Tony Robinson is known for playing Baldrick in the BBC television series Blackadder, and for hosting Channel 4 programmes such as Time Team and The Worst Jobs in History.

Robinson is a member of the Labour Party and served on its National Executive Committee. He has also written sixteen children's books .

His first professional acting role came at the age of 12, as a member of Fagin's gang in the original production of the musical Oliver!, including a stint as the Artful Dodger when the boy playing the role didn't turn up.

He then spent five years during which he appeared in a number of West End shows, in film, and on television.

After leaving school he won an Arts Council bursary to work as a director at the Midland Arts Theatre, Birmingham and founded the Avon Touring Company, a Bristol-based community theatre company, with writer David Illingworth.

But Tony Robinson came to prominence in 1983 for his role in sitcom Blackadder, as Edmund Blackadder's dogsbody Baldrick.

In the first series, broadcast as The Black Adder, he was quite astute, whilst his master played by Rowan Atkinson was an idiot.

Later series moved the duo through history and switched the relationship, with Baldrick becoming stupid.

Tony Robinson also wrote and narrated several Jackanory-style children's programmes, and in the late 1980s he created the children's comedy TV series Maid Marian and her Merry Men, a loose retelling of the legend of Robin Hood in which he appeared as the Sheriff of Nottingham.

In 1994, Tony Robinson began presenting Time Team, a TV programme devoted to archaeological investigations.

Tony Robinson's Cunning Night Out, a largely improvised stage show, started in 2005 and included a mix of the many themes from his career for which Robinson is famous.

Robinson and his former partner Mary Shepheard were active in Bristol Labour politics from the early 1980s.

From 1996 to 2000, he was vice-president of the actors' union Equity, helping with a huge restructuring programme which turned a £500,000 deficit into a small surplus.

He was also elected to the Labour Party's National Executive Committee.

In 2006 he appeared in Tony Robinson: Me and My Mum, a documentary surrounding Tony's decision to put his mother into a nursing home, and the difficulty he had with doing so.

He recently took part in a Memory Walk in Bristol.

Tony Robinson is a keen Bristol City supporter.

He recently joined the campaign to keep the BBC show Casualty being kept in Bristol and not to be moved to Cardiff.

It has been reported that he is engaged to marry his fiancee Miss Louise Hobbs, 27, in the summer.

In January 2009 Tony Robinson backed a campaign to restore St James Priory, Bristol's oldest building.

Go to Bristol People to find out about other famous names from the city.