ARCHAEOLOGY can be seen as the process of digging up facts about the past, as you will have learned if you have followed Tony Robinson and his Time Team over the past 17 years.
But this weekend the 65-year-old actor and presenter fronts a different kind of documentary series.
Tony Robinson’s Gods and Monsters explores the weird and wonderful beliefs humans have held through the ages.
From human sacrifices in Iron Age Britain to witch hunts and exorcisms in the 17th Century, the five-part series uses a combination of experiments and dramatic reconstruction.
Episode one focuses on the great undead, aka zombies.
“The first references to belief in staking the undead to stop them rising again are in the 12th Century, near the border with Scotland,” says Robinson.
“There’s a story that this rather dodgy bloke thought his wife was having an affair, so he crept up into the rafters of Alnwick Castle to spy on her and, sure enough, saw her having a bit of hanky-panky and slipped out of the rafters, crashed to the floor and died, whereupon he was buried.
“But then he broke out of the confines of his coffin at night and went into Alnwick breathing pestilence and spraying blood at people, before disappearing back into the grave. Eventually the local villagers ripped up the earth and plunged a stake into him.”
Even more weirdly, Robinson discovered that up until the early 1800s, anyone could request permission from a magistrate to open up the coffin of someone who had committed suicide and stake them so they couldn’t rise again.
“There’s documented evidence of at least seven cases of that,” he insists.
No wonder Hollywood seems to be obsessed with zombies, but where did this belief come from?
According to Robinson, the answer is two-fold. Firstly, that people in the Middle Ages were surrounded with icons of Christ having risen from the dead. Secondly, and more gruesomely, the biological phenomenon that makes corpses appear to be living long after burial.
“We buried a number of pigs at a scientific establishment and opened them up again after three weeks,” says Robinson.
“After death, the skin is all bloated because of the chemical reactions going on inside, and yet lots of areas of the body have actually shrunk, so it looks as though the hair and nails have grown.”
Another experiment involved asking a group of non-superstitious students to stab pictures of their loved ones with a knife. All refused apart from one who poked at his dad’s stomach because he worried he was overweight.
Robinson observes: “It’s very old, this notion that by harming something that is close to a person, you’re actually threatening the real person.”
The presenter denies he’s superstitious but admits he avoids walking under ladders. And while we’ve been chatting on the phone, his new wife, Louise, has apparently saluted a magpie.
“If you look at every superstition, they’re either about fending off evil or imbuing yourself with more power,” he says.
Whether luck or magic had anything to do with it, Robinson has managed to carve out a very successful niche as a presenter of all things historical. Why does he think Time Team has done so well?
“It’s a bunch of hippies getting considerably older by the year, digging a field and occasionally finding something. Who would have thought that would last 20 years on the television?
“It just seems to have tapped the zeitgeist in a way that occasionally programmes do. It’s hit me three times with Blackadder, Time Team and on children’s television with Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (which he created).”
He’d love the opportunity to act again and dreams of playing all Shakespeare’s clowns in a season for the RSC. But he’s booked up with documentaries until next Christmas.
One project he would always make time for, however, is a Blackadder film.
Rowan Atkinson recently said it “wasn’t impossible” they could revisit the classic comedy.
Says the man who stole many a scene playing down-to-earth everyman Baldrick: “Yes, it’s funny, Rowan seems to have changed his tune a little bit during the interviews for Johnny English, which is great.”
“I’ve always said I’d be happy to do another series – and my bank manager would certainly be incredibly enthusiastic about me doing another series.
“But I think a lot of the others have always been very diffident simply because we’ve all got so much on. It was very difficult to get us all together to do Blackadder Back and Forth which we did in 1999 for the Millennium Dome.
“But if Rowan is beginning to think a bit more fondly about doing something, then maybe Richard (Curtis) and Ben (Elton) will as well.
“I think we’d do much better making a Blackadder movie, even if it was relatively low budget, than going back to a TV series.
“If we made a TV series, everyone would just compare it with the other TV series, whereas if we moved to a different kind of canvas then there’s a chance that people might be prepared to judge it on what it is rather than compare it with something we did 20 years ago.”
For the time being, Tony – who is speaking from ‘down under’ where he is making a series called Tony Robinson’s Time Walks for Australian TV – says he’s content to keep exploring.
“One of the joys of what I’m doing is that people are coming to me with ideas all the time. I feel a bit like a kid who’s been given free tickets for every ride in the fairground and I can just wander round and do that.”
:: Tony Robinson’s Gods and Monsters starts on Channel 4 on Saturday.
