Sandi Toksvig

Occasionally, we were shown a film and we were one night shown Brief Encounter.

I don't know why.

It's quite a sexually charged film.

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard.

And I watched the film and I thought, oh, well.

whatever i'll speak like that so so i speak like celia johnson in in brief encounter however if and when richard you and i enjoy a small schooner of beer i will revert to my real accent which is somewhere i think between the norwegian portuguese and american do you need to have a drink for that to come out well i think it's probably best to keep it quiet

Initially, I found it hugely exciting because the presence of clever people is always energising, I think.

It was, again, it's hard to imagine, but it was the late 70s.

It was still a huge imbalance in terms of gender.

So there were 10 boys for every girl on my...

course.

And if you wanted to get heard, you really needed to make yourself unpopular, I think, because it was hard for women to get in.

I loved the study of law.

I really enjoyed it.

My dream then was to become a human rights lawyer.

And gradually, through my training, I began to realize more and more that the legal system, maybe it's not true in Australia, but certainly it's true in Britain, was more and more about money and less and less about justice.

And that's not true for everybody, but it was certainly true for the kind of course that I was on.

So I started taking random courses that nobody else was interested in.

I was one of only three people, all women, who took the very first course taught on Muslim law in the United Kingdom.

And I found that fascinating because I love knowledge just for its own sake.