Gone Medieval - Time Team's Tony Robinson: A Life in History

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

On this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Sir Tony Robinson — actor, author and presenter — who is now hosting his own podcast, Tony Robinson’s Cunningcast.Sir Tony talks about how he has been making history fun, funny and accessible for decades, ranging across Black Adder, Time Team and Maid Marian and her Merry Men.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. It's only Sir Tony Robinson on Gone Medieval. Tony has a brilliant new podcast called Cunningcast and when I went to speak to him about knights since he is one, I asked him if he'd come and talk to us. From Blackadder to Maid Marian and her merry men and from Time Team to the Peasants Revolt. Tony's been making history fun, funny and accessible for decades. We spoke about the shows Tony's made, his experiences working around history and archaeology, and how it's turned his own view of history into a

duble entendre. Enjoy! Welcome to God Medieval, Tony. It's fantastic to have you here. That's nice to be here. I'm actually still sitting in my room. What a cliche that was to start with, sorry. I guess to start off with, a lot of people might associate you with Time Team, particularly people who were interested in history and perhaps time team was a way into history for a lot of people. Do you have a favourite medieval dig that you took part in and anything that particularly stood out about it?

The problem with that, and you must have had this conversation a million times on your podcast, is what the heck are we talking about when we say medieval? Basically, I think most people in their minds, all right, so the Romans have gone. What happens next?

well, nothing much really probably until William the Conquer, then what happened after him? Well, it's all a bit confusing. And oh, thank God we've got to the Tudors. Everything before that, after the Romans, we'll call medieval. If that is what you mean by medieval, in other words, if we can count the Anglo-Saxons under Vikings in, some of my most exciting digs, I think we're in that period.

Although it's a problem, isn't it? because certainly, really, from the time the Romans leave, for a few hundred years, there's not much being made out of metal, and people aren't writing much, and what they are writing is either getting nicked or destroyed or rotting away. So you're getting a very partial vision of what life was like, and in a way, I think that were the dark ages. I don't think it's as bad a word as a lot of people think it is now, because it is like if you come back at night and you turn on the...

sitting room light and it's not working. You kind of blunder through the sitting room and all there is is the bit of light coming from the lamp outside and on the pavement. That's the vision we have of those years, isn't it? So frustratingly, you're looking for an Anglo-Saxon hall. When you think of a hall as this kind of huge place full of romance and people looking like beer, or from what you're really looking at is a pothole the side of the dustbin cover. Get a few of those. I have found all. It never ceases to amaze me what archaeologists can draw from that tiniest little thing. They can look at the smallest little anomaly and they can build so much around that. I think it's fascinating. By and large, I think they're probably right. They tend to be very scrupulous people.

You do learn to look at the ground and see that there are lines of them and there are relationships between them and the other marks on the ground. So I sort of believe them, but it's not that exciting. Having said that, probably my dream dig took place on the Isle of Man. And we were looking at what I think they call a keel, K-I-E-L, which is like a very early little church in the Isle of Man on a golf course and they had very generously sacrificed the rough round one hole for a few days for us. And no one was whacking balls on that. And we found some stones. Then we found some flat stones, which looked very interesting, moved them to one side. And eventually we found a burial, which we think was probably 7th to 9th century. And when we exposed it, it was a woman.

And because of particular circumstances in the earth, she still had her hair. Her hair was Orban to Ginger and they say that that often is what happens to hair when it's been in the ground for a long time. So it might be too romantic to say that was the colour of her hair. But the thing about it was that it was neatly arranged. I just had never ever seen anything like that ever before. It was as though the person was zooming live out of the grave. So we got doubly meticulous, as you can imagine about that dig. Did a lot of work on that dig. She was a Saxon. We'd worked that out. Then we double-checked on these big slabs that we removed. And Matt, one of our senior diggers, turned one round and brushed the dirt side on it. And there was Ogham script on it.

real old script like the Vikings used and we scraped it away one of our archaeologists showed it to the specialists on some early version of Zoom or whatever and he said yes it's very interesting you're holding it the wrong way up which mortify there I think it was on day two of the three days that we found this and for the rest of the day and a half it was being zoomed around between various archaeologists and eventually it was agreed that the words said something like 50 soldiers cornered here. Maybe it was just we was here, but it was two incredible voices calling out of the medieval down to us. Yeah, as you say, it must be incredible to be there as history is literally coming out the ground to meet you and smack you in the face. Yeah, I think that's right. Our model of time travel has always tended to be modeled on HG Worlds and Doctor Who, isn't it? It's this idea that you go into a little space, some kind of scientific magic happens, and then you go back via this little space into

time, into a specific place in time. I think we can see that the most plausible time travel is time coming to us, the echoes, the disintegrating carbon, the evidence from the carbon dating, what is still there, the chemicals, all these things. And we're learning, of course, more and more about them as each year goes by. The DNA, which can tell us more about discarded bones that have been in museums for 75 years than we could ever possibly have dreamt. Thank God most archaeologists keep all of, at least samples of all their stuff. That to me is the most vivid time travel, and I suspect that is what time travel will continue to be. That's a really nice way to think about it. I've never thought about time travel like that, but I will from now on.

Just to finish off on Time Team a little bit, how do you reflect on Time Team and what it achieved, in the sense of it really brought archaeology into people's living rooms and made it a kind of thrilling three-day narrow window that made history and archaeology really, really exciting for far more people than would ever have been exposed to it before? And I guess also, is it good to be back. Time Team is, of course, back. It is, yeah. It's back online. It's crowdfunding. And it raises enough for us to do two or three proper major digs, properly for.

funded a year and we've managed to get all the permissions, which is terribly complex, to get all the old editions, virtually all the old editions, re-shown. And so, yeah, Time Team Online has become a big thing. And initially, I said that I didn't want to do the three-day digs anymore. I felt that I'd done everything that I could contribute towards them and it was important that there were other voices doing the job that I did. But Tim Taylor, the Eminol's gris behind time team, asked me whether I would go back to front the promotion. of the documentaries. We made about 60 Time Team documentaries, which are very good pieces of work. And to make some more documentaries, and so my face has started popping up on the new Time Team.

As far as the old time team is concerned, they always used to have something like Annika Rice at the weekend doing a family-type show, but a kind of smart family-type show that everybody could enjoy and sit on the sofa floor. Anika's shows had finished and they were looking for something new. And the idea was pitched to them of archaeology in three days, which as far as they were concerned meant treasure hunting. And so they thought they had a show there. And they wanted to make a pilot. And it being Channel 4 in those early days, they wanted to use someone who was the epitome of the person that you wouldn't choose to do an academic discipline on the telly. So who better than the most stupid character in the whole world, i.e. Baudrick.

They approached me about the possibility of my doing that, not knowing that I had been an archaeology enthusiast for a number of years and actually knew very well the guy who was going to be the lead archaeologist in it, McCaston. So it was a marriage made in heaven, although after I'd done the pilot, I'd turned down the series. And there was a very emotional three weeks in which people were saying, why, why? We put all this work in. And as far as I was concerned, the pilot program didn't have enough confidence in the actual subject of archaeology. There were too many gimmicks in it, too many. And now we have a guest star this week. It's the monkeys.

It wasn't ever. But you know what I mean? Or we would all be talking around a printer and suddenly the printer would operate. And whoop! A clue would come up on the printer that kind of thing. My feeling was that archaeology was very exciting. And even things which we might, those who don't know about archaeology, might not find exciting, could be very exciting in the same way that tiny little finds on CSIR, because that's all the archaeology is CSI history. And they said, well, we feel that too.

Come back in as one of the producers as well, because at least that means you can get around the table and make your case, as it were. And I did. And really after that first series, which the first series was pretty bloody getting it right. the arguments were quite challenging. But after that, everyone was confident in each other, and we made the series. That's brilliant to know that Time Team is essentially the result of your confidence in archaeology,

your belief that archaeology is interesting in itself. That was only one slice of a number of contributions that were made in order to make it work. One of the things that made it very good was that the choice of producers and directors, they were just very good television people. They weren't archaeologists, but they knew their...

job was to reflect the discipline of archaeology, but to do it in an entertaining way. And that was what John Reith, the father of the BBC, that was what he wanted all his programs to be. Very entertaining, but the people would go away from them with something that they didn't have in their intellectual or emotional armory before they went to it. That television shouldn't be chewing up. And that Reithian tradition, I think, was very much alive in Channel for and everybody who came in and felt that. It was cast very well. And if you might think it's not a drama, you don't need casting. Oh yes, you do. Everybody was on that screen. We thought about not only what their academic skills were, but how they communicated, how different they were to

somebody else, what they might contribute to the program as a whole. The same was true of the sites that we went to. Of the archaeological disciplines we needed week after week, there would be no point doing an archaeological show where the same thing turned up. You had to have lots of different periods, lots of different challenges, lots of different characters week after week. So it was scrutinised as profoundly as you were, scrutinised the drama and in many of the similar ways. I live near Bridge North in Shropshire and there are still people today who talk about the time when time team were down here digging up Bridge North Castle. It's still the stuff of local myth and legend. I cannot tell you how proud I am of that. I'm so proud of the fact that for many

years, the students of archaeology in our universities, virtually all of them in their application forms, cited Time Team as one of the major reasons they wanted to read archaeology. You mentioned Baldrick there, so that brings me on nicely, to anyone who doesn't know you for Time Team will surely know you for Blackadder. I grew up watching Black Adder. My children grew up watching Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, which is another fantastic series I absolutely loved. Why do you think history and comedy work so well together? Do we like to laugh at people from the past, or does it just need to be more than that? I think it's something slightly different from that. And if you notice, an awful lot of our best playwrights, certainly up to the end of the

19th century, would set their plays in the old days, even though by and large what they were discussing was contemporary issues. And they would do that because if you wanted to do this, discuss a contemporary issue. One of the best way of doing it was getting rid of the detritus that surrounded that, all the rest of the things about the present day. Put them in the past and you can see the issues, the problems, the politics, the manipulations, so much clearer. It's what Shakespeare did, isn't it, time and time again. It's what Brecht did virtually all the time. And I think when you do that in comedy, A, it means it doesn't date so much. and B, you can have the fun of being in a time we're not in, but with the sensibilities of you and I.

And that's what all Blackadder is, really, isn't it? That's all made Marion. That's what Wolf Hall is, isn't it? That's why Hillary Mantell's brilliant construction of Thomas Cromwell. He's a sort of Blair-Eight Labour Party member, isn't he? In his politics, he's sort of slightly radical. and wants things to change, but he knows that revolution is actually going to make things worse. One of my favourite quotes by C.S. Lewis is he talks about our lack of understanding of allegory today is the greatest barrier between us and understanding the past that we lose this idea that everyone always wrapped up stories as a political message delivered through the medium of the past somehow. Yes, I think that's true. I have a problem with the whole notion of history, to be quite honest.

The older I get, the more I think that what you might call the rest, of history. History is a series of pinpoints where certain people were present, giant steps slowly coming towards us to the present day. The idea that there are these moments is probably not reality anyway. It's a kind of shorthand our brains do. The idea that history is what we call primary sources. That's what people always say, say, good history, get all the primary sources, you put them together and then you can see the proof. What are the things? What are the things? these prime resources. They're what you just said. They're things written by people who would have been punished if they didn't say the right thing, were paid a lot of money in order to do it.

The person who is the star of the thing they're writing about, either commissioned them to do it or they want to get into the good books of that person. The person themselves can't do it because they can't read or they're too busy killing somebody else. You want to justify your own religion or their religion or the foul things that they did. I mean, it's like, look, If you look at the news nowadays, deconstruct the news as you go along one day and see how many of those things in the news are actually specially orchestrated events for the news. Or someone who was involved in the particular battle or whatever is on the news will have sent the news a package which they want them to include in the news. So my thesis is the idea of the news as the news is a fiction. And history seems to me that too.

the best that we can make and why in a way, archaeology is such a great stab in the dark is that it doesn't really try to do that or not much, does it? It offers you the work of one particular person in a particular period of time and you can draw your own conclusions from that. History, I think, is much more of a fairy tale than archaeology. Yeah, I think it's just the version of the past

that most people agree on at the present time. If you think about how much content we have today, how many different views of the world we have today from social media to video to everything else. And we still can't agree on what the truth is, in inverted commas. How on earth we reconstruct that from lots and lots of ancient documents with any kind of confidence is we're guessing an awful lot, aren't we? And the problem is, and I think it's what history over the last 20 years or so has been

very good at is it's pointed out to us that a huge number of voices are almost entirely absent from the historical record. So even when we think we have, by and large, whittled a particular moment in history down to pretty much the truth, it's twaddle. How many people are aware, for instance, that in the time of King Alfred, probably 15% of the people in England were slaves? How does that pan out in your vision of what was going on at that time? Michael Wood, his old, glorious book about understanding Anglo-Saxon history, has rewritten it and suddenly there are a huge number of women in it. They've actually always been there in the sources.

We didn't notice them. We didn't flipping notice them. We weren't interested in them. We weren't interested in them. We went for the blokes with the swords. I read a brilliant article the other day about animals in history, how animals have impacted history. Now, we don't see much of that in our history. record, really.

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and throughout June on not just the Tudors from history hit, I'm marking the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's first folio. It would be hard to think of Shakespeare without plays like Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Anthony Cleopatra, Macbeth, as you like it, and a winter's tale. But without the first folio, none of these would have survived. This is not a book designed to be carried around. This is a book which establishes itself. in the library, in the study, and that physicality tells us something about

how the plays are being rebranded, reframed for a new generation. Throughout this month, I'm delving deep into the first folio, how it was produced, who made it, and to what extent it has ensured Shakespeare's enduring legacy. So do join me on not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I have watched you on numerous kind of medieval history documentaries as well, from the Peasants' Revolt to history's worst jobs and things like that.

Do you have any kind of favourite memories of those kind of documentaries? Did you come across a story that you think ought to be better known, for example, that you wish more people knew? I love the idea of the Peasant's Revolt. I've always hoped that change could take place from the bottom or at least the middle rather than the top. And there is a lot of very fascinating things about the Peasant's Revolt that I hadn't known or understood the fact that a revolt is always...

about poverty or it appears to be. By and large, it's often about a new middle class who, for some reason or other, have arisen, and they've got more money than the poorest of people, so they can afford to have themselves educated. They've got more mobility, or, as in the case of the Peasants' Revolt, they may have gone out to France for a few years, fighting, and have developed a sophistication through their travels, and they come back. There's a kind of Monty Python view of something like the Peasant Revolt, is it? They're all people who would bump into a door unless you reminded them there to open it first. But actually, there were a lot of very articulate people who were communicating with each other,

with messages, in other words, it was a network. The word uprising in a way is slightly misleading, isn't it? It's like something out of science fiction that suddenly all the undeads rise up at the same time. And that wasn't the way things worked at all. The echoes of it that continued long afterwards, the fact that the actual thing itself was such a flurry. I had always thought it was Kentish men who were the peasantry vile. I'd never realised how closely they were associated with Essex and what a kind of unification there was there and how the whole thing moved forward.

So I would say that as documentaries go, that was the one I enjoyed most because it was about process. Yeah, of course there was that one rather embarrassing day when the king men the peasants and no one really knew what to do. Yeah, we don't talk very much about how national that uprising was, how it spreads to the Midlands, it spreads down to the southwest, and all of those networks are working incredibly efficiently to organise everybody. We tend to think medieval people don't move outside their own village, but you've got sophisticated networks covering most of England at this point. I think that's a hugely important point. We do tend to think how isolated people were.

Do you know how long it took people to get from Oxford to Reading in those days? that kind of history of, aren't we good because we've got into City Rail. And yes, you're right. See, it's even true of Stonehenge that a lot of the finds in Stonehenge are actually modelled on things that were from the Orkneys and were reflecting particular places like Myers-Hey in the Orknes, the Shetland, Northern Scotland. In other words, not only were there things passing from the very north to the very south,

there were ideas, there must have been narratives. All that stuff was spinning round the country at a time when we just think that people were just like there was them and there was their wood and they never went beyond it. You'll have made Tristan our host of our sister podcast, The Ancients, very happy by mentioning Stonehenge but also mentioning the Orkneys, he loves Ancient Scotland and the Ancient Orkney's, so he'll be glad to hear that they're getting a mention on Gone Medieval.

Very unsubtly going back to my own podcast. one of the episodes is about Stonehenge and we talk a lot about the finds because you don't talk very much about one. One doesn't talk very much about the finds at Stonehenge. You just talk about the big stones, don't you? Where did they come from? Where did the slightly smaller ones come from?

But the finds tell exactly the story that you and I have been discussing just now. And I hope they come more to the fore in the general perceptions of Stonehenge and the other great monuments. You mentioned there with the present. Revolved documentary in particular about an interest in change coming from the bottom-up kind of thing. And your history of Britain series was described as a kind of bottom-up view of history,

which I assume wasn't meant to be a duble entendre. Do you think that's a particularly valuable way of telling history? I just think that there are histories which are seldom highlighted, which tell us as much as the narratives of the great and the good do. I'm not a kind of Luddite who thinks that we should ban any piece of history that's got a king or a queen in it forever and replace it with the stories of those who emptied the lose. But I think you can only really get a vision of what was going on by looking at how people changed, not only themselves, but society as well. And I think that whole notion of dissent is a very important one. We only get it very occasionally flaring up in various moments in history, don't we? It seems to

come out of nowhere. Of course it hasn't come out of nowhere. People have always been carrying these things around them. They've probably been expressing themselves. Sometimes in times of dissent, you have to be very quiet about these things and talk about them in a very coded way. But there are always, as it were, these fractures in civilisation, where suddenly this stuff which people have held onto for hundreds, if not thousands of years, comes up through the cracks and flares up and can change the historical surface as it were forever. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they are washed away with detol again and sink back. But by often or not, some change occurs which transforms the way we think about things. And we've seen this,

I think, an awful lot as far as gay people are concerned, haven't we, in the last, certainly in our lifetime. They're hardly in the historical record. If you read it in a coded way, you can get the fact that there were homosexuals before the 1960s, but they don't seem to have been many about, according to history. But it was some time around the publication of the Wolfenden Report in the late 60s and in the early 70s that this great explosion of social and sexual dissent appeared, suddenly there were all these ideas and thoughts and lifestyles around, which most people hadn't contemplated and actually took seriously in a very short time. Anything to do with homosexuality in

my house when I was a kid was rude. That was all it was. It was just rude. And yet within a very few years, my parents could accept the idea of civil relationships and eventually marriages for gay people. The speed with which that came, as it were, out of the ground is phenomenal. But that kind of social change has been happening with that speed, I would see. suggest throughout the whole history. Yeah, and I think we've probably been guilty for centuries of thinking of history as the story of kings and battles and wars. And we forget that to complement that for every one king, there were hundreds of thousands, millions of other people doing all sorts of stuff.

And their history complements that history. And like you say, you can't understand the peasants' revolt without understanding where the peasants were coming from and what they were going through. But you can't understand the awful compromise that took place without understanding the politics of the generals and the king. I do think there is a bounce to be struck. I just don't think we've struck it yet. I made, last year for Channel 4, what I thought was the beginnings of a really great series, which didn't get the ratings and has totally disappeared. It's called Museum of Us. And what I did was, each week I would go to a different street in a different town and fire up the local people with the history of their street, the history of their house and their own history,

in the history of their own lives. We would talk about them. They would find iconic things. At the end of the street, the local museum would build a pop-up museum just for 24 hours on the bottom of their street. Everyone could go. There would be items in it like the dog collar of someone's favourite dog. And a cannonball that they found in their back garden.

It was a lovely series that it failed this time. It's a great disappointment to me. Next time we will get it right. Because that to me is really the joy of what history is. is that interplay between people and lives and houses and events. It's glorious. It's what we do now. It's just how we did now a few years ago, isn't it? I mean, that might have answered my next question, which was going to be if I had a commissioner's magic wand and you could make any documentary, maybe particularly medieval, what would you make? What would you like to tell the story of?

I think I would try to reclaim what Bede was after. I'd like to try and really understand how much or how little people were blown apart by the end of the Roman occupation and how gradually they came together in a variety of ways until round about the time of Ethelstane, a grandson of Alfred. round about that time, we had a kind of England, which was pretty much the kind of England that we have today. And yet it came out of this swirl of different experiences and different people and disorder and terrible betrayal. And an awful lot of very powerful and influential women and slaves and all that kind of stuff, which were only just beginning to get a purchase on. That's what I would like to see.

A complete reordering of what you and I might call the early medieval. The Forging of England with Tony Robinson, something like that. We'll get to work on that one. I'm going to indulge myself a little bit here, I'm afraid, while I've got you. So anyone listening to Gone Medieval will more than likely know my views on Richard the 3rd in particular. It's my real passion in history. And I never pass up the chance to talk about him. So thinking about the first ever episode of Blackadder,

Series 1, episode 1, it's really, really friendly to Richard the 3rd. It paints him as actually quite a nice guy. He looked after his nephews, the princes in the tower. In fact, one of them succeeds him on the throne as the incredible Brian Blessed. Am I too hopeful to think there's a bit of Ricardianism in there? Or was it just a good story to play with and to play with Shakespeare? You've got to remember that the people who made Blackadder loved their history, were very O'Fay with their history, and loved playing with the notion.

that Richard III was as the Ricardians paint him. And you guys gave it to us on a plate, really, didn't you? And one of the things that I find so fascinating was that this body in the car park actually did have a hunch. After all those years in which I have said, along with so many other people, the hunch was stuck on there by the Tudors who wanted to vilify and monsterify Richard III.

I'm terribly philosophical about television. Once a channel loses interest in me, and all channels lose interest in all its performers at some time to part of the nature of the cycle of television. I'm totally philosophic about that. I was so upset that I wasn't asked to front the Richard III in the Carpark Show. The reason being that I would have been deeply skeptical that it would be possible to find such a thing,

that in all my experience, I had only ever had one tangible moment where I had seen history writ large in archaeology, and that is the burning in Colchester, the Roman burning in Colchester at the time of Buda. That's the only time that I'd ever seen anything that you could actually date in such a specific way about a particular moment in history. The idea that we would just arbitrarily dig up, Richard seemed to be so far removed. from any likelihood that, and I would love to have gone into it really scathingly and come out the other end looking a complete idiot. I'd have taken that on the chin. Yeah, it is a fantastic story. I mean, where do you stand on Richard III? Do you think he wasn't as bad as history says, or he was? Well, in my opinion, no King of England is as bad as history paints him other

than King John, who was probably 10 times worse. Those of you who haven't read the Mark Morris book on King John is an indictment that makes the Daily Mail's vilification of Prince Harry. I found myself turning every page thinking, where is the redemption? Surely it's on the next page. Nope, it's just getting worse. And I guess to end on, what are you working on at the moment? We've got, as we said, by the time this goes out, people will have had a chance to see the pilot episode of Blackadder, which will be brand new to all of us, and I'm excited to watch it. But what else do you have in the works? You're working on time team at the moment. I think you're doing some stuff for history hit, doing some archive work.

Yeah, I'm doing some archive work for history hit. I'm also doing a documentary which is associated with history hit, a 18th, 19th century one. I don't think I ought to say any more than that about it, because I'm not sure what state is in. All I know is I'm booked to film it, so if it falls apart, they'll have to blame me. Sorry, that was very immersed to me, wasn't it? You know what I mean? No, no, well, as a history hit podcast, we're just thrilled to have Tony Robinson as part of history hits. I'm really looking forward to be part of that stable. I'm finishing a documentary series at the moment called Tony Robinson's Marvelous Machines, which came about because I was looking out of my window and they were tarmac in the road with a machine about the size of the Isle of White. And I thought,

if that machine had been static, I wouldn't have had any idea what it was. And yet it's a machine which will transform my life every day for the next 20 years because we'll have a smooth road again. And I thought, wouldn't it be great to do a series about those machines that I'm not even aware out there, like the robots that Akado have got, for instance, that are transforming my life? And once we started to research them, they're just everywhere. One of the producers said to me the other day, we've just made six to start with. If it goes ahead, obviously, there'll be more. He said, we could do this every week for the rest of our lives because the number of new machines coming from everywhere now is almost infinite. So that's a series I'm doing now.

I'm doing a drama. There's a drama on Channel 5 called Madam Blanc's Mysteries, which Sally Lindsay writes, who is an old friend of mine, and she's written a very villainous part for me. So I'm going out to Gozo to shoot that, which will be an enormous pleasure. I'm working on a project that is medieval, which I'm not going to tell you anything about at all now,

because I'm utterly sworn to secrecy. But, Matt, I promise you, I'll give you first dibs when it comes alive. And the second series of Tony Romperton's cunning cast, I couldn't have believed that I would have the response. The first series that I had, the premises, I think everything is interesting. There are profoundly boring ways of talking about everything. You and I spend our lives fighting against such boring talk. So I just wanted to reclaim like a dozen things, including the National Census, prostate cancer, women in politics, pies, things that you might think of that are obsessive. Certainly boring. Knights in Armour isn't, but that you did that one. But you know what I mean? That arbitrariness was quite a political statement on my part, if you like. And I've been asked to do 30 more, and the choice will be hopefully even more mad. Are you enjoying doing a podcast? Is it something new for you?

Enormously, because I like today, we have so much control over it, don't we? My whole life, as a performer, has been about working within the parameters set by the playwright, the other actor. certainly not by me. And now to be able to do something where it doesn't matter if I have to struggle to find the words because that's part of being a human being. It doesn't matter if I veer off track of it because you'll either cut it out or it's part of what we're doing today. Certainly on my podcast, it doesn't matter how long it is. I can make it as long or as short as I want it to be.

And also the other thing is like being able to think, I've always really wanted to talk to that person for an hour and approaching them. By and large, they say yes, eventually. I mean, that's why I came on the podcast. You just always wanted to talk to me for an hour about nights. That's why I set up the whole notion of my podcast in order to be able to talk with here. Oh, perfect. That's my new ringtone for my phone, that is. And I thoroughly recommend anyone going to listen to Cunningcast. It is such a great mix of different topics that are incredibly eclected, but also always quite personal to you as well. So we talked about nights because you're a knight and it was about what does that mean for Tony Robinson, but what did it mean all throughout history as well? So I think it's a really great collect. of guests and topics and subjects,

and I really enjoyed doing it and speaking to you, so everyone go and listen to Cunningcast. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Tony. I wish I could keep you for at least three or four times as long as this, but I really, really shouldn't. We should probably let everybody get on with their day, but it's been absolutely fascinating to talk to you. Thank you very much for sharing some of your fabulous memories and stories with us.

Nice to talk to you, mate, really genuinely. I'm really looking forward to the next thing from Tony Robinson, too. Thank you very much. Bye. There are a brand new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more on the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a

moment, please drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find their way to us. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.