Tony Robinson: Time Team Memories

[Music] [Music] well first of all sir tony welcome oh thank you very much tim thank you this is a glass of champagne which i uncorked in your honor um thank you and indeed um my relationship with archaeology came up in the citation so you know the time team is part of the reason i was honored which is lovely and i knew you for so long that this got vague feeling of talking to one of my exes you know it's just you know we were together for what 22 years for god's sake yes and never a crossword tim just like with your exes i i i think i i i was thinking about that and first of all i'd like to say thank you for being there for that time i really mean that i think you're the fact that you went through the wet and rainy days with sod all archaeology in and at the end of it managed to get yourself together to do the end piece to camera and the fact that i don't you i don't think you missed one with a sniffle a cold or a which was remarkable i mean it says something about you know genetic energy i suppose or something but i just thought that was a real that's a real block of work isn't it i suppose what we all felt after a while is it actually didn't matter if we didn't find anything on that day because when you do a quest it's hard and if we were constantly revealing things all the time then people wouldn't really buy into the notion that what we was doing what we were doing was real they think oh it's just telling but i mean i remember i'm sure you remember too i think it was in in derbyshire it was near manchester somewhere we did three whole days where we didn't find anything unfortunately it was probably about episode 14 or 15 or something and you and i we didn't lose our bottles if it had been episode one we'd both been tearing our hair out and saying we've got no show but we knew that what was important was the investigation so i think i always wanted to come and i knew that if i was looking like a drowned rat and phil was too and we were desperately trying to interview each other a half past four in the afternoon wishing to god we were in the pub we knew it would be good telling i always felt that your opening piece to camera in three days we're going to find x there was a point when it sort of got to you it got to me as well that we kind of knew we were trying to communicate it's communicate something to the viewer by the end of the program and and some of those sites where day day two nothing and you're thinking well and and we start looking at the researcher developer i was saying we could always sacrifice one of the researchers as a sort of to odin yeah yeah and i remember in the early days we we used to do some quite artistic work in those opening pieces when graham dixon was the director dear graham um he would devise you to be walking through a marsh like athene and sort of the sun would rise the mists would cross and you'd say in three days we're going to find x and i thought oh crikey i hope you know we do i think it's interesting the way you describe that because i think that one of the uh developments the maturities that happened during time team was that when it started we felt we needed to employ my skills for better or worse as a storyteller as an actor we needed graham to do beautiful stuff it was really i think only once we got the confidence to know that all that mattered was the archaeology that we could simplify all that stuff up the top and just say to the audience you know what this is you know the deal this is what we're doing this week let's get into it as quickly as possible and i think that was probably a relief to all of us and apart from anything else it meant it didn't tie up the first half a day of the three days on doing beautiful work for the first five minutes of the show yes i seem to remember quite a few shoots of you wandering through somerset mud and reeds sort of appearing [Music] one wellington thing stuck the other thing tim uh you saying about how you would write all this labyrinth stuff at the beginning was that for a long time you would write enormous elaborate amounts of stuff at the end and up some which i had to learn like a half past six on the third evening you would present me with this full scale there was hey poetry that was made poetry it was poetry but i think it well it was more war and peace than the sun but but again i think what we learned after a while was that what the audience really took away with them was two or three memories if they were really liking a logical nerd they would have taped it anyway and they would go back and go this way but i think to most people what they needed was just the reward of it was a field and now i know a thing yeah and it was it was liberation for me and i remember the strain of that because you know we didn't always go to bed early i mean you were quite good at leaving about 10 30 but there were times when things went on a little late then get up in the morning at the crack of dawn it was the fresh air all the time that knackered me you know you were out there in the wind you'd have lunch in the wind then and that final moment and i often saw you in your car disappearing at the end i i i don't know what you were doing i imagine you were singing but how you felt when you left having done that final piece to camera i think i always knew that i needed my energy before now but you know when we started i was young middle-aged but i think i'd learned uh both through meditation and just by being an actor that when you're off you really need to get keep that battery low so that when you're in demand bang you can start again and i think for a lot of the archaeologists on the third morning when they had their second hangover running well they were kind of on their own i wouldn't come to them until about mid morning so they got that amount of time but every morning i had to be hey this is so exciting camera first thing so i desperately needed to be on top of it and the few mornings that i did have a hangover i really i just so didn't enjoy doing the show and if i'm not enjoying it the audience wouldn't enjoy yeah various people decided that having done the whole stressful thing of trying to do archaeology in three days trying to uncover sites nobody had looked at before we'd then have a crack at doing it live and suddenly there we were in buckingham palace digging up the queen's lawn or a one of the live sites in york and that thing where the producer would come and you'd be running with an entire crew following you and we'd be hearing five three two what do you remember about the lives is it traumatic or did you think it was worth the pressure you know that hunter that writer hunter s thompson who wrote all those drug-fueled books yeah and his whole day he was like that was how it was for me i have to say the last thing i wanted was any artificial stimulus but i would i would always lose at least three or four pounds in weight during the course of those days because it was like that you just had to stay in the moment all the time and the moment was constantly going away from you because the technology was so temperamental uh that everything kept going down you weren't sure if everything was working people were rushing by yelling at you if you put your script down it was suicide because someone would clear it away and you would have no idea what was happening there was one live shooter i don't know if you remember this but there was one a moment where the camera was following me i went left they went right and i lost the crew i had to keep talking and they were doing pretty shots because they were definitely trying to find me and we're in a ruined castle and i was over still desperately talking they were going that was a buzz i really really did enjoy it but i enjoyed it in that kind of wild-eyed way that you would if you were on a yacht from it was a storm yes that was borsy i think wasn't it remember that skull that head chopped the that thing yes there was one classic moment that i remember when we prepared a scene um desperately trying to hopefully make it happen when you arrive we knew you were coming and phil was in the trench with margaret cox who as you know is just a genius when it comes to bones and had pointed out to phil repeatedly that this skeleton had a pubic tubercle which is the thing that the the womb hangs off the muscles hang off for the woman and here you came rattling across phil was scraping away turn up he said here tony i think i've got a tubic pubical here and margaret with laughter and the whole trend was shaking um and on we went think that's um i think that's uh uh there were big ones for me one big difference between the lives and the other ones is normally on the other ones i would go over to a trench i would have a conversation probably with you although you might be managing another trench but certainly with the the director and the archaeologists and i would ask them what they found what the route through to that was what were the major points that they wanted me to hit and i would kind of orchestrate it in my mind and then when they said action there would as it were be a kind of dance which the um cameraman and i would know and the contributors would know they would roughly know who i was going to go to next and the kind of thing that they would want me to say but then when we got to the live there was never any time for that and i mean you gave a very vivid example of that but um i would go up to a trench i wouldn't have a clue what was going on and and we would we would all be improvising and that was that was lovely really because that is life isn't it but it's life under great pressure if i gave you the time team crew we'd all turn up alarmingly enough in the trucks and everybody would be there and you could take us anywhere you want in the world to any site we're going to stick a trowel in your hand you're going to be there with us what sort of places would you like to take as if you had a chance i know exactly where i would like to take you it's it's tyrion's in the peloponnese most people know something about the uh trojan war and homer and all those stories and if you said the word mycenae they would vaguely know that there was some lovely old archaeology there and there is a dotted all over the peloponnese there's little echoes of that particular culture tyrion's is bonkers tyrion's the the buildings they call them cyclopic because they actually believe the cyclops must have built them because it's all so massive and i would love to introduce an audience to tyrion's and to see what is around it but of course the restrictions on greek archaeology quite understandably are so enormous and the greeks aren't that friendly with us about our uh archaeology apparently we went out with a a few tons of archaeology in our pockets in the 19th century and it's still a museum so well i kind of kind of understand that but that would be my dream yeah interesting enough i went to my sinai last year and stood in the tomb of atreus which is this huge treasury of atreus this beautiful beehive location interesting enough one of the people we're working at the moment has been working on a site quite near tyrion's and has had great time with the archaeologists and it's the place where the main dye came from for roman purple robes and it's got a hillside full of buildings that have not been looked at it it's tumbled down and um it's a lovely site i always felt do you remember that moment when i i i don't know whether you were occasionally there but we'd certainly walk into a commissioning editor at channel 4 and i would have a list of sites it would be like manchester newcastle and then halfway down i'd slip in the caribbean nevis and inevitably they'd look at you and say holiday or what you know and and i think some of those sites we went to nevis we went to spain um we did a lot of america america some areas city um memories of nevis because i think both you and i i felt we could do this and you could put us anywhere you could have put us in egypt you could put as on a greek site and we'd have done exactly what we do in the uk carefully do the archaeology so we ended up and we had to do two sites to you know make it worthwhile an amber indian site in an early year colonial center and we ended up in the caribbean with jungle and god what are your memories of that i know both you and i were very ambitious to do a global series because we both felt that we could keep them as domestic we could keep them as much fun but on an enormous scale and i think channel 4 never wanted that they always wanted it to be really domestic i remember the channel 4 commissioning editor said to me once the perfect time team would be a back garden in nottinghamshire where you find an anglo-saxon burial site by their fish pond and we did do you remember it had grown wrong yeah so that that was their ambition but we we always and the other is money of course because the travel was so enormous and now given kovitz i think you and i are going to be a pretty wobbly old man before we were ever asked to to do that but the thing about nevis i suppose is that it was the antithesis of having a jolly holiday it was such hard work the temperature on one of those islands is absolutely colossal which you kind of don't notice except you get brown when you're on holiday but we had to get up at something like half past four in the morning in order to get to the site um and have enough hours of a decent temperature and then we had to travel through all this kind of you know it felt almost as long as they were in the amazon there was so much dense tropical uh rainforest in order to get back to somewhere relatively cool and then start again at three o'clock in the afternoon worked through by eight o'clock when we got back home we went completely wiped out and then we kind of did that for three days and then on the fourth day we were on the trail the plane back to england i remember the archaeology absolutely very very vividly to be honest in my ignorance i don't think i'd realized that there were amerindians in virtually all of the caribbean islands all of whom we seem to have systematically slaughtered it's one of the the great obscenities of our colonialism i think um and i'm kind of recapturing little memories and little observations about those people who were there far beyond the british settlers far beyond the portuguese or the arabs who may have landed up there at some time these wonderful people who are just echoes in our memory i think that was the most vivid memory to me on the on the seashore you could find little bits of works too that was theirs and and i i think i i hope we achieved it i think on those overseas sites we did show i mean as you know i was trying to get a world time team going one way or another and there was a funny transition in america between doing real archaeology and history and then doing ice road truckers i think that i think that's always been the problem for us we were very lucky that we worked for channel 4 who by and large really protected the integrity of what we wanted to do they even after a couple of years gave us enough money to to uh do the post-production uh proper archaeological work every other television company we went to was so imbued with some kind of showbiz morality but almost as soon as we went to them it all became tordry so probably in a way it's best that we did stay as clear as we did um one of the things that we ask a lot of people when we're chatting about interviews this is the tony robinson museum of time team fines and this is a bit like uh this is a dreadful memory exercise which i should have we should have exchanged notes on i suppose but i'm i have a connected question with this which is now you're doing a series about the thames who've been doing walks in history what do you do what sense do you get about the difference between history and when you've got an artifact in your hand but first what artifacts do you remember from time team and would you like in your personal collection of time team fines i think when we first started uh what i wanted to do was dig down about a few feet and then find the pointy bit on the top of the pyramid it was always the the biggest most perfect most exotic thing that one could possibly find the more we got into time team the more i realized that what it was able to offer was the mark of ordinary people in the landscape and after a while that's what i used to get emotional about it was almost as though they'd signed an autograph book and then buried it and left it for me so it's something like a roman tile with a dog's paw print on was great because i always remember when i was little and my dad made a concrete path uh down to the shed and he laid it in the day and then the next day came back and there were all these cats paw prints and i remember the language that he used and it was just like the guy who made that was just like my dad would have been just as furious or i remember a site which i think we did in rutland where it was like a big big wooden medieval house or manor and there were two lumps of wood which we found dissociated from each other but each one was marked with what joint it was and just the initials of the joint and we were able to put them back in together and it's like that that was him exploded that he probably got a roll in his mouth and he copied the sun in his back pocket and and that was the work he was doing and and like that i can remember when we discovered the the uh country cathedral the one that henry viii smashed up there was this beautiful carving from the church which had been in one of the pillars but then when you spun it around it was just kind of raw because that bit was going to go slotty into the pillar and there was real back of a packet scratch of what it was going to look like at the front and it was as though the master mason he was going to go away for a bacon sandwich down the road and he just said to the uh the trainee look this is what we're going to do so if you just carve that that bit and i'll be back in half an hour those kinds of things were the ones that i really treasured i was watching a programme recently and um i found a note tony gets trowel goes into trench and finds flint arrowhead or piece of pottery you and i occasionally when phil wasn't looking sneaked in and had a bit of a scrape it was as dangerous for me as it was for you the one that i remember the most and we never shot it precisely because we weren't trying to advocate that people like you and me should have scraped we wanted that to be done by professionals we were down on a roman site and we had a roman mosaic specialist with us and he said to me i reckon about two inches below us there is a mosaic floor and i said i got i'll i'll go get tim i'm going to get the carrot we'll just check it you and me just to see if there is and i said i can't i'm not an archaeologist he said look the thing about floors is they're robust if it wasn't robust it would be a pretty pretty rubbish floor i'll stand over your shoulder here's a trowel and while everyone else was off i was the first person to reveal a tiny bit of this mosaic floor which was best of you know the best part of 2000 years old and i think apart from the occasional wonderful meal and some great sex this is the moment in my life that i remember most the whole mystery of seeing something you begin with a few and you think oh this is going to be a corridor mosaic a few lines and then you get a squirt of a design of flower yeah absolutely absolutely the first mosaic the first little tile i got first tesla was white and i thought exactly what you just said it's a flipping corridor and then you go further and there's a little bit of black it's corridor with a little bit of pretty on it and then you get that first sort of ochre one and then oh it's a floor and the tragedy of it was that when eventually the other archaeologists came in and we exposed it with a big damn floor it was almost perfect except there were two big gouges out of it which were the deep ploughing which farmers had only been doing there for five years and you know you and i were always constantly particularly sort of trying to crowbar in moments on the television to say please please be ever so careful when you plow because it's it's so easy to ruin our shared heritage but that was that was not a great moment one of the things that i think not many people realized over the years is that you could dive and i remember quite a few dive sites flan gorse you in a big dry suit and carenza in a big dry suit in the old days um tinmuth um where you had a little paddle and and phil wasn't very well that diving side again that felt to me like i was stretching what we could do if you could dive we could get a cameraman down with you phil could dive i remember taking phil on a training thing for diving and we could not sink him he was like hollow man the guy was putting sinks bits of lead weight in his boots and everything do you still dive i still get the mask and miss snorkel on and float along the surface and look down and to be honest there is an awful lot of great archaeology which you you can see virtually surface so i've i have lost a little bit and i regret it but i've done it you know i had 10 15 golden years where i was diving onto sites yeah and i remember you up in scotland on isla in some week and uh i thought wow this looks like some sort of action archaeology program here we've got diving going on here which was great um the lens single it was as though everybody on the whole side had been stricken by the same plague i've never seen so many action-faced people in my life and i remember the brand it was bunner haben which i'd rather like because it's the one that's got the song western home with the song in the uh that one the other one i remember diving connected at language do you remember that final scene where we'd spent three days with damian goodburn creating a wooden boat and damien was pretty hard on the ground with these guys he'd driven them overnight and finally we had this log hollowed out and you and phil went off in it and the cameras were all ready to take you and the thing had a life of its own it just sort of snaked i think one of the things that we discovered was how difficult it is for anybody nowadays to comprehend uh prehistoric boat work and certainly very very very difficult for us to use it in the way that they did there are so many boat programs that i did with time team and time team documentaries where we ended up up to our wastes in water even with war you know when when there were bronze age boat specialists with us because we just can't quite do it if you had to choose one program one or two programs to stand by out of the time team over as we might call it is there one or two that you'd say because i watched one the other day i hadn't watched it for ages series 12 to 16 and i sat there thinking this is really a nice great enjoyable i was like going this is good yeah the one i would really really defend is the one where we found out in south wales where we found the whole thing was a ripoff oh yes legally look legato that's right uh over a period of time different people had just stuck things in the ground and the whole thing looked like the most awe-inspiring sight and i remember by two-thirds of the way through day one the arc is the archaeologist was saying to you we've got to get away from this this is so gonna undermine what we do because it's all phony and you said and you were absolutely right no what we can show is how archaeology works we're going to go to everything on this site just like csi do and show how you discover whether something is real archaeology or not and we did that over three days and apparently i was very not nervous about it but i thought people might kick up a fuss about it but apparently for a long while they used to show it in schools to kids who were studying uh gcse archaeology i don't think there is such thing tragically but so they could see actually how archaeologists approach problems and um just for those who didn't see it we had a we had a medieval wall that had a victorian jam jar under it a standing stone that francis could push over and that wasn't on the 1946 aerials and uh an iron age sword that had a piece of modern barbed wire going over the top of it which stewart identified and as i think that was what my favorite thing was that stewart was able to to date the barbed wire yes there was a typology of of barbara final thing and it'd be lovely to come back and talk some other day i know you have uh um in a sense political interests about archaeology you and i care about getting fines protected getting sites protected and all the rest of it um but i didn't want to end today without a few thoughts about mick um my friend your friend you knew mick before i did and it was the joy of that program was you and i knew that we could always go back to mick and just a couple of memories for him of him to end on really i think possibly what mick would have liked to say um was that he brought landscape archaeology into the popular imagination you and i knew about the famous book by hoskins about landscape archaeology which i suppose had come out 10-15 years before time t but everybody thought that archaeology was about digging a hole finding a thing and taking it away it was mick who taught me and taught a wider audience that landscape is like a book where on chapter one you start and you know very little and gradually you open up a whole landscape and the fines are great but the fines are just part of the story and the layers are just as much part of it that reveal time as you excavate downwards the link there is between what you've got and what other people have discovered in other places the link between what you've discovered the nearby church or the shape of the nearby road or the bends in the river and how those bends have changed over time the fact that archaeology is a fascinating essay and that you could only tell the importance of an archaeological site by walking in two or three miles in each direction i think that's that was what mick taught me um mick as a person was one of the most rabelasian people that i've ever met and anybody who doesn't know what ravelaisian is google it rather than me having to go into detail um absolutely lovely to talk to you it's it's it's a great pleasure that um you've said that you would welcome the chance to be an honorary patron of what happens next uh you are part of time team's dna um and you are part a huge part of that story and and just listening to you talking makes me understand why it's so nice to feel that you have some ongoing connection with whatever craziness we pursue into the future so lovely to talk to you just just contact me all the time let me know what's going on if if if time team is a book i'm you know i'm so looking forward to reading the next chapter i think it's so brilliant that you've started all this again and some of the old friends will be in this i know the ones who survives you know there's a growing list as you and i know of people who are now very poorly or have left this planet who are associated with time team and i'm i'm very excited to see what the next generation will do with it and for you you've got a series on the thames coming out on channel five is it or yeah and i've also got um another series called uh tony robinson's history of britain which i've shot and is in the process of being edited which again is about the mark of ordinary people within history and uh uh yeah so i'm keeping keeping up waving the flag passing on the battle tony thank you so much lovely to talk to you uh we could have gone on for a lot longer but it's been great talking to you lovely hearing and catching up with all those memories and stay well and i look forward to seeing your series when they come out next cheers mate and i'm now going to press the button which says leave but give my love to everybody we can't do any of this work without you so please subscribe back us on patreon and make sure that time team comes back again

Channel: Time Team Official

Views: 69,457

Rating: 4.9666982 out of 5

Keywords: Time team, Archaeology, History, Tim Taylor, Channel 4, Archaeological, Archaeological site, Digging, Digs, UK Archaeology, Archeology, archeology site, Phil Harding, Mick Aston, Tony Robinson, TimeTeam, Time Team Official

Id: nEA_y-e6wG8

Length: 34min 18sec (2058 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Actiaslunahello]

Tony is the best!! <3

[u/goeie-ouwe-henk]

At 07:13 Baldrick came to life for a moment :D

[u/No-Pressure6042]

Anyone know what episode he's referring to when he says that everything was fabricated on the site?