon body. Because he'd seen 'Time Team', he knew exactly what to do with it - he cleaned it very respectfully and then called the local archaeologist, who called us in.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I have a passion for knowing stuff.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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