Chapter 1: What unique experiences shaped Sandi Toksvig's early life?
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is on ABC Listen and ABC iView. ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Today it's my conversation with author, broadcaster and comedian Sandy Toksvig. Sandy's best known in Australia as a host of the BBC series QI, but that is just the merest, teeniest, tiniest portion of a fabulous life spent in the relentless pursuit of everything that interests her.
Sandy's curiosity was stoked from a young age by her dad, who was Denmark's first TV foreign correspondent. And that meant that Sandy grew up all over the world, in Europe and Africa and New York City. Despite being a frequent absentee student, Sandy went on to Cambridge University. And while she was there, she joined Footlights.
And then she appeared on the very first night of London's legendary Comedy Store. Sandy Toxvig has appeared regularly on shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Have I Got News For You? She's written more than 20 books for adults and for children. And as an 11-year-old, Sandy played a crucial role in NASA's mission control during the Apollo 11 moon landings. Hi, Sandy.
It's like my life flashed before me there, Richard. I feel there's nothing left to say.
I know. Let's wrap it up now, shall we? Let's go home, have a cup of tea or something. I mentioned your dad there, who was on the telly as well. Tell me a bit about the kind of man he was and what he meant to you.
Well, we just passed the anniversary of his passing, which is extraordinary to me because he was such a vibrant guy. The fact that he's not here is hard to believe he passed away 34 years ago. He was, and not just because he was my dad, the sort of guy that lit up a room. He had a charm about him. He was the sort of man who couldn't go into a bar without buying a round of drinks for everybody.
And he taught me to be interested in minutiae. He was a brilliant correspondent.
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Chapter 2: How did Sandi's father's career influence her worldview?
And he always said it's the detail that is going to sell the story to the audience. I'll give you a very quick example. He was broadcasting to Denmark the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. And he was trying to find a Danish connection of any kind. And Kiri Takanawa was singing. And he discovered that her earrings were made by a Danish jeweler. And he went, that's it. That's the one.
There we go. His excitement at that, I've never forgotten.
He must have been very well known in Denmark. What did that mean when you went out in public as a family?
Well, it gave me a very odd relationship with fame early in my life. I don't remember a time when my family wasn't in the spotlight. My dad was incredibly famous. When Danish television started, my dad was the very first host of the news. And in those days... It's hard to believe now. The news would come on.
I don't know how old you are, Richard, but it used to be that if you wanted to watch television at 7, you had to turn on a 5.2 to warm the television up. You had to have a little moment to think about going, oh, I get to broadcast now. The lights would come on at the back. So my dad came on at 7. He read the news from a desk in black and white. There were no insert film footages at all.
He had a red telephone on his desk. I don't know why it was red because it was black and white, telly. And occasionally the prime minister would ring and they would do an interview together. And my dad would often smoke his pipe while reading the news. So this is how casual it was.
At 8 o'clock, he would finish and then they would do a half-hour documentary about, I don't know, the Queen's silver spoon collection. And then the service would close down. My father was two-thirds of all available Danish television. He was famous in a way.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Sandi face during her education?
That's it. We had one channel, and he was an hour over an hour and a half. I don't think you can imagine fame like it.
You're saying to me that the TV station closed down at, what, 8.30 or something, didn't it?
8.30, yes.
It was an hour and a half. That was it. That was thought to be quite enough television for the Danish public, was it, at that point?
Darling, there was milking to do in the morning. I'm not going to keep you up. So when we went out, if we went into a restaurant, this is how old fashioned it is. You're talking about the early 1960s. The men in the restaurant who were dining, if my father walked in, would stand up and bow their heads and click their heels until he sat down to eat. It was weird. It was weird.
Did all that go to his head a bit? I wonder. No. Not in the slightest. So he was so wonderful about it. What he always taught me, and he had no idea what I was planning to do for a living, he said the thing about fame, Sandy, is it doesn't mean anything. It's absolute nonsense unless you use it for good purpose, unless you try and make it mean something.
So he was passionate about being factually accurate. He would be so horrified by the misinformation around things like, for example, American elections and so on, just to pick a subject at random. And he was passionate that he had to tell the truth and that the audience had to believe him because he said, otherwise, I'm just, what am I? I'm just a mouthpiece.
And I remember on holiday, he once grew most exquisite, very neat, what we used to call a navel beard. He thought it was marvelous. He was very pleased with it. And he went on television with his neat navel beard and he got lots of letters saying, what a marvelous beard. And he immediately shaved it off. And I said, why did you do that? It looked really nice.
And he said, because if they're looking at my beard and talking about that, they're not listening to what I'm saying. So it was important to him that he said the truth.
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Chapter 4: How did Sandi's family navigate fame and public life?
You need to learn the name of the person whose job it is to get you the glass of water because they're as important a member of the team as you are. So I don't want to ever hear you say again, may I have a glass of water? I want you to hear you say the name of the person and then ask them for the glass of water. And he was right.
That's famous in Australia, a bit of advice that was given to Prime Minister Paul Keating by his mentor who said, watch how people in politics behave.
treat service people watch how a politician treats a waiter a taxi driver a cleaner a flight attendant that'll tell you so much about who they are and their personality this is the same thing isn't it yeah it's exactly the same thing and when my father passed which was you know horrendous uh time in my life at his funeral our local postman and the prime minister sat next to each other in the front row of the church and i thought yeah that's that's he got that right your mom was british how did she meet your dad
So when Danish radio, as we still call it, we still call Danish television, Danish radio. When Danish radio started, so it was their equivalent of the BBC, in order to do the trainings that hadn't happened before, they sent my dad as one of the first trainees to the BBC. And my mom, who doesn't ever get as much credit as my dad, and she should...
She was one of the first female studio managers at the BBC. It was unheard of to have a woman in – imagine a woman putting the news on. Extraordinary idea. And so she literally met him through the glass. People who are not familiar with radio studios won't know that the sort of controls are on the other side of a large piece of glass to the person who's broadcasting. And she put him on air.
So they – I don't know if the glass steamed up. I don't like to think about it too much, Richard. It's my parents. Do you know what I'm saying?
I was going to ask you if it was love at first sight, but it is your mum and dad, and you probably don't want to go there. No, that's right. I don't.
They liked each other.
They liked each other. That's marvellous. And here you are in the world, and that's lovely. I know. You mentioned there that the TV had to go off at 8.30 so people could get up to do the milking. Was Denmark still quite a rural provincial society? Did you have country rural family members?
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Chapter 5: What was Sandi's experience at Cambridge University?
And he said, as he was growing up, there was a TV ad campaign in Reykjavik that said, Iceland, it's okay to smile. Because they wanted to encourage Icelanders to smile for visitors. Because they said, he said, until then, Icelanders saw smiling as a sign of weakness and laughter as a sign of madness. Was Denmark a fellow Scandi country a bit like that as well, Sandy?
Yeah.
Well, no, I mean, weirdly, I went into comedy because of Denmark. So my dad, as is the way, had lots of friends in show business. And he had a friend of his called Dirk Passer.
Chapter 6: How did Sandi Toksvig's health issues impact her life?
And Dirk Passer was in his time the most famous comic kind of slash clown in Denmark. And I remember going to see him at the age of six and watching him Just have the audience completely in the parmesan and people were rocking with laughter. And I sat there and I thought, yeah, that I'd like that. I'd like to do what he's doing. That looks like fun.
So the Danes have a great sense of humor, but they will also tell you straight out if you say to them what you think of the thing I'm wearing. It doesn't suit you, and they're trying to be kind. They're really trying to be kind. I don't think it's just a Danish thing. I think it's a Scandinavian thing. I was in Norway.
We went to Norway to the Arctic for our honeymoon, and we were right up in the north in a place called the Lofoten Islands, and I was talking to this guy, and I said, how bad does the weather get up here? He said, well, last winter the porch blew off our house. And I said, oh, that's terrible. And he said, no, it was winter. Who needs a porch in the winter?
And I thought, wow, that's such a Scandi attitude. Okay, we'll worry about that in the spring.
Norway, the home of disposable porches.
I know, right? You just imagine some porch flying past. Somebody go, oh, there's Olaf's porch again. I quite like it as an attitude. I think we all worry too much about stuff.
That's right. Let's not get so hung up on our porches. I quite agree. You've written about your family's extraordinary story during the Second World War and your father, who was a boy during that time. Tell me how you found out this story and how it unfolded as it was told to you.
My dad didn't really talk very much about it. So Denmark was occupied during the Second World War, Copenhagen in particular. And it used to make my dad very mad that in Britain, for example, they used to refer to Denmark, not everybody, some people refer to Denmark as Hitler's canary. And there was a suggestion that the Danes were colluding with the Germans being there.
And it wasn't the case at all. And he eventually, although very slowly, told me the story of what happened. So I come from a long line of theatricals and writers. And my grandmother, my father's mother, was an actress. She was extremely beautiful. And my grandfather was a writer and a painter, a scenic artist.
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Chapter 7: What led Sandi to come out publicly in the 1990s?
And years and years later, my uncle, Hans, my father's brother, was getting married and he went to a tailor to have a suit made. And the man said to him, it's almost making me cry as I say it to you. And the man said to him, I'm not going to charge you for this suit because I was the small boy who escaped that day from your home.
Oh, Sandy, that story makes me think and feel so many different things. How does it make you think and feel when you hear that?
Well, you know, it's a lot to live up to to have a family like that. And I remember saying to my dad, why did you do it? You weren't Jewish. You didn't even have any Jewish friends. And he just shrugged and said, it was the right thing to do. And that is like if I had a motto in my life, it's that. Try and do the right thing. So I have a lot to... You know, he was a great guy.
Maybe it would have been nice to have had a bricklayer dad. My English grandfather was a bricklayer, so I don't know why I picked that.
So when you were seven or so, the family moved to the United States. What brought you there?
So Denmark decided that it was time we had a foreign correspondent. It was a new idea. And so in order to have one, because that's all they could afford, they sent my dad to New York because the United Nations was there. There was a theory, which I like, that you could cover the whole world from the United Nations because it'd be somebody from that country that you could talk to.
And so we moved there.
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Chapter 8: How does Sandi view her career and the importance of curiosity?
People don't know how the information dissemination has changed. My dad used to go out with a film crew and he would shoot a story about whatever it was. And then quite often late at night, my dad and I would drive out to Kennedy Airport, the main airport in New York, with a large roll of film in a silver canister.
And we would go up to people flying to Copenhagen and ask them if they'd take the news home. What? Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you'd meet some nice person. My dad would probably know somebody who was at school with or something. Denmark's quite a small country. And they would take the film home. So a story would take maybe three days from shooting to appearing on the television.
And nobody was in a great hurry. Nobody was racing to get the news. It wasn't like last minute, oh, this has happened and that's happened. And my dad always referred to it as edited reality, that he wanted in his, whatever the broadcast was going to be, three minutes or whatever, to make sure that it was the truth about what he had done. It just took a bit longer.
It was a little bit more thoughtful. And I think that's probably not a bad thing.
Do you remember how you responded to moving from Copenhagen, which is beautiful and very human in scale, to the great roaring enormity of Manhattan?
I loved it. I'm still excited when I arrive anywhere. I have a real sense of the potential of anywhere new. And what I learned from my dad is that everywhere in the world has something to commend it. You just need to go and find it. So all I see is possibility when I go anywhere.
And I think I felt that when we arrived in New York, just the smell of it and the steam rising up from the subway in the street. And there's something magical. Still, I feel that. I feel very at home in New York. But it has left me with a great love of arriving anywhere new.
How did your father encourage you to become interested, you and your brother to become interested in current affairs, worldliness, the world at large?
Well, I don't think we had any choice, Richard. Really? Again, I must sound like some terrible dinosaur. So in our house, we had a Reuters ticker tape machine. Reuters is still one of the great news services. And a ticker tape machine was a machine that sort of fed the news out and it didn't stop. It just kept coming.
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