HE has had a stellar career lasting over 50 years that no cunning plan could ever have envisaged.

In his long-awaited autobiography, Tony Robinson reveals how he went from child stardom in the first stage production of Oliver, to comedy icon Baldrick, the loyal servant and turnip aficionado in Blackadder.

It wasn’t all plain sailing though. Along the way he was bullied by Steve Marriott, failed to impress Liza Minnelli and was pushed into a stinking London dock by John Wayne.

The comedian and nation’s adopted historian is heading to Dorset County Museum to share his stories at Dorchester Literary Festival on Friday, October 21.

He entertained us with Maid Marian and Her Merry Men and presented Time Team for 20 years, watching countless gardens ruthlessly dug up in the name of history.

As Jessica Rees speaks to Tony about his new self-deprecating autobiography – No Cunning Plan, she’s discovered he hasn’t kept to a script for it, and nor will he be for the night in Dorchester.

Tony said: “I think one of the things that I wanted to ensure was that people would say ‘I didn’t know that’. I wanted to surprise them with other aspects of my life.

“People think they know you when you are on television, but there’s times people do not know about. But I’ve tried to keep the autobiography balanced with things people would expect too.”

He said: “I had a very clear idea of what I wanted it to be. When I read an autobiography I want to be taken on a journey.

“I don’t worry about saying things, you only have one stab at life to try and change things for the better.”

The Time Team presenter said he’s looking forward to heading to Dorchester - a place he describes as always being ‘so warm and welcoming’.

Out of his never ending list of accomplishments, Tony said it was one of his earlier works which was his favourite.

He said: “Maid Marian was very much a highlight. It was the first time I was in control. We created something out of nothing.”

Yet his more serious in depth documentaries on history and heritage are perhaps what he is now best known for. The star said history has an important place in his heart.

He said: “How do we know who we are unless we know where we come from and what direction we were looking to?

“How can we learn about how human beings are now unless we can see what they have done before?

“History is the shadow we all leave as we move through time so it’s central to our experience as much as breathing, eating and sleeping.”

The prompt to pen his autobiography was an emotional process Tony said.

“I hadn’t realised how moved I would be by going back to certain times in my life. Most of us just assume that when difficult things happen, we deal with it, we work it through and we move on. But actually, most of the time, we don’t - if there’s an issue we just park it, and then move on, and ghosts of it are still ticking away.”

“Coming back to those things that made you feel uneasy or upset, or humiliated or lonely, or all of those, there’s no doubt it does trigger some echo of those emotions in you. My wife said my moods changed with which chapters I was writing.”

“I’m slightly less intellectual and slightly more larky than a lot of people might imagine.

“My children are embarrassed by most of it,” he says of the book, but adds: “If that is going to be the criterion on which I’m writing the story of my life - whether I’m embarrassed or not - then really, I’m not going to get past chapter one.”

He dedicates a huge chunk to his years spent playing hapless manservant Baldrick in Blackadder, opposite Rowan Atkinson, but slices through the gloss of it, and firmly avoids rose-tinted glasses.

He’s frank about the fact he didn’t have particularly high hopes for the show.

“I don’t think anyone really did after the pilot,” he remembers. “It just wasn’t very funny. It had lots of good ideas, but the jokes didn’t really work.”

And even when the team, including writers Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, got it into shape, he was still “completely” surprised it took off.

Perhaps what’s most startling, though, is that despite the show’s triumph and the sense of camaraderie that unspools from the screen when you watch it, during filming, Robinson suffered from an acute sense of inferiority.

“I’d left school at 16, I had virtually no formal education, I didn’t have the network of sophisticated London friends they all had. I’d never been part of that collective bantering set that could produce humorous and acidic wit at the drop of a hat - and I was crap at the Times crossword.”

The 10-year age gap between himself and his co-stars might have had something to do with it - Blackadder didn’t come along until Robinson was 38. “Maybe they were much more confident than me, but it did feel very competitive sometimes. Working with brilliant people; it’s not always going to be kittens and chrysanthemums.”

Can we hope for more Blackadder?

“I don’t know,” he says, with a certain amount of weariness. “Every time anybody asks me that question, I say, ‘Well, yes, I feel quite optimistic about that’, and immediately the story encircles the globe for 24 hours. I have no knowledge that there’s going to be another Blackadder. Of course, I would love to do it, but I’m not sure everybody else would.”

n Sir Tony Robinson, at Dorset County Museum for Dorchester Literary Festival on Friday, October 21.