Tony Robinson (Man On Earth) interview
Not many people can have enjoyed as varied a career as Tony Robinson. To many, he will forever be Baldrick, the turnip-obsessed simpleton from the Blackadder series. To many more, he is a presenter of archaeological hit Time Team and numerous historical documentaries. He's also a children's author, political campaigner and has starred in his own one-man show.
This December, Robinson is back on our TV screens with a brand new four-part TV series, Man On Earth, in which he travels back through 200,000 years of human history to find out what happened to our ancestors when violent climate change turned their world upside down. Speaking to leading archaeologists, historians and climate scientists, Robinson illustrates how climate has shaped human history from the beginning. Here, he reveals more about his love of archaeology and why this epic project is a subject close to his heart.
What first piqued your interest in archaeology?
I've always been interested in history. I've never really understood why anybody wouldn't be. It was one of those things at school where you thought "They can't really give marks for this," because you'd want to know it anyway. Most kids feel that about PE, but a few sad kids like me felt it about history. How do you know who you are unless you know where you've come from? So archaeology for me has always been a very dramatic way of bringing history to life. It's not so much the subtle shades in the earth that interest me, more that they represent the mark of human beings on the planet.
Were you ever tempted to pursue archaeology as a career?
No. I love what I do. I can serve archaeology best by doing what I do, which is to be a storyteller. But I don't think I've got the patience to be an archaeologist, or indeed the physical resilience. These are really tough men and women.
When you did the first series of Time Team, did you ever envisage how successful it would become?
No, absolutely not at all. I can remember having a conversation with a senior executive at Channel 4, in which we both agreed that we'd never be able to make more than four programmes a year, because there wasn't sufficiently varied archaeology to do that, nor indeed would there be sufficient interest from people. We were both confounded by the reality, which is that there is a whole host of different kinds of archaeology, of different challenges, of different environments, and the public's appetite never seems to be sated.
Do you get more people now coming up to talk to you about archaeology or Blackadder?
Oh, I would say it's split down the middle, between those who say "Do you have a cunning plan?" and those who say "Will you come and dig my back garden?"
Oh God! The cunning plan thing must drive you round the bend!
I always smile as though it's the first time anyone has said that. "What an amusing thing to do - to say the catchphrase back to the person who's already said it 1,683 times."
What's been your most exciting archaeological moment?
I think when I was asked to clear away the earth from a Roman mosaic. I was the first person to see that mosaic for 1500 years. I just trowelled it away, and each new trowelling revealed more of the pattern. I don't think archaeology gets better than that.
Your new series has a strong basis of archaeology, but there's more to it than that. What's it all about?
It's about the fact that climate change has always been with us, since the birth of time, and certainly since the birth of human beings. Without climate change we wouldn't have been the successful species that we've been. Climate change is part of our heritage, and throughout various moments of history, we've either adapted to the changing climate and have ultimately been successful, or we have failed to adapt, and ignored it, in which case disaster has arisen. We can choose either to deal with it or not. We have in the past, and it's there to see.
What has caused these periods of climate change in the past?
The fluctuations in our orbit around the sun, the moving of tectonic plates in general, and volcanic explosions in particular. But it could also be then impact of meteors landing from space. That was behind the huge climate change that killed the dinosaurs. So we have a very robust but also a very sensitive planet on which we live, and when it is hit by a blow of whatever kind, it will respond with a change in the climate.
What kind of extent of climate change are we talking about. What have been the extents of the rises and falls in temperature, and over how long?
It can be massive or it can be relatively small. It was something like 10°C over a couple of hundred years at the end of the last Ice Age, which produced massive melting throughout the whole globe, so that, for instance, the Black Sea was water that burst through the Bosphorus in cascades and flooded Southern Turkey over a period of about 30 years.
But even a fluctuation as small as 2°C, which is less than is currently being predicted for the next 70 years, even that can have a huge affect. In the Middle Ages there was what was called the Little Ice Age, which was about 2°C. The rains just pelted down for three winters on the trot, rotted all of the crops in the fields, there was huge famine and starvation. A couple of decades later bubonic and pneumonic plague flooded into the country because that kind of climate was good for rats and the fleas that lived on rats, we got the disease, because we were weaker than we would normally have been, and the population was decimated. And all that came about because of a less than 2°C climate change.
The series takes you all over the world. Where did you go to?
I went to Egypt, I went to Turkey, I went to the States, I went to Belize, Iceland, all over Europe, plus Tanzania and Ethiopia. It was a real privilege for me. Although I've made lots of documentary series, it was the first time I was given one of those landmark David Attenborough-type series to present, on a great global canvas. It really felt a responsibility. It was like getting a promotion.
Was it fun, doing all that travelling, or was it quite exhausting?
Oh, you ask anyone who's done one of those series, they are very rigorous. You don't hang around much, you spend three-quarters of your time in airports, you worry about the fact that all your kit has been impounded and it's not going to get into the country, you get altitude sickness, all sorts of things occur. It's still the best job in the world, but it's not a holiday in each place.
The obvious question for a film of this nature is 'was it carbon neutral?'
No. I don't think for the next 30 or 40 years we'll be able to make everything carbon neutral. What we're going to have to do is to decide where we think it's really important to burn our carbon, and where not. My personal decision was that somewhere where I thought it was quite legitimate to burn up carbon was in telling people what's likely to happen in the future and how to arm themselves. I think it would be naïve for anybody to think that from tomorrow we can live a carbon-free future. There aren't the means to do it.
So as well as looking to the past, does the series examine what will happen in the future with our climate, and how best we can learn from the past?
Well, it will certainly examine how best we can learn from the past. But we can't predict what's going to happen in the future, that's for someone else to do. I think if we'd gone on to that, it would have been a very different series. I wanted to find different ways of talking about climate change, different stories to tell about climate change, and it seemed to me that this was a very appropriate way of dealing with it.
Hopefully what will happen is that people looking at our series will start to think about climate change in a way they hadn't before. People who felt very pessimistic about it will hopefully start to feel a little more optimistic about it, because the series clearly shows that people have survived climate change before. Hopefully that will mean they don't just shut it out from their minds - that would be the ideal from my point of view. But it's then for other people to have debates about what we should do next.
Is there a danger that some people will look at a series like this and think "Climate change has always happened, and is a natural phenomenon, and there's nothing we can do about it"?
Well, we can see from the series that there are things we can do. Apart from anything else, for instance, we can control water. If you control water properly, it gives you a real chance of a very profitable survival. I'm relieved that the whole of London is at last starting to replace the Victorian water pipes with a new generation. We need to do that kind of job much quicker and much more efficiently, and need to put more money in it. You can see from the past that when you have proper control of water, you have a chance of survival. Without it, you just don't.
If climate change has been happening throughout history, would you say that humanity has contributed to the climate change that's happening at present?
My opinion as to that is irrelevant as far as this series is concerned. There are only a very few scientists in this world who say there is no human component in global warming, and many of those have been paid by oil companies. But, quite frankly, whether there is a human component or not, we're going to have to deal with global warming. My series will have been successful if people are prepared to understand that.
Man On Earth airs on Channel 4 from Monday 7th December 2009 at 9pm.
