ONCE upon a time in 1993, Terry published a book. He’d written quite a few previously, but this one was different because it was about history. With the nasty bits left in.

From that simple premise sprang an entire genre, of telling kids about stuff in an entertaining way. But if you are a parent of children over the age of four you’ll know all this because, with six million copies of Terry’s Horrible Histories sold in Britain alone, you probably have the Vile Victorians or the Terrible Tudors on your bookshelf.

If your children are still relatively young, they will probably have watched the series on the TV or, indeed, be badgering you to buy them tickets for the forthcoming tour, featuring the Ruthless Romans and the Awful Egyptians, which arrives at Poole’s Lighthouse theatre next month.

And you’d be forgiven for thinking that the person who dreamed all this up must be some kind of sweet-faced old historian, whose life’s ambition was to get kids studying his favourite topic.

And how wrong you’d be because: “I don’t like history books,” Terry declares. “I like books about real people, real situations and if anybody ever did a horrible histories quiz which included a question like when was the battle of Hastings, I’d have to shoot them because that’s not important.”

All this is said at breakneck speed in a voice as soft as the Sunderland mist – Terry is a proud north-easterner – but he means it. He means everything.

Schools should be shut down, the people who wrote the National Curriculum are ‘divvies in Whitehall’, lots of the stuff you learn in history is ‘lies’, universities are ‘a waste of young people’s time’, and don’t get him started on Tony Blair… “People come to me endlessly and say ‘I’m doing history at university because of your books’ and I say ‘don’t blame me!’” he chuckles. “You get here and you have these pompous old geezers spouting stuff at you that they wrote in notes 20 years ago and repeat every year and they are bored out of their minds.”

If he had his way young people wouldn’t go to university but they wouldn’t go to school, either. Is this because he had a bad time then? “No, no, no!” he says. True, he was ‘beaten, bullied and abused’ by teachers but: “That’s got nothing to do with it, I was in education as a teacher when this new national curriculum was written and teachers became a mouthpiece for some divvy in Whitehall.”

“What W B Yeats said was that education’s not about filling buckets, it’s about lighting fires and all teachers do, day after day, is they fill buckets.”

The really evil thing, he says, is that they are ‘filling them with dishwater, useless rubbish.’ “If you love history, don’t do GCSE for God’s sake.”

So what should young people do?

“Well I never went to university and I’m pretty successful,” he says. He started off as an actor in rep, becoming a theatre-director, museum manager, drama teacher, television presenter and finally, after his show The Custard Kid was commissioned as a book, a children’s author.

Terry explains that all the Horrible Histories books were researched and then he read around the subject, finally deciding what to put in and how to approach it. He worked on the theory that if something interested him, it would interest the readers.

His favourite characters from history are the subversive Guy Fawkes; “The only man to enter parliament with honest intentions,” and his idol, Will Shakespeare. “He was a working class boy who went through the theatre and taught himself to write, exactly the same as I did. What a fabulous man.”

He deeply resents the doubters who ask how a glover’s son could have written the plays and claim it must have been the Earl of Oxford. “How patronising,” he snorts.

Woe betide anyone who tries to patronise him, whether that person is Tony Blair or the future King of England. “I’m anti-establishment, I would never sell out,” he says. “That makes me physically sick.”

A few years back, he says, Tony Blair invited all the top children’s authors to Downing Street.

“My wife wanted to go but I said ‘why does Tony Blair want me in Downing Street?’ Because he’s invited a load of top authors to make him look good and the other 99 idiots (he actually uses a more down-to-earth expression here) who write books went along.

“And there he was on the six o’clock news, on the steps of Downing Street, shaking hands a with children’s author. Those authors have allowed their names to be cheapened by that man,” he declares.

His frustration with Prince Charles stems from the fact that he believes it’s obvious that royal aides didn’t bother to research his background because they asked him to talk to teachers at a summer school.

“I’ve been on record so many times saying I want to see schools closed down and teachers sacked. How can I go and talk to them?” he says. “Get your act together Charles, get your advisers to do their research before you waste their time writing letters!”

Phew. So when he’s not writing, dreaming up new projects; ‘I’ve got a list of 20 on my computer’ and raising money for his favourite charities, one that helps the single homeless and another that supports disabled children, what does he do?

By this point in our conversation I’m too scared to ask him how much he earns, in case he chews my ear off, but maybe he likes to go travelling, spending his money in foreign climes?

No. “I don’t have a passport, I’ve never had a holiday abroad,” he says. “ I’ve had three weeks holiday in the last 30 and they’ve all been in Britain.”

Why? “Because Britain is such a fascinating country. I could live to be 1,000 but never get to the bottom of all the fascinating places to visit. I don’t need to go abroad, I don’t know what I could gain from Marbella. My family went to South Africa at the end of last year but I don’t feel the need to photograph giraffes.”

What does warm him, though, is when parents of boys tell him that thanks to the Horrible Histories, their son has finally become a reader and is now tackling Dickens.

“Or when others say: ‘My son’s autistic, but because of you he got into reading books and that gives him so much pleasure.’ That’s my pride, rather than just making money out of books.”

How nice it is, I tell him, to speak to a real, proper author, someone who is well-known for achieving something rather than just appearing on reality TV.

He seems genuinely nonplussed. “I don’t think anyone’s ever said that to me.”

Really? Divvies.

u Horrible Histories’ Ruthless Romans and Awful Egyptians are coming to Lighthouse, Poole, November 22-26. For details of how to sponsor Terry’s Hadrian’s Wall run click on to terry-deary.com