I've never really seen archaeology as being any different from history. What I love are the stories of human beings that were around 1,000 years ago and how they lived - archaeology is another aspect to that.Collection: History
I think everyone is fairly fed up with mildly dysfunctional people being put under pressure and then behaving abysmally.
A naughty part of me thinks, how come Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and Tim McInnerny have all done really good parts in a film, whereas I've only ever done bits and bobs? Before I die, wouldn't it be nice to be the scheming old man in a movie?
Always plan, but never plan on your plans.
Most of us work so hard and live so hard. On the first day of the holiday I remain in work gear, it can take me some time to slow down and all that time I'm missing the serendipity of the wonderful things that are all around us.
I am terrified of being pushed out of a plane at 10,000ft with my hands tied behind my back.
Both my parents developed dementia in their old age. Everyone I know whose parents had dementia feel that they didn't deal with it very well.
The confidence in my ability to be a performer, a steeliness about survival... I learnt all those things from my dad.
As anyone who has watched Time Team will know, the context is all in archaeology.
I was an only child. Both my parents came from working-class families in Hackney, east London.
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.
Intellectual and emotional curiosity is what I hope I've taught my children.
If I go to posh parties, I hover by the kitchen so I can get as many nice canapes as possible.
A lot of sitcoms don't last more than four series. You could say it's mystic.
A lot of us saw Blackadder in terms of problem-solving - 'Did that work in that episode?' and so on. We were very picky.
Time Team' is by definition very static. Once you're in that field and you've dug your trenches, that's it.
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.
I love the Pembroke coastal path. Whenever I've been there, it's been sunny, but slightly bracing. So you're happy to keep walking, but you'll get a bit of a tan. The wildflowers and the insects are great and you'll occasionally see a small mammal.
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.
Politicians have been downplaying the importance of history as a subject in our schools but, if they had bothered to have a better grasp of history themselves, they might have avoided costly wars. Instead they act like children. The only time that they think matters is their own.
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 didn't have much of a formal education myself.
My job in many ways has been to navigate interesting routes around subjects people think are dull.
I can't see much purpose in archaeology unless you can find out the narrative about that place, or even realise that nobody actually knows what the narrative was.
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.
There are huge pluses in Scottish archaeology that you simply don't get elsewhere. Partly that's to do with the tragedy of the clearances, and that so much of the landscape has been owned by so few people that didn't want it messed around with.
I was about 40 when I got a glimmer of the wonders archaeology can offer, and I want kids to be able to have that for their whole lives, not just in middle-age.
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.
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.
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.
The founding of Graeae by disabled actors was a huge political statement that you forgot at your peril.
The great countercultural movement that we all know from the mid-1960s was epitomised by popular music. But within a few years another shift happened: the birth of alternative theatre.
A chap was digging a pond for his carp in the garden behind his terraced house in the small town of Raunds, when he unearthed remains of an Anglo-Saxon body. Because he'd seen 'Time Team', he knew exactly what to do with it - he cleaned it very respectfully and then called the local archaeologist, who called us in.
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.
If you were going to protect Buckingham Palace, you wouldn't put a tunnel in halfway down the Mall. If you wanted to protected Wembley Stadium, you wouldn't put a tunnel halfway up Wembley Way.
The adrenaline of being somewhere no one has ever been before is, or at least not for thousands of years, is quite extraordinary and by and large that overwhelms the feeling of personal terror.
The work that I do doesn't make me feel uptight, It energises me.
I often get very tired but I'll just have a good sleep and a day off and then I'm fine to go again.
Digging sand is a bit like digging water. You take your trowel out and it all fills back up again, so there are a whole lot of different techniques that are required.
It's not that I think every late 19th-century man with a beard who saw something shimmering in front of him was actually seeing his dead aunty. What I'm saying is: lighten up. This isn't weird stuff. It's interesting.
For a long time, the paranormal was a legitimate area of explanation for quite a lot of people.
I have a passion for knowing stuff.
I don't know much, but nor do I have the intellectual straitjacket that a lot of people inevitably pick up at university.