Biography

Along with Rowan Atkinson and Tim McInnerny, he is one of only three actors to appear in all four "Blackadder" series: Blackadder (1982), Blackadder II (1986), Blackadder the Third (1987) and Blackadder Goes Forth (1989).

Has written 17 children's books, most recently one on Kings and Queens.

He was consultant on children's programming for the London Symphony Orchestra from 1998 to 2000.

He was created a Knight Bachelor in the 2013 Queen's Birthday Honours List for public and political service.

In 2000, he was awarded an honorary Masters of Arts degree from Bristol University for his services to theatre and archaeology.

There is a century of socialism to be won. It will only happen if we make it happen.

Blackadder fans call out Blackadder's catchphrase 'I have a cunning plan', Time Team lovers want me to dig up their gardens, while Tories shout 'You Labour idiot'.

At first I wanted to be an MP but now I think it would be crap.

It was around about the repeat of the second series that I began to get an inkling of quite how popular [Blackadder (1982)] was. It also coincided with the time I was having children. I brought them up in Bristol and an awful lot of that time it wasn't as if I was popping in and out of the Ivy and the Groucho club. I was dealing with things like queuing up outside primary schools and driving children to the next games field. I remember going to Alton Towers with my kids one day and we were unable to go round it. My presence there caused chaos. I suddenly thought - I have to recalibrate what my life is!

We'd all had running conversations throughout the first series [of Blackadder (1982)] as to what was wrong with it. As soon as we read the scripts we knew how we would change it. We all knew that it wasn't really working to have Blackadder as stupid as he was. So in the second series there was a feeling of 'Wow, we've got it'. Of course then it was up to me to interpret it. That's just the work you do as an actor. Even after we had done the second series we had no way of knowing whether it would be a sufficient step forward to ensure the BBC gave us a third series. I think probably once we'd made the third series, we were confident that there would be a fourth. But by that time various people were getting so successful, you couldn't guarantee they would be available.