Sir Tony Robinson - ‘I learned comedy as a defence mechanism’

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0:36welcome to this super special episode with living legend sir tony robinson this was recorded with a live audience from the corn exchange in cambridge enjoy Oh my goodness, it's so amazing to be in Cambridge in the Corn Exchange. The last time I was in this building, I was sitting my finals. And the Corn Exchange still appears in all of my stress dreams. So I'm so thrilled that you're here and we can reclaim the memories together. Thank you, thank you, thank you for turning up. So, my guest tonight has had a remarkably varied career as an actor, presenter, documentary maker, public educator, writer and political activist.

1:22I'm pretty sure that his sharp intelligence and wry humour have had a formative influence on almost everyone in this auditorium. Whether it was as Baldrick, the comedy stooge in Blackadder who always claimed to have a cunning plan, or fronting the archaeological hit Time Team on Channel 4 for some 20 years, or creating, writing, and starring in the children's TV show Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, which I personally loved, Sir Tony Robinson has been an integral cultural force over the last half century. Born the year after the Second World War ended, Sir Tony grew up as an only child in northeast London.

2:07His first part, aged 13, was as a member of Fagin's gang in the original production of the musical Oliver. After drama school, he spent years as a jobbing actor before being cast alongside Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder in 1983. Since then, Sir Tony has presented multiple documentaries, launched his own history podcast, Cunningcast, written 18 children's books, and won a BAFTA. Alongside this professional success, he's made time for charity work, most notably as ambassador for the Alzheimer's Society. Both his parents developed dementia in older age. In 2013, he was knighted for his public service.

2:51I feel my biggest achievement though is being the father of two fabulous children he says nothing else I have done in my life even comes close to that Cambridge please welcome to the stage the one and only Sir Tony Robinson

3:14oh Sir Tony thank you so much for coming on how to fail not at all it really struck me writing that introduction how you've had such an impact on multiple generations my dad is a huge fan because of black adder i'm a huge fan because of made marion and we're all huge fans here tonight and i can't wait to get into your failures with you but i wanted to end on that quote about fatherhood yeah what do you think fatherhood has has taught you oh i think you know how when somebody hasn't got kids and one of them gets pregnant and they say, well actually we're going to be very firm when we have the kids, we're going to keep our own space and I'll probably go back to work after five days and all that stuff comes out but what nobody realises until they have the child like that one I know, I'm so thrilled there's a child here.

4:17What no one realises is that they will love you more than anyone will ever love you. You know that moment when the kid is born and it just looks up into your eyes and it goes, wow, you're just the absolute greatest. That is such an enormous present. And then ever after that, I think, there's something that's sort of slightly narcissistic about it, is that you learn so much about your own development from seeing how your own child develops and the changes in your relationship with the child and the way that both child and adult are constantly negotiating with each. I'm going to stop now. It's getting a bit tedious.

4:58No, it's beautiful. But you know what I mean? I just find, I found the whole thing. Of course a load of it was ghastly. Of course it was. I'm not being unrealistic about it. But it's so exciting. And now you have grandchildren, you have two granddaughters, and your daughter, Laura Shepherds-Robertson, is a very successful novelist. And you yourself have written a novel, Sir Tony, which has just been announced, The House of Wolves. What has that process been like for you? Did you feel competitive with your daughter? Oh, no, I didn't feel, no, no, no, no. I remember saying to my literary agent, whatever you and I do, actually, Laura is more important than me.

5:36what she does is, you know, as a dad, what I do pulls into insignificance compared with what she's going to do. It was so great. Can you imagine, you know, to have a daughter who suddenly becomes this hugely successful writer? What was the question? The question was about you writing your novel. Oh, I was just talking about hers, yeah. What was the process like? Ah, well, it was weird. Lockdown, I said to myself, I want to have a crack at writing the novel that I've always wanted to write I'd written loads of stuff but never a novel and I I've been always been fascinated by Alfred the Great you know how like there were the story of Alfred and burning the cakes and I remember as a kid not really getting it there was that image that you saw on the front of the Lady Bird book of this really grouchy peasant and Alfred looking all a bit duh and it was about the fact that he had retreated from the Vikings, goes into this peasant hut, this old peasant woman says to him, while I go out and get the firewood will you look after the cakes?

6:47He says yes, she comes back, he's deep in thought and all the cakes are burnt and I remember thinking it's a great image but what's it all about? What does it mean? And then a bit later, I understood that he was the youngest of five kids. His dad was king of Wessex. He was never meant to be king at all. By the time he became king, the whole of Wessex had gone completely, it was wrecked. And yet he managed to turn it around, defeat the Vikings, become a king who reformed our currency, our legal system, our architecture. he was to my mind one of the greatest kings he was the guy who really sort of started England and I wanted to address that contradiction about the fact that he just didn't he wasn't trained to do it and I was also as I say fascinated by this weird story so I wanted to knit all that together and I and during lockdown I had five or six chapters when it was over I went to a literary agent and he said wow I really think there's something in this let's pitch it to some publishers and on the Thursday he pitched it to 12 publishers by the following Tuesday 10 publishers had said they wanted to publish it which was like just like a dream come true and then it went to auction which is like oh I mean you know I'm afraid I don't know Tony but Sorry about that.

8:22I love how excited you are by it. Man, I was so excited. Because I was going around all these people like Random House and publishers that I'd only just kind of heard of, Penguin and stuff. And they were pitching themselves to me about what they would do if we let them publish the novel. So eventually I went to Little Brown, who have turned out to be the most honestly great great publishers along with my agent Anthony Anthony Topping so I then had about three weeks where my head was like about this size you know all I had to do now was write a whole book and everything would be fine but the thing is I write by hand I always have and I've never wanted not to write by hand my wife and I decided we would go over to Spain for three months I'd got a few jobs to do which I could like fly back and do but all the rest of the time I would be out in Spain writing we drove down through France with our little dog and the first service station in Spain someone broke into the car and nicked all the stuff I had so far written no and it was I you know you it was by hand and it wasn't it wasn't I mean the first five or so chapters were at home but the rest of it that I'd written since then had all gone but even worse than that all the research had gone oh because I'd written I'd just written it by hand and I plunged into such a massive depression depression I mean I know you've been through this before with other interviews but saying that my heart still goes but I just had to get on with it and what I realized was and this is really weird the chapters that I'd lost I was able to write again very quickly somewhere inside this weird thing we call a brain there is this thing that literally stores stuff and I was able to to write very but that was hard hard hard and i lost a lot of confidence for a lot of time oh my gosh i mean i feel like we've done the podcast now that was the most extraordinary failure that turned into a realization of the depth of your talent maybe but that also happened to jilly cooper very similar writer she she lost the manuscript for riders i think on the 22 bus in london and she said the same thing when she rewrote it it just it came to her and it was almost better your sort of your brain is redrafting but I think the thing that strikes me most about that story is the sweet innocence of your enthusiasm and excitement that people would actually be interested in publishing your novel and and even though you're immensely successful I feel like you've never lost that sense of excitement and disbelief almost and I remember reading that when you got the part in Blackadder.

11:20Let's do the Blackadder bit now. Part of the reason that you loved it so much and you were kind of surprised you got the part was because you got this sense of belonging with these kind of Oxbridge types who you didn't feel that you fitted in with. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. It feels like I got the part by chance. I got this letter on the Thursday through the post saying we would like you to be in Rowan Atkinson's new show in the pilot for Rowan Atkinson's new show now if you get a script on the Thursday when rehearsals start the following Monday you know you were not the first choice in fact there was I think there was something like nine other people who said that they didn't want to play Baldrick because honestly it was the part was only like about eight lines long and none of them were gag lines but I had always loved that kind of what I thought of as Oxbridge comedy from that was the week that was in the what would that be oh it's the 60s wasn't it um through to John Wells and John Byrd and John Fortune and then Monty Python and Forty Towers they all seemed to me so golden so wonderful and there was a I always felt there was a part of me who really got that stuff.

12:40As a performer, I really got that stuff. And like actors do, I wrote dozens of letters saying, you know, I'm like you, can I be in your thing? And when I got this letter saying, we would like you to be in it, it didn't matter to me that it was only eight lines. I just thought, I believed that if I could be among that group of people, they would get me. and it worked it was just incredible from the first morning that i walked in i i just felt at home it was magic magic magic it's extraordinary to think of the seismic influence that black adder had and still has given that it was four seasons and the last one which i know so many of you will have seen as i did was set against the backdrop of the first world war and probably has done more than any other piece of popular television to shape our understanding of the Great War.

13:36Was part of the reason there was never a season five because it was impossible to follow that? No, it was mostly because most of the people in it weren't talking to each other by then. Really? Tell me more, Tony. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. But the same was true with the Pythons, wasn't it? You get a lot of incredibly bright people, very ambitious, very articulate, very opinionated young people in the same room. When they have some success behind them, but not a huge amount of success, have an enormous amount of ambition. often I must say when I say ambition not so much like you know they're going to be Brad Pitt or something or even you know drive a Ferrari but ambition for the work you get them all in the same room which it's like a cooking pot always by the end of the first series it's very difficult to hold all those people together and it really took many many years before everybody was still mates again and I know that that was true with the pythons as well yeah do you hate Rowan Atkinson I'm kidding I'm kidding no I said that that pause was not comic timing about irony that pause was because I feel so soft about about Rowan I wouldn't have been sitting here now talking to you had it not been for Rowan's artistic generosity.

15:18If you think about it, he was like at the top of the pyramid. I come in, I'm 38, I'm 10 years older than all that lot, but nobody knows who I am. I've just got the role as a servant. And Rowan and I immediately understood each other. We worked wise. We just knew. We knew the rhythms. It was always... Ba-da-ba-ba-ba-ba-da-dum. Ba-ba-ba-ba. You know, we just knew it. We just got it. And work-wise, we were very, very close. Not so much socially, because by that time, being that much older, I had kids, I was back in Bristol, so I didn't see them too much out of work. But Rowan's generosity was about the fact that he gave me space to play those rhythms and he gave me permission to have those cutaway shots which meant that he would work really hard doing those long gags and I would get the laugh now there aren't many people who in his position who would have allowed that to happen but what going back to that thing about for those people work was all the all important thing Roe is still like that all he cares about is is the work and And if he has to sacrifice the applause and pass the baton to the other person, he will do so.

16:40And that generosity actually, you know, gave me the glorious career I've had. So it forgives the pause. It's not that I think he's a git, because I don't.

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17:53Your first failure, wait for it. in Tony's words I failed to grow tall does this actually feel like a failure to you? in many ways yeah and I think I still carry it around with me I think what first set me off on this was there was a place which used to be called the Acton Hilton it was actually the BBC rehearsal rooms over five floors and the top floor was a restaurant where all the different actors from all the different shows even if you didn't know them very well would meet up and we would get friendly and this is like I was I was in the lunch queue with Victoria Wood and we got talking and she said to me you know we'll never play Romeo and Juliet because I'm too fat to be Juliet and you're too small to be Romeo and you know it it kind of hit me like a bolt from the blue and yet it was so obviously true that although both she and I had all those feelings all those emotion carried all that weight that Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet had there was no way that they were that we were ever going to be given those parts and it it took me back to my feelings at school and just all those humiliations and that kind of thing is still there this is very weird I've never I've never talked about this out loud because well I think you'll understand why nowadays you don't pick on people's looks do you it's like it's kind of a new understanding over the last 10 or 15 years You don't deride people for what they look like.

19:45There is a blind spot about men's height. And the shorter blokes here will understand exactly what I mean. And you kind of don't want to talk about it because, you know, what are you going to get back when you say that? But you look at Love Island. Every woman who is asked what bloke they want, they will always start by saying, I want a tall man. And then everyone else will laugh in collusion. If you look at those kind of either bleeding hearts comments, exactly the same. Smart women who wouldn't pick out the fact that they didn't want, I don't know, didn't want to be married. With a red-haired man.

20:31Or a Jew, or a blind person, or anything else, will laugh with their friends and say, oh God, he's got to be taller than me. Yes. And it really pisses me off, really, to be honest. My wife said, don't get cross when you talk about this. Do. Your anger is welcome here, because I think it's an extremely good point. And actually, I've had two men on the podcast before who are very, very tall, Richard Osman and Stephen Merchant, and they said the same thing. They get it the other way, where you might think, oh you know pass me the tissues complaining about your height but they said that they that that people quite often comment on their height in kind of an insulting slightly jokey way yeah and that's still acceptable yeah which it shouldn't be do you still get comments on it well yes i do but kind of as a performer i've managed to turn it around in some ways and now it's it you know it's it's part of my definition as a performer you know why how did i learn the comic timing for baldrick i think a lot of it had to do with the defense mechanism in the classroom of the tea you know going back to what i was saying about ryan and ryan and i um the teacher would say something and i would go just as rowan who was a chronic stutterer would have used a very similar defense mechanism to to cover up on from his stuff so as a child being the recipient of these mean comments at school was there anyone that you confided in because i know that you're an only child you were your parents only child did you tell them no no i i never learned to confide about hers i didn't i It sounds mad, doesn't it?

22:22I didn't know you could. So I just developed whatever weaponry I could as a young child to push away that hurt. And of course, when it came to adolescence, and I had to confront the fact that I wanted to court girls and that being a short man, I was by definition funny and not someone who most girls would want to be associated with because my height would rub off on them. That was very, very difficult. And, you know, if I could live my adolescence again, it would be to do exactly what you said and seek out people who I could share it with. Because it's not, you know, in the great scheme of things, it's not the worst thing in the world.

23:13It's not Syria or Gaza, is it? It's just a little boy who's hurt and needs to find a vocabulary. Oh, gosh, I really feel for your younger self. I was also, I was the youngest child in my class. Short-sighted, the smallest, the worst at games. Again, it's, you know, so what in a way, but it certainly was never recognised. In retrospect, I think I had quite a tough time with myself, you know. Yes. And although I didn't realise it at the time, I didn't even realise what hurt was. You know, going back to you saying, were you hurt? I didn't know. Well, you probably didn't have the language that we have now around trauma.

24:01And also because you are being raised in the shadow of the Second World War, you probably felt, well, this is small fry compared to what my parents might have gone through. Absolutely. And I think my parents would have thought that. My parents loved me to bits, but I don't think that they would have seen what we've just been discussing as a serious an issue as getting good grades in my O-levels for instance. Just quickly on this failure you have spoken about it being a defense mechanism performance and comedy so when you found yourself on stage age 13 in the first ever production of Oliver was there a level of self-acceptance then?

24:39absolutely I think I was most at home from the moment I was an actor and if you think about it those kids in Oliver were cast because they were little yeah you know you'd got to look younger than you were we'd all got to look cute and I spent this bizarre four years after Oliver where half the time I was in the A stream of a grammar school the other half of the time I was going off to do bit parts in movies and on telly just because I was little. And at school I felt less than, to use today's cliche, but in the theatre I was just alive, I was just there. And I think I still feel that to this day.

25:25Here talking to you now, it's not scary for me. just before we came on I just did that thing to make sure I was centered but just having that little five minute warm-up with you beforehand and we were both giving each sharing with each other those kind of friendly codes about like being on stage and just kind of patter we knew it would be all right and I knew I would be in the place where I feel safe and I knew this audience wouldn't turn on me, will you? You know, and all that, all that I think comes about from the height thing too. So there is a, there's a sort of huge upside about all that.

26:09Your second failure, which is a very intriguing one. I failed to win at Texas Hold 'em. Okay. Not the Beyonce song, I'm imagining, but the actual poker game. Okay. Tell us about this. So from about the age of 16, I loved gambling. I failed my maths O level which was mad because I was the school bookie I always knew that if someone came up to me and said I want to put two bob each way on seabird the second at seven to two I would know immediately how much I had to give them if they won because 72 is three and a half to one so you've lost me tony sorry stay with me um three two bobs is six bob plus the half is makes it seven bob plus a quarter for the place quarter for the of seven bob is one and nine so that's eight and nine plus the original steak is 12 shillings and ninepence of's of's so i mean that may not be right now it's a long time since I've done that stuff in my head but isn't it absurd that I failed my maths o level even though I had enormous pleasure in in in doing that kind of thing and when I went to drama school by the I was I only I went when I was like 17 in the day and there were a lot of older boys there so they were always going down the betting shop which I wasn't even supposed to at 17 so I learned a lot about book about bookies I learned how to play poker and on Friday nights we used to go down to one of our teachers' houses.

27:51And his name was Eric Thompson. And Eric was, at that time, he had created the English version of Magic Roundabout. He's Emma Thompson's dad. This is Eric Thompson. And Emma was seven years old at the time when we would be playing poker. And she would go around and sit on our laps and look at the cards and signal to her dad if she thought we got good cards. This is the best story ever. And you can't tell off a seven-year-old, can you? And I got very good at poker. I won, let's say, two-thirds of the evenings. And I perceived of myself as a really good poker player. And I played, you know, every other Friday night maybe, and most of the times I won.

28:39And the trick with a poker player is knowing you're not always going to win, but the skill is to minimise when you're losing and maximise when you're winning. A couple of years after I left drama school, I won a scholarship to be a theatre director at what's now the MAC, the Midlands Arts Theatre in Birmingham. It then had its own professional theatre company, the Midlands Arts Theatre Company, and I trained to be a professional theatre director when I was there. And while I was there, a friend said to me, there is a professional poker game in this room off the bullring, I could get you into it.

29:16And I thought to myself, this is it. I'm earning 20 quid a week. If I, on average, double it over the course of six months, that's like twice my earnings. So I went there. They were playing Texas Holden, which was a game I knew backwards, and I knew all the odds and everything. I played, and on the first night, I lost 20 quid. so that's a week's wages. So I thought, that's all right, I've minimised my losses. Second week I went, I lost another 20 quid. Breathe in deeply, go back the third week, I lost 40 quid. And at that moment, I knew I wasn't as good as I thought I was. I was maybe quite a good amateur poker player, but in no way would I ever be a professional and you know the thing about being a professional gambler which I thought I would always be if I wasn't a an actor is it was kind of so sexy wasn't it didn't matter I didn't you know I could be a James Bond quite type gambler in a casino I could be dodgy with a brown mac in a betting shop I wouldn't have minded as long as I could do it Suddenly all that had gone and I had to face up to the fact that I was a failure as a gambler.

30:40So you come face to face with who you actually are rather than who you might have been slightly pretending to be, albeit with a foundation of talent. I'm very interested in your relationship with money more generally because growing up there wasn't a lot of it, but you must have been very aware of the value of it when you started earning age 13. I don't think I was because I didn't have anything to spend it on other than sweets and consulate cigarettes. Wait, were you smoking at 30? Oh, yeah, yeah, we all did, because we got money, you know. I earned£10 a week when I was in Oliver. And this is when I learned about capitalism.

31:23It became the biggest hit that there had been for so many years in the British theatre, so we had to get understudies in. they were paid eight pounds a week and then they got the second tranche of understanding this in and they were paid six pounds a week people wanted to be in it because they wanted to be associated with its success but that meant that the the people with the money could were able to pay pay them less but yeah my dad looked after my money and looked after it very honorably which a number of parents of child actors didn't at that time and I got like an extra five bob a week but at that age how I keep talking about an old currency don't I I do still think in old currency there was nothing for me to spend it on but fags and we all felt so cool you know we could stand outside the stage door with these Rothman cigarettes sometimes with long cigarette holders going...

32:26I'm sure you were terribly dumb. With sherbet lemons in our mouths at the same time. That was really all there was to spend the money on. And then when I was 17, my dad said, I didn't earn that much money. I was never a child star. I was a child actor, and like child actors today, the majority of them don't get that much money. But there was enough when I passed my driving test for me to buy a car, and that was the present, apart from the experience of having been a child actor. Have you ever worried about not having enough money? All the time. My dad was brilliant about that. My dad was an administrator by trade, and he wanted me to be an actor.

33:03But at that time, there were so many actors going bust because, as you know, I don't know if they could still call it, but we had to pay tax a year behind on Schedule D, and if you spend all that money, when the tax bill comes around, you go bust. and he was always terrified that I would do that. Can you remember a point in your professional life where you got to the stage and you thought, I don't need to worry about money anymore. I can see my bank balance and I'm okay. Yeah, it was funny actually. It was about the second series of Blackadder. It was when, because I think Time Team had started by that and suddenly there were the VHSs and they were flying off the shelves and I was just putting the money in my current account.

33:51And my bank manager said to me, do you realise that you could at least put it into an account that gave you interest? And shouldn't you get an accountant? Really, I was that naive about the whole thing. And I did, and my accountant, who just very luckily turned out to have the accountant from heaven. And I'm still with the same accountant all these years later. and he just kind of talked me through the whole thing and I realised I was in the process of earning more money than I could legitimately spend and that was absolutely great. Yeah, what a wonderful present that is. You know, going back to that thing about Rowan.

34:32Thank you Rowan for that. Thanks for the money Rowan. So what do you think your failure as a Texas Hold 'em player has taught you? I think you hit the nail on the head it's about of course we're all going to have fantasies about what we can be and actually I think being the only child of really loving middle class family who always told me I could be whatever I wanted to be I think I've always had those fantasies I always thought I could be a judge I always thought I could be a politician. I always thought I could be a gambler. All of those things I may well have failed in. Had I done so, the great trick would be to let the failure go.

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36:17You speak so beautifully about your parents, and I know many of us here will have watched your astonishing documentary that you made with your mother about finding her a care home. Both your parents, as I mentioned in the introduction, lived with Alzheimer's and died with the disease, and it's an incredibly cruel thing for someone to go through and for their family to go through. as an only child I imagine that weight must have been crushing at times yeah it was I think I've talked to a lot of people about this as you can imagine and they always say the same thing that if you are an only child it is very very hard I was lucky because both my kids were young adults by that time and I was able to share some of that weight with them but then I as a dad I didn't want to share too much of that weight with them although when it got intolerable I was able to and my girlfriend at the time was great about it too.

37:11But I kind of felt it was my responsibility. I was their child. They had given me so much. And I think it was even worse then than it was now in that nobody really knew anything about Alzheimer's. Their doctor didn't know anything about it. I went to the doctor and it was like, oh, well, your dad's just being a bit silly. That was kind of the message I was getting off them. You know, my dad went in to see the doctor. My dad was suffering from such confusion. When he went to see the doctor, he pulled himself together. People with Alzheimer's can be artful, and I don't say that in a cruel way. It's part of their way of coping.