Interview With Sandi Toksvig

Sandi Toksvig is a woman of many talents and incredibly large experience (despite her tiny stature) – her CV must run to pages, but she talks to you like someone she’s known for ages. For a while I wondered who was interviewing whom as she asked me where I worked, and how long I’d been involved in the magazine and so on. I met her at LBC (the London Broadcasting Company radio station, which I foolishly thought would be in a trendy part of West London – it’s actually in the middle of a rather depressing housing estate, but the fact that it was a cold, foggy day didn’t help), where she is clearly just one of the gang, even though everyone else I saw there seemed to be in their early twenties. She was casually dressed in jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and comfortable shoes, and when I later asked to take a few photos she said ‘I look awful today’, but happily acquiesced – no luvviness there!

To break the ice, I asked her if she’d enjoyed the young lady lap dancing on her at the last Libertas festival (while being compeer of the opening night concert, Sandi was lap-danced on by one of the singers). She said, “No. It was a complete surprise and awkward and embarrassing in the extreme. I’m quite shy in that way so I could have done without it truthfully, but it got a laugh so that’s fair enough, but no I wouldn’t have said yes to it had I known.” I was quite surprised to find that Sandi is shy in any way, given that she’s quite feisty and opinionated. By that I don’t mean that she’s offensive, far from it, but she has very firm ideas about things and she’s not afraid to share them. She talks very confidently in that marvellous Radio 4 voice with surprisingly few hesitations (maybe that comes from her time on the radio show Just a Minute). Later on she said, “I’m not one for masses of publicity. You won’t find me in Hello magazine or putting myself forward. I’ll do interviews if I’ve got to sell one of my books but I don’t go out of my way to seek publicity. I’m quite private really.” This didn’t surprise me given that I’d had quite a hard time finding background information and had to resort to reading her articles in Good Housekeeping (GH). She agreed to be interviewed for Velvet because she likes to support new ventures by women. “I think it’s a brilliant thing. It’s still very difficult for women and it’s a very small community. I think it’s still easier for the boys, there’s much more for the boys, the boys have more disposable income. So if I can, I will go to things like Libertas.” “Velvet and GH it’s a good range, I think.”

I asked her if she did anything specifically activist/political for the community. “I support Stonewall and Terence Higgins, I do stuff for them. I have a daily radio show here, and I say things on that, I mean I’m not at all closeted. I think that sometimes you can do a lot just by being yourself, not hiding away. I think maybe that’s my contribution. I’m not a great drum banger or marcher. I’ve done a bit of marching, but I think there’s a lot to be said for leading your life and I suspect that the life we have with the kids has touched quite a lot of people who perhaps wouldn’t have come across that situation. I like to think that’s my way. And I wrote a book called Flying Under Bridges and there’s a lesbian character in that. I said a lot of things I felt I needed to say about life in the public eye.”

Writing is a large part of Sandi’s life. Apart from writing material for her daily radio show on LBC, and various programmes she presents on Radio 4, she has two novels coming out. “The one coming out in July is about the occupation of Denmark in the Second World War. Called Hitler’s Canary, it’s a children’s adventure story about a little boy who’s in the resistance in Copenhagen, loosely based on my father’s life. The one coming out next year is a love story set in Italy, just a straight forward lovey dovey story.” She says she has no preference for writing adult or children’s books (she’s written 8 children’s books, 4 adult fiction, and 4 non-fiction); it’s just a matter of producing something entertaining for different audiences. In an article for The Independent she once said that “acting is showing your pants for a living; writing is a craft.” She still stands by that. “Writing is more difficult, because you’ve got to try and be original and interesting. That’s not to decry acting; comedy acting is extremely complicated. It’s [writing] not working at the coal face, but nevertheless you feel tired by the time you’ve finished.” I asked if she felt she’d been pigeon-holed as a writer, either for being a comedienne, or for being a lesbian. “I don’t feel it, but maybe it’s because I don’t read anything about myself. I’ve never Googled myself, which is an extraordinary expression, I never read anything written about me, because it might be very nice or it might be horrible, but it affects how you think about things and I think you should just get on and not worry so much about it. I’ve constantly re-invented myself. I started in children’s television, I went on to be an alternative comedienne and now I work in news radio. I defy anyone to find a pigeon with a hole large enough to put me in! The world is full of strange, various and fascinating things and I don’t think any writer writes exclusively about their sexuality, it would be dull. I don’t think about it, I don’t think of myself as a lesbian writer, you’re a writer or you’re not a writer.”

Last year she was Chair of the Judges for the Orange Prize for fiction, which is something she supports strongly. “I don’t do things that I don’t take seriously and there’s no money in it, so it’s not for the money. I think if you read in the papers, as I do, I read all the papers every day, and if you do that on a regular basis you will see the huge imbalance in the reviews given to male writers of fiction and female writers of fiction, you see how woman are very easily pigeon-holed even women doing brave and interesting work and until that changes I think we have to try and support women’s writing. The fact that quite a lot of women write about the domestic is perfectly fair because that may be for them the minutiae of life that is relevant to them. It would be great to say that there’ll be a day when everyone is on the same level playing field, but it hasn’t happened yet. My experience of working with women is a system of lots of laughter, much cooperation and much cheesecake and I have no problem with that at all.” When asked, as Chair of Judges, what unique quality she thought she would bring to the proceedings she said, “the ability to order pudding.” Food is clearly another thing she is passionate about. “As soon as we turned up [at the Orange Prize], I said what’s for lunch because I like to get the important things sorted out straight away, start with the food and move on from there.”

Apart from writing, radio, and being funny, Sandi Toksvig is probably best known for her love of travel. She presents Excess Baggage on Radio 4 and has presented BBC1’s Holiday Programme. I asked her about sailing round the UK with John McCarthy (the subject of one of her non-fiction books). “It was three months of bloody unadulterated hell. John and I had been friends for many years, long before he became a hostage. He was at university with my brother, so I’ve known him half my life. And it was John’s dream when he was a hostage to sail on a boat and have that sense of freedom. As we were two old friends and they needed someone who’d made documentaries before they asked me. John and I shared a cabin for three months, and didn’t have a single cross word and lived in unbelievably close circumstances. You had to get permission from each other to change clothes, not so the other person could turn away, but because there wasn’t room to move if the other person was changing. We knew each other very well by the end of it. He’s the most delightful person with a similar attitude to me in times of stress, which is to try and find the funny side. We laughed a lot, although I think it’s safe to say we both hated the trip. It was very long, very wet, very miserable, and no shower euch oough.” Needless to say she hasn’t been on a boat since, “although I’ve been asked to take part in a round the Isle of White sailing trip this summer, a race, and I am going to do that just for the heck of it, but I think I’ll be able to see land the entire time, so I’m not worried about it.”

She has also canoed across Africa. I asked her what on earth had persuaded her to do such a thing. “Pretty much any challenge that’s ever been set to me, I’ve tried to say, ‘yeah OK I’ll try that’. I can’t think of many cases where I’ve said, no I’m not going to do that. It was a challenge. Also I had this canoe that my father claimed Livingstone had used to charter the Zambezi. He brought it home from an antique shop one day, and I thought it would be fun to make the canoe travel the Zambezi, so we took my father’s canoe and that was the one I used to go across. It was extraordinary and amazing and terrifying. We had three genuine near death experiences and it’s interesting when you have to face that what you’re reaction is going to be, and apart from absolute mind numbing terror I still found the funny side. It’s survival of the wittiest. It’s an interesting thing to learn about oneself, what happens to the mind when you’re about to die, do you wet yourself or do you do that rather British thing and say something smart. Fortunately it was the smart remark that came out, rather than wee which would have been bad, but I don’t know if I would do it again. I’m getting a little savvy as I get older.” Surprisingly that wasn’t her worst travel experience. “No my worst travel experience was travelling to the Isle of White in a wardrobe that had been made into a hovercraft, which subsequently blew up and I had to be rescued by the RNLI. That was for children’s television. But for actually thinking you were going to peg it, the Africa trip was the most scary.”

She doesn’t have a favourite travel location, but genuinely loves anywhere new and different. “I’d be as happy in the Scilly Isles as I would in San Francisco, as I would in Shetland. Actually anywhere beginning with S is fine. I like to go home to Denmark. I’m going home this weekend to Copenhagen. I think if one just picks one place you become rather stuck in your ways. I’m always looking for the next place I want to go to, the new adventure.” Despite all her travels, and having lived for many years first in the U.S. and in this country for over thirty years, she still thinks of Denmark as home. “When I’m tired I start to speak in Danish, which is fine for the family, slightly confusing for English friends. Copenhagen is my hometown - fantastic food, and the people, it’s friendly and it’s clean with fresh air. I’m going for the big Hans Christian Andersen celebration. It’s his birthday on Sunday. Obviously he’s dead, so he won’t be there, but there’s people gathering from all over the world for a big celebration.”

Her ambition is to go back to university and study some more, but she wouldn’t go back to Cambridge. “I wasn’t very happy at Cambridge. They were very narrow-minded people I thought. People could split an atom, but not hold a normal conversation, I found it depressing and I thought socially and politically they were very narrow-minded. I have little or no time for that. I’d go to somewhere in America maybe, they do some wonderful schemes where you can be a writer in residence and help young writers and study for your PhD. But my youngest is 10, so it won’t be until he’s done with his education that I’d be able to do that.” She believes very strongly in the absolute right of anybody in this country, who wants to, to go university. “I think tuition fees are immoral. It makes me furious, absolutely furious and this is a government that promised they were never going to come in and they have, and I’m also fed up with the fact that and Oxford and Cambridge are supposed to be the two leading universities, they’re still the ones that everybody recognises abroad, and the previous Chancellor’s of both these universities have frankly done nothing, that may not be true, but it is from a PR publicity point of view that one is sort of unaware that they have ever done anything for the students or stuck up for the students and I thought it was time somebody at least said so and stood up on the part of the undergraduates.” That is why she ran for Chancellor of Oxford University in 2002. “Actually I got 25% of the votes, so I didn’t do too badly for someone who never went to Oxford and isn’t an old boy.”

More than anything else, Sandi Toksvig comes across as somebody’s mum, which of course she is. She says being a parent is the best thing she’s done. “My children are the most important thing in my whole life. I would give up everything for my children. And the reason I’m dashing now is my son’s got to get to tennis and my daughter needs help with her physics homework. There is nothing in my present world that I wouldn’t give up this second if that’s what my kids required. I recommend it whole-heartedly. It is my greatest production.” I asked if she’d encountered any problems as a lesbian mother (she has three children, 16, 14 and 10, conceived by her former partner with the help of a syringe and an obliging male friend). “I’ll touch wood here and say no. I suspect it’s because we’re very clear with everybody that we deal with, we’re just very up front. My experience is that most people are really kind and affable. And my kids are very sussed and cool and fabulous, very relaxed and they know their dad and we’re all very communicative about this issue, we’ve talked it through. Maybe it’s just that we’re fortunate and have the most fabulous children. Even my teenagers who are 16 and 14, that teenage thing that’s supposed to happen, that hasn’t happened either, but it may happen still that grumpy teenage thing. They’re delightful and charming and I spent yesterday playing tennis with the three of them. We had such a good time, we were crying with laughter.” When asked if she was good at tennis she replied, “No I’m crap that’s why we were laughing so much. My son said, ‘you’re great mum ‘cos you laugh when you lose’ and I said that’s just as well, isn’t it. I enjoy it and I get fun out of it and so does particularly Teddy my son. He and I will go off and play tennis or go swimming or whatever. We love to go mountain biking together. He’s at an age where he’s really raring to go. The girls are a bit more going off with their friends and things.” I find it hard to conjure a mental image of Sandi on a mountain bike (probably just as well) but it’s heart-warming to find someone who is so serious about being a good parent and enjoys it, especially when there are so many programmes on the TV about ‘problem’ children. And so, having checked, in a motherly way, that my recorder had taped our conversation, and that I knew the way home, I left her to swot up her physics homework.

Naomi Young (From Velvet Issue 4)