'King Alfred and the cakes? I'll tell you what happened'

As Tony Robinson's new novel 'The House of Wolf' kicks off an Anglo-Saxon trilogy, he talks to Kathryn Bromwich about his time on 'Blackadder', 'Time Team', and a devastating loss

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Across the table from me, Tony Robinson’s eyes are brimming with what look like tears.

I’ve just asked him about the time five chapters of his book were stolen from his car while he was on holiday, and the memory is clearly still raw. It must have been a hell of a manuscript, I think. But that’s not the whole story.

“During lockdown, my wife Louise and I got a dog called Holly Berry, whom we loved very much,” he says. “Loved particularly hard because she had been a poorly old thing. It was wonderful bringing a rescue dog back to life. It’s been one of the joys I’ve discovered only over the last few years. But she had diabetes, so I had to inject her at six o’clock every morning and six o’clock in the evening.”

While driving down to Spain, they had stopped at a service station when a car pulled up and zoomed off with their belongings. “No smash, just grab.” Five handwritten chapters were in the bag that was taken, along with three years’ worth of research. But, more pressingly, Holly Berry’s medication was snatched as well. They sped down to their destination, where they found a vet who supplied them with insulin. “Three weeks later, we realised they had given us the wrong syringes and not enough of the medicine, and Holly Berry died.”

By this stage, there is something in my eye, too. Following Holly Berry’s passing, Robinson - always so unflappable as Baldrick in the adored British historical sitcom Blackadder - was too distressed to write. “I was completely flattened. Lou was in as much mourning as I was, but she raised me up. Within three weeks, I was writing again, and I found it was still in my head - a number of writers who’ve lost manuscripts have said the same thing. And in a way, you actually write them better.”

We are in the Embankment offices of his publishers, Little, Brown, to discuss his new book,