Tony Robinson has gone from worst jobs to best, as he tells Charles Hutchinson.

TONY Robinson has hatched another of his cunning plans.

Once he would put up with Blackadder's jibes and jabs in his guise as stinking, turnip-chomping simpleton Baldrick; next he grubbed around in the mud alongside wildly bearded men with inexcusable fashion sense in Time Team before rolling up his trousers to wade through life's detritus in The Worst Jobs In History.

Why not, he thought, do the best job of the lot? Namely, making people laugh in his new live show, Tony Robinson's Cunning Night Out!, a humorous journey through the disparate strands of his life conducted at breakneck speed.

On Thursday, his tour schedule brings him to the Grand Opera House in York, the city where he so enjoyed his Time Team dig for Channel 4 in June 2003.

"The best thing about it was the people in York, without a doubt. They made us feel like the city was ours," says Tony. "My most vivid memory was when I had to cross the river by boat and there were so many people about that I had to jog with security people around me.

"People were coming up to me with something from their back garden, and everyone in York has something they've found in their back garden."

Now he is digging up his own past for his new show, which he has been preparing in Spain.

"It's kind of two thirds work and one third sitting on my butt. I'm only out here for a week, doing lots of writing and preparing for the tour. Of course it's a luxury when the phone isn't ringing and it's much easier to focus, though I've never had trouble concentrating. I've written on film sets and trains."

Tony's last stage appearance was in a national tour of Alan Bennett's Forty Years On eight years ago, but he has deep roots in the acting profession.

"I made my professional debut at 13," says Tony, who is now in his late 50s. "I was in the original London production of Oliver!, taking over as the Artful Dodger. You can only go down after that. On the first night, there were 26 curtain calls. Everyone came on, even the stage carpenter."

It was not until Blackadder that Tony Robinson became a household name. "It's really quite ironic that by portraying the stupidest person in the world, suddenly it gave me credibility as a performer and allowed me to express things I'd never been able to express before," he says.

"People thought it must have been quite a shock to transfer to documentary but my interests have always been wider, like my involvement in politics. I've always thought of that interest as being just part of my life, which is an 18th century view of politics.

"I used to get annoyed that because I stood for Labour's NEC people assumed I wanted to be an MP but that was never the case. Being on the NEC was something that I could do and I did it for four years, fighting in three elections and coming top every time."

Post-tour, Tony will be returning to The Worst Jobs In History duties in mid-February and Time Team in the summer.

"The Time Team are going to do the most ambitious dig we've ever done and all I can tell you is it will be for nine days running. It's bizarre how successful the show has become.

"People ask me if other countries have seized on the idea and I have to tell you they haven't. It's particularly British: we love the idea of a quest, and it's dotty how we love half a dozen barking mad, middle-aged hippies trying to find things and usually failing," he says.

"But we try to give the message that it's not about trying to find a diamond necklace but the detritus of past generations. There's nothing more that you can learn about a star than by going through their dustbins, and archaeology is another way of doing that."

Tony believes the humour in all his work is rooted in what he calls the "Aah, I never knew that" factor. Next he hopes to apply that principle to writing a novel.

"My ambition is to be able to take off months to concentrate on that, but the TV stuff I'm being offered is so fantastic I don't think I'll have the discipline to do a novel this year. Hopefully I'll have that self-discipline next year."

Unless another cunning plan crosses his mind, of course.

Tony Robinson's Cunning Night Out!, Grand Opera House, York, Thursday, 8pm; tickets £15 on 0870 606 3590. He will sign copies of his book, The Worst Jobs In History (Macmillan, £18.99), at Waterstone's, High Ousegate, York, on Thursday at 1pm.

Updated: 15:28 Thursday, January 27, 2005