Tony Robinson

I've spent so much of my life in what can be quite solitary professions, particularly when you're fronting television programmes. I've been all over the world doing that on my own, to be able to enjoy that in the company of someone you adore makes it five times as good.

Virtually all my conscious life I had been involved in theatre - I had been a child actor - but as a young man who had experienced the 1960s, British theatre seemed remote from my aspirations in life - theatre was still a posh thing, a middle-class thing, something for an elite.

My parents taught me practical things, about how important hard work, discipline and the necessity of managing your own money were. Their values were very much the values of the postwar middle class.

I have always felt that the rise of what became known as alternative comedy was born out of the loins of the alternative theatre movement.

I believe that any politician has to be constantly challenged. It is very easy for the rest of us to seduced into thinking they're smarter than us, or that they are privy to more information.

I hate the word educational! I mean, 'Downton Abbey' is educational in that you come away from it knowing so much more about that period than when the show started, but you don't come away thinking it was educational.

Ancient barrows get cleared away. Legislation is pretty much 19th century. Global warming means there is an awful lot of erosion, exposing new archaeology, there is not the funding around to deal with it.

As a child actor, you haven't been allowed to be yourself for most of your life; you've been constrained by the demands of your job, your parents, directors. A fictional or amplified version of you exists, but when you're 17, you can't have a debate with yourself about authenticity.

I was an only child. Both my parents came from working-class families in Hackney, east London.

The confidence in my ability to be a performer, a steeliness about survival... I learnt all those things from my dad.

I didn't have much of a formal education myself.

Fifty one per cent of 'Time Team' viewers are not of my gender. And that surprised me, because I thought it'd be at least 60 per cent male.