I am no great fan of the word history. Or politics, or religion, or archaeology for that matter. They’re all such pompous, cold words that seem to squeeze any possibility of life out of subjects that are anything but. An old hippie friend I met in the 60s in Mojácar, Spain once said to me that there are no boring things. Everything is part of this wonderful phenomenon of us living in the world. But there are certainly boring ways of talking about things. I’ve never found a better way of putting it.
What I’ve always wanted to do is find out about something, find out what it really is, and celebrate it. When that happens I get very excited and want to share it, just like if you’ve had a great experience you go home and say, you’ll never guess what just happened to me. That’s how I feel about discovering things, whether they’re historical or archaeological. It’s just, mother of Christ, this is amazing!
It’s ironic then that at rest my face looks rather grumpy, and maybe I am profoundly morose, and these explosions of joy are a way of escaping from that. But I do like enjoying things, and I do like sharing that joy, and I think that impulse runs through everything I’ve done, from comedy and acting, to Time Team and children’s books. It’s just what I’ve followed, without ever really being something I planned.
That’s probably why age has never had all that much meaning for me. I was an only child brought up by two doting parents who I considered friends really rather than parents, and the notion of age didn’t come into things very much. In the latter part of my life, virtually all of my friends have been considerably younger than me. I would say my favourite friends are my kids and my wife.
And those two things together – following joy and my ease with younger ages – probably explains why writing for children has always felt so natural. When I first started I realised pretty soon that it’s not quite that you’re writing for children, it’s that you’re writing into the space that you’re in when you are with children. Any parent will understand what I mean by that. And there have always been little Easter eggs for adults in the children’s books too, not because I’m really writing for adults and pretending otherwise, but because I want to write for everybody in my children’s work.
What’s happening now is so extreme and so fast that we simply can’t adapt to it in the speed with which it happens.
When I turn that same curiosity on the world right now, I find it both genuinely fascinating and deeply unsettling. I’m not sure about the adage that history always repeats itself. What I do think is that there are little arcs of experience that reflect themselves, that you can notice from one period to another, and sometimes try to avoid. But what’s happening now is so extreme and so fast that we simply can’t adapt to it in the speed with which it happens. All the rules, all the institutions, all the moralities and attitudes developed in Western Europe over the last three or four hundred years, it’s like they don’t exist anymore.
I played a game with myself as I walked to the shops recently, and imagined doing it as a five year old and asking what was still the same. There wasn’t very much. The pillar boxes, maybe. That was about it. This is a truly bizarre situation we’ve created. And it is, in spite of everything, an extraordinary time to be alive, probably more exciting for younger people who weren’t invested in those old institutions.
There are things that history can help us understand, though, even now. I don’t think we can begin to understand what’s happening in the Middle East unless we realise that two bureaucrats, Sykes and Picot, drew the borders of the region after the First World War without any respect for the people who lived there. That has been a time bomb ever since. It’s one of many instances and the same story plays out across Africa, where someone took a ruler and drew a line for hundreds of miles straight across cultures and communities that had existed long before anyone thought to put a border through them. History doesn’t repeat itself, but the consequences of its carelessness certainly linger.
This is also, I think, why governing has become so extraordinarily difficult. We are no longer masters of our own destiny in the way we once were. Even a message from one person to another, even the transfer of money from one place to another, things that once took time and had friction, now happen instantly and across boundaries that make the old tools of government feel hopelessly inadequate.
The sheer difficulty of steering the good ship Britain is of a completely different order to how it’s been in the past, and I think it is no surprise that we’ve had so many leaders over such a short period of time.
Whatever you think of Keir Starmer as a politician, the level of vitriol poured on him seems to me wildly out of proportion. Of course, he has made some really gauche mistakes. But sometimes I wake up in the morning and think, “what are they all talking about?” This idea that he epitomises duplicity and stupidity. It just doesn’t seem appropriate. I think I’d feel the same if he were Rishi Sunak or anyone else. The problem isn’t the person. The problem is the impossible complexity of the moment.
I have a yearning for authenticity. So much of the world we live in is fabricated.
What I find myself yearning for, looking at all of this, is authenticity, and the nuance that comes with it. So much of what passes for public life now is fabricated, positions taken not because someone has thought carefully but because it makes them feel part of the same outraged gang as other people. They become wanted, they become meaningful, if they just assert certain positions loudly enough. And what that means is there is no room for understanding, and no room for nuance. If there is one thing I’d want to bring back to our society, it’s nuance. To take a hard position on anything just doesn’t work in the long run. We’ve seen it over and over again.
Trump will take a hard position for three days and then find that even the emperor of the world, or at least I’m sure that’s what he thinks he is, simply can’t sustain it. He very much doubt he’d even heard of the Strait of Hormuz when he bombed Iran, and had no idea what he was unleashing. The world is far too complicated for the kind of certainty people seem to want from it.
The interesting thing is that this yearning for authenticity is in a way a contradiction, because what I do is absolutely fabricated. Actors talk about actors’ truth, which when you think about it is complete bollocks. You’re on a stage saying someone else’s words, doing the same thing night after night, pretending. The idea that that is truth seems absurd.
And yet when you’re up there working with your fellow actors, something real can happen, a shared understanding that becomes so strong you can transmit it to an audience. Anyone who’s ever watched Marlon Brando knows exactly what I mean. You could cut it with a knife. Whether that constitutes truth in any objective sense I genuinely couldn’t say, but it’s real in some way that clearly matters.
And maybe that’s the point. It’s something to do with a common understanding, isn’t it? Most of what we believe in, 200 years from now people will probably think was complete twaddle. And yet, if we live in a world where we believe things and they seem to link up with other things, and we believe them in a kind way, that seems to be the way human civilisations have worked best. Not certainty. Not outrage. Just a shared, imperfect, good-faith attempt to make sense of the world together.
That, as far as I can tell, is what history has always been trying to tell us. We just keep finding such boring ways of listening to it.
This conversation took place in April 2026 and has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Sir Tony Robinson’s latest book, The House of Wolf is available now.
