Sir Tony Robinson: Playing the clown and why Alfred is the greatest

“It was the Leeds Playhouse in those days and this was the very first Leeds Playhouse, there hadn’t been one prior to that,” he explained. “A whole lot of people had got together to fundraise – Peter O’Toole had come up and made speeches, Keith Waterhouse did as well. Eventually Leeds Council gave them £25,000 and they built a theatre in the gym at the university.

“I was the very first actor on the first stage at Leeds Playhouse. The theatre went black, the spotlight came on and there was me dressed as a clown and the audience went crazy! They applauded for about five minutes, which for an unknown actor was just about the biggest ego trip you could have.

“Of course, they weren’t applauding me it was the fact that after all their hard work over the years they’d finally got a professional Equity member standing on their stage doing a play. That was one of the highlights of my performing life.

“The play was called Simon Says by Alan Plater – it was funny and political, it was ideal for a Leeds play and I played the part of Simon. The fantasy of it is that everything was set in a circus."

Robinson is returning to Yorkshire this month to speak at The Northern Aldborough Festival – one of the most prestigious classical music events in the country – that is itself celebrating 30 years since it was founded in 1994. Based in the village of Aldborough near York the festival aims to ‘bring exceptional music from world class performers to new audiences, in rural locations where it wouldn’t normally be heard’.

The village, which was built on the site of a major Roman-British town, is also of huge interest to Robinson, who for many years hosted the popular television programme Time Team which saw specialists carrying out archaeological digs over a period of three days at sites across the country.

“I have spent an awful lot of time in Yorkshire and an awful lot of time looking at history of Yorkshire but I have never been to Aldborough. So it’s actually going to be very exciting for me,” he said.

“I’ve always thought how glorious it is for the little village of Aldborough to say ‘stuff the one down south, we’re going to have our own music festival’. It’s like if Woodstock near Oxford said ‘right, we’re going to have our own rock n roll festival!”

Explore Yorkshire’s rich arts and culture scene with our dedicated newsletter

While Robinson will have the opportunity to brush up on his Roman history at Aldborough, he pulls a face when it’s suggested that for many people he could list amateur archeologist to his list of talents. And although he is currently writing two historical novels, he wouldn’t badge himself as an historian either.

“More than anything else I’m a storyteller, so I’m after the story,” he says. “Like a journalist you can go out and cover something and it blows up or you can have five days of nothingness which we often had on Time Team.

“The period is irrelevant, what is important is the story. Having said that, personally the period that fascinates me the most is the Anglo Saxon period. It was during the Anglo Saxon period that England as a concept was created.

“You have this remarkable king called Alfred who comes out of nowhere and he and his son and grandson create the beginning of England. How they did that, how they were possible able to do that, has always seemed to me to be a miracle.

“And given that Anglo Saxon England – because most of the stuff was made out of wood and leather and things that were friable not much of it remains. Not in the same way as the bricks of Rome remain. So trying to tease out that story from such impermanent remains is a challenge.

“The fact that he (Alfred) had this mate called Bishop Asser who did for him what Dominic Cummings did for Boris Johnson and Alastair Campbell did for Tony Blair and created a story around them that he perpetuated is brilliant because it does give you a flavour of the man in a very modern way. But on the other hand you really have to take it with a pinch of salt because it’s as much propaganda as the propagandists of today present us with.

“Trying to find that balance for what Asser wrote as evidence but also recognising that a lot of the real Alfred is going to be buried away somewhere between the lines I find it enormously satisfying.”

Perhaps the most popular character Robinson played was Baldrick, the servant and sidekick of Blackadder in the comedy series of the same name, which was set in different parts of British history. The final series focused on the First World War but with the 80th anniversary of D-Day having taken place on June 6 Robinson said he thinks lessons can be learned by studying the Second World War.

He said: “One of the interesting things about time past is how elastic it is. I was born in 1946 and yet the Second World War seemed a million miles away. Now, having spent so much time immersed in history, I think the Bronze Age was quite close to me.

“And I think that happens more and more you concentrate on a particular time the closer it gets to you. Which is why it is probably so important for our generation that the younger generations should know more about the Second World War because then they can become more aware of it. Become more aware of what war actually means in your own country, what it means when you lose people of your own.

“One of the things when you don’t look at that part of history – those wars – you just forget how dreadful they are. I think it was Shelley who wrote a poem; he’d been to a battleground in Europe which had been incredibly famous, one of the most significant battles of a particular war, and 30 years later nobody remembered who’d fought it.

“In my lifetime the First World War has actually got much closer to kids then when I was a kid. Then the First World War was all in black and white and people running around in a jerky fashion.

“But nowadays so many kids – maybe because of the Channel Tunnel – see the front line and go out and be engaged with it, work out what relatives they had were involved in it and it is very personal to a lot of kids these days, it is a strange kind of miracle.

“And in a way I think for the past couple of decades, no matter how bonkers this may sound, the First World War has been closer to kids than the Second World War was. That generation of the Second World War is beginning to die out and those voices are beginning to disappear. Hopefully the Second World War will become to come closer to people again."

Sir Tony Robinson will speak at The Northern Aldborough Festival on June 20. The festival takes place June 13-22, 2024 for tickets visit aldboroughfestival.co.uk