Across the table from me, Tony Robinson’s eyes are brimming with what look like tears. I’ve just asked him about the time five chapters of his book were stolen from his car while he was on holiday, and the memory is clearly still raw. It must have been a hell of a manuscript, I think. But that’s not the whole story.
“During lockdown, my wife Louise and I got a dog called Holly Berry, whom we loved very much,” he says. “Loved particularly hard because she had been a poorly old thing. It was wonderful bringing a rescue dog back to life. It’s been one of the joys I’ve discovered only over the last few years. But she had diabetes, so I had to inject her at six o’clock every morning and six o’clock in the evening.”
While driving down to Spain, they had stopped at a service station when a car pulled up and zoomed off with their belongings. “No smash, just grab.” Five handwritten chapters were in the bag that was taken, along with three years’ worth of research. But, more pressingly, Holly Berry’s medication was snatched as well. They sped down to their destination, where they found a vet who supplied them with insulin. “Three weeks later, we realised they had given us the wrong syringes and not enough of the medicine, and Holly Berry died.”
By this stage, there is something in my eye, too. Following Holly Berry’s passing, Robinson – always so unflappable as Baldrick in the adored British historical sitcom Blackadder – was too distressed to write. “I was completely flattened. Lou was in as much mourning as I was, but she raised me up. Within three weeks, I was writing again, and I found it was still in my head – a number of writers who’ve lost manuscripts have said the same thing. And in a way, you actually write them better.”
We are in the Embankment offices of his publishers, Little, Brown, to discuss his new book The House of Wolf. It is a saga of prodigious scale, and Robinson’s first novel for adults following more than 30 children’s books and a handful of non-fiction works, including his 2016 memoir, No Cunning Plan. It is the first in a planned Anglo-Saxon trilogy exploring the rise of Alfred the Great: “The burning of the cakes will happen in my second book, and I’ve got an answer to what happened, which I really enjoy.”
He has described the book as “Succession for the Middle Ages”: the elderly king Aethelwolf is ailing, and must decide to which of his enormously flawed children to bequeath the kingdom of Wessex. The action unfolds across Europe, taking in the marauding Norlanders (Vikings), papal conspiracies and a series of monasteries. Dickens, Tolkien, Pratchett and George RR Martin are named as influences.
The scope is vast, with a four-page index of characters and maps for readers to get their heads around (Robinson had a PA to keep track of them all, leaving him free to “let [his] imagination run riot”). But the world-building came naturally: “I don’t find that very difficult. It’s what I’ve always done.” While a continent-spanning saga might be a daunting prospect for anyone, Robinson, who spent 20 years excavating archaeological sites around Britain on the Channel 4 series Time Team, is singularly well placed for the endeavour: “I’ve dug up at Sutton Hoo an awful lot, and you create a Saxon world in your head.”
The apparently self-contradictory term “historical fiction” gave him plenty of leeway: “I know the Anglo-Saxons ate a lot of eels. I know they ate a lot of beans. I make the monks eat a lot of eel and bean stew. Why wouldn’t they? And also, it’s fun, because most people reading it now would think it’s quite disgusting.” After all, Robinson is accustomed to playing with history using creativity and humour, thanks to his Blackadder days in the Eighties with Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis. “I was working with these incredibly intelligent, very well educated young men. I was older than them, and had only got four O-levels, so I wasn’t part of their coterie, but I was very influenced by them and they taught me a huge amount.” Time Team, on the other hand, instilled in him a deep respect for, and rigour around, historical artefacts and archaeology. “So really, I think my style is a synthesis of those two attitudes towards history.”
When we meet, Robinson is genial company, if slightly frazzled by being ferried back and forth between publicity events ahead of the next day’s book release. He has a habit of asking himself questions and answering them, which makes my job easier in a way. (“Was it hubris to populate the book with half the population of Europe? Look, I’m 79 now – I can write what I want.”) His warmth doesn’t quite mask a certain wariness about interviews; a publicist sits at the other end of the room, nodding or frowning at the different questions. Clearly, like Alfred’s cakes, he has been burnt before: at the end, he asks me to correct any grammatical errors in his answers. (“Some journalists don’t do that, and it’s absurd – I don’t know if it’s a feeling of authenticity or what, to make me seem a bit verbally inadequate.”)
Anthony Robinson was born in Homerton, east London, in 1946, to Leslie, a civil servant and council employee, and Phyllis, an audio typist; both had served in the air force during the Second World War. (When I tell him I live in Homerton, he quips: “If my mum was here, she’d say, ‘She speaks nice for a girl from Homerton, doesn’t she? Is she really from Homerton?’”) Following the family’s exodus to Essex, he grew up in South Woodford; he describes his clan as a “lower-middle-class, aspirational family that hadn’t forgotten its roots”.
He was a lazy student: “I was cheating and borrowing everybody else’s homework, taking notes into exams and copying off them; totally fraudulent.” He originally didn’t want to go to drama school because he thought he was “God’s gift to acting”, but is now thankful that he did, mainly because it made him move past the “faux-cockney ‘Oh cor blimey’” school of acting. Aged 13, he starred in the original production of Oliver!, briefly taking on the role of the Artful Dodger.
Until being cast in Blackadder in his late thirties, Robinson was a jobbing actor and theatre director; it’s a route he thinks is becoming increasingly inaccessible to aspiring actors. “With the introduction of AI, who knows how much acting there will be in 10 or 15 years’ time? Audiobooks, small-part acting, extra work – one might say, ‘They’re just the fringes of the acting profession,’ but they’re the jobs that kept me in the business for the first 20 years. I couldn’t just survive on playing Laertes.” His granddaughter, 13, has her sights set on an acting career. “Do I have anxieties about how she’ll do? Of course I do. It is terribly difficult now.”
Like everyone else, he also worries about the state of the world. When researching Viking violence for the book, he was surprised to find that none of it felt particularly shocking. “Given what’s happening now in Ukraine and Gaza, it isn’t too easy to be shocked by the systematic violence that took place in the Anglo-Saxon period.” The publicist in the corner shifts uncomfortably. “It’s shocking on a much smaller scale than we’re used to. When the Vikings occupied somewhere, it wasn’t in their interest to kill the peasants, because they grew the turnips. You’re just going to make yourself starve.”
Practices like “blood eagling” – splitting someone open and lifting out their lungs – may initially have felt shocking. “But we know every day, when we pick up the paper, something similar is happening nowadays, on a scale inconceivable in Saxon times.” Pretty soon, he started to lose interest in Viking violence. “When a Viking runs his sword through the fifth person, it’s diminishing returns.”
We are speaking the week after Angela Rayner resigned as Labour’s deputy leader, a fractious time for the party. I wonder if Robinson, who formerly served on its national executive committee and quit the party in 2019 over its handling of Brexit and the allegations of antisemitism it was facing, has any thoughts on the subject. After a long pause, he answers. “Three days after we got in,” he says, “I was invited to a party at No 10 to celebrate us winning. And I said to Angela [Rayner]: ‘I’m not going to speak about the Labour Party for 18 months, because I know how hard it’s going to be, given the mess we’re in.’”
The issue of Europe is still close to his heart, especially the impact of Brexit on students; he singles out health secretary Wes Streeting as a politician he admires for his candour about the challenges of the job. But beyond that, he will not be drawn. “In year two, I will give myself the luxury of bitching and whining about things I don’t like, and praising the things I do. But for the moment, I’m going to keep my mouth shut.”
Another subject he has been outspoken on is the prejudice he has faced on account of his 5ft 4in height. When he watches Love Island, which is “so PC”, the first thing women will say is that they want a tall man. “They wouldn’t say, ‘I don’t want a Jew’, ‘I don’t want a blind person’, ‘I don’t want a ginger person’. They may carry some of those prejudices inside of them, but they would know how inappropriate it was to say that.” Fortunately for him, the third thing that usually comes up is a sense of humour. “I’m blessed by the fact I’ve had this wonderful career and a fabulous wife and great children. It would be absurd to pretend [my height] was a massive cross I was carrying through life, but it pisses me off.”
Looking back on that wonderful career, what was it like working on a series as well-loved and enduring as Blackadder? “Incredible. What a blessing is that? I might worry a bit about being short, but landing that part in the cult comedy series of the century, to be surrounded by those wonderful artists, as I was for 10 years… Richard Curtis was the biggest influence on my writing – not deliberately, but because he was there, because he was around, because, by nature, he’s a supportive person. I’m the luckiest bunny there is.”
He has a few films coming out, I remind him as we wrap up (including the William Baldwin-starring Me and Milosevic, slated for release next year), though he doesn’t seem particularly interested. “Oh, yeah, I guess – I shot that ages ago in Kosovo. I’ve got a couple of movies coming out. I wouldn’t say I had the lead in either of them.” His priority right now is writing book two. The trilogy is not, he insists, “a shrewd ruse” to get a television deal, but, he adds: “If somebody came up to me and said, ‘Here’s a sack full of gold. Would you mind if we turn it into a telly show?’, of course I would love that. But I don’t think about it. My prime goal is to write.”
Whether it’s conjuring up epic historical sagas or bringing rescue dogs back to life, Robinson has a clear idea of how he wants to spend his time. “I think, having had a pretty successful career – and having been able to put aside enough money to have a pension – I only want to do, in the autumn of my days, what I want to do.”
‘The House of Wolf’ by Tony Robinson (Sphere, £25) is out now. Robinson will appear at the Henley Literary Festival on 8 October. Click here to buy tickets
