Conversations: Sandi Toksvig and the school of life

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Sandy Toxvig is an author, broadcaster, comedian and part-time tour guide.

Sandy is best known in Australia as the 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, Africa and New York City.

Despite being a frequent absentee student, Sandy went to Cambridge

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 she played a crucial role in NASA's mission control

during the Apollo 11 moon landing.

I spoke with Sandy when she visited Australia last year.

Hello Sandy.

It's like my life flashed before me there Richard, I feel there's nothing left to say really.

Let's wrap it up now shall we?

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 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 Takanova was singing

and he discovered that her earrings were made by a Danish jeweler

and he went, that's it, that's the one.

So, his excitement at that, I've never forgotten it.

You 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 seven, 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 seven.

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 telling.

And occasionally, the prime minister would ring

and they would do an interview together.

My dad often smoked his pipe while reading the news.

So, this is how casual it was.

At eight 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.

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,

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 past half the stage.

Ridiculous.

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 they 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 a big 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 naval beard.

He thought it was marvelous.

He was very pleased with it.

And he went on television with his neat naval 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, Doug?

He looked really nice.

And he said, because if they're looking at my beard

and talking about that,

I'm not listening to what I'm saying.

So, it was important to him that he said the truth.

And is he still an influence on how you go

about your day-to-day life today?

Absolutely.

I think about him every time I take a seat in a television studio.

Of course, I stood behind the cameras for years

and watched him working.

And I remember him saying to me,

he came to visit me in my very first television show

that I was doing.

And I said at one point, I said, can I get a glass of water?

And he took me to one side and he said, darling,

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 a famous in Australia a bit of advice

that was given to a Prime Minister, Paul Keating,

by his mentor who said,

watch how people in politics 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 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, he got that right.

Your mum 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 mum, 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, an 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 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 that is your mum and dad, and you probably don't want to.

No, that's right.

They liked each other.

They liked each other. That's marvellous.

And here you are in the world, and that's lovely.

You mentioned there that 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?

Yes, absolutely.

I had a great aunt who was a milkmaid all her life,

and she was the sweetest person I think I've ever met.

And when she got married, she had a week's holiday

in Copenhagen.

And when she got back to the mainland,

the main country area of Denmark,

nobody wanted to know what Copenhagen was like.

Everybody wanted to know what it was like to have a week off.

It was just unheard of.

And she told me a story,

and it has stayed with me all of my life.

So they got every other Christmas off, right, the milkmaids.

So one year was her year to have Christmas off,

and a milkmaid came to her and said,

could she swap years because there was a boy she really liked,

and she wanted to go to a dance with him.

And my aunt said, no, she wanted to have Christmas off.

And she said she regretted it for the whole of her life.

Oh, she remembered that one unkindness, did she?

Yeah.

There's an interesting lesson for us all there.

I have a very good friend who grew up in Iceland.

He's early years were in Iceland, and he said,

as he was growing up, there was a TV ad campaign in Reykjavik

that said Iceland, it's OK to smile,

because they wanted to encourage Icelanders to smile for visitors,

because they 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?

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,

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 palm of his hand,

and people were rocking with laughter.

And I sat there and I thought, yeah, that, I'd like to do what he's doing.

That looks like fun.

So the Danes have a great sense of humour,

but they will also tell you straight out,

if you say to them, what do you think of the thing I'm wearing?

It doesn't suit you, and they're trying to be kind.

They really, they're trying to be kind.

I don't think it's just a Danish thing.

I think it's this kind of 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, yeah, that's such a Scandi attitude.

Okay, we'll worry about that in the spring.

Norway, the home of disposable porches.

I know, right?

He just mentioned some porch flying past somebody.

Go, oh, there's a lot of porch again.

I quite like it as an attitude.

I think we all worry too much about stuff.

That's right.

Let's look at, so, hang 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 the 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 I 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.

And when Germany occupied Denmark,

we didn't have a large Jewish population,

perhaps seven or 8,000 people.

It was decided by a number of right-thinking people

that what they needed to do

was to get the Jewish population out to Sweden.

And the story is remarkable.

So it was very dangerous.

You have to imagine there was the SS troops everywhere,

the German troops.

My grandfather created and painted a false wall

in their apartment in central Copenhagen.

So it created a sort of a narrow space,

maybe three, four feet deep.

But if you looked at it,

you put a chaise-longs right in front of it,

almost to draw attention to it.

If you looked at it as you walked into the room,

you would think that was the end of the room.

That is how he painted it.

And then they hid a Jewish family behind this wall.

And they did have a gun,

but they hid it in a geranium flowerpot.

And my father, who was perhaps 11 at the time,

ran messages for the underground.

And then on one occasion they heard that the SS

were going to come and search the apartment.

So they put the Jewish family behind the wall.

And my grandmother, bear in mind, actress,

she lay on the chaise-longs.

And before the soldiers arrived,

she cut her legs all over with a sharp knife

and then applied theatrical makeup.

So she looked like she had terrible sores on her legs.

And then she covered herself with a shawl.

And knowing my grandmother, probably Kashmir.

And my father, a small boy,

stood in front of the geranium pot,

which had the gun hidden in it on instructions

that at the last minute, if there was nothing else to do,

he was to reach for the gun.

And the soldiers arrived.

And my father said my grandmother gave

the finest performance of her life.

She threw back the shawl and said,

how could you accuse a woman who's this ill

of doing anything at all?

Look at me, I can't walk.

He said it was, you know, Damo Camelia.

It was just an amazing performance.

Did she disgust them?

Is that part of the trick as well?

Disgusting them by her sores?

Disgusting them, a horrify that you could treat a woman like this,

a mixture of trembling lip and outrage, tears,

and they never did take the gun out of the geranium pot.

The men went away.

And that Jewish family was

safely taken by small boat

across the waters to Sweden.

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 do try and do the right thing.

So I have a lot to, you know, he was a great guy.

It's, you know, maybe it would have been nice

if I 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.

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

and 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.

And 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,

all 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 have 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.

So you had this chattering machine in the apartment?

This chattering machine was in my dad's study.

And it would ping.

It would ping one for quite interesting, two for...

And three for invasion, pretty much.

That was kind of...

So I have never forgotten the night

when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia

because it just kept pinging threes all the time.

So there was a sense of the news being a backdrop to our lives.

There was a sense of the sound track of a ticker tape machine

constantly telling us that something was happening.

Plus, dad never treated us like children.

He just thought we were sort of slightly smaller adults.

I don't ever remember him talking to us as a child.

From about the age of eight, I read the first...

Me and my brother read the first three pages of The New York Times

before supper so that we had something interesting to talk about

because, dear God, he didn't want to hear about school.

So I guess we were expected to be up to speed.

And we attended lots of events.

I went to both the Republican and the Democrat National Conventions.

We attended all kinds of things.

We were endlessly on the road,

but we were aware of what was happening.

One of the most distressing moments of my life,

my father ringing in tears

because he had been there when Robert Kennedy was shot

and him ringing saying,

this is so horrific for America

and this is not wearing his impartial journalist's hat,

but he had personally liked Robert Kennedy and spent time with him.

So there were things that really stayed with me,

that my father's reaction to it

and the importance on the world stage of it

absolutely was brought home to me.

And my brother is now an absolutely brilliant foreign journalist.

He's on the editorial side, but he's an extraordinary journalist.

So it stayed with us.

I don't think it has ever left either of us.

So that was 68 and 69 was the year of the Apollo moon landing.

Tell me about the day your dad took you to Cape Kennedy

for the launch of the Apollo moon mission in 69.

How close did you get to the rocket, Sandy?

Well, incredibly close.

So again, you know, I'm 11 years old and I'm thinking,

oh, Florida fun because in those days

you could get the baby alligator for hardly any money

at the roadside.

And they were like $10 or something.

Oh, let's get a baby alligator.

And we drove down, there's a place called,

there's a road called the Beeline Highway.

And it was just exciting.

I thought, oh, go to Florida, how marvelous.

And then there was less anxiety about childcare.

Can I just say in those days, I think there was a lot less anxiety.

So my mum went off to help dad

because there were these huge booths set up

for all the foreign journalists.

So Apollo 11, of course,

anybody who doesn't recall the very first manned mission to the moon.

So my brother and I were sort of abandoned at a beach,

which was all the families of the correspondence.

And we were as close as you were allowed to be to the rocket,

which was a mile and a half.

But you could see it really clearly across the sort of flat waters.

And when it, and there was the countdown,

they had big tannoy system set up.

So you heard the countdown, T minus 10.

And there was all the stuff going on and people were very excited.

And when it took off, the ground shook.

I have such a strong recollection of it.

And then we transferred.

So that was Cape Kennedy as was in Florida.

And then we flew to Houston in Texas,

which is where mission control was.

And again, dad was very busy and people didn't have the security they have now.

I just say ABC, very hard to get into.

In those days, mission control of Houston.

I had some trouble getting to meet you, Richard.

It was tricky.

We arrived there and we just,

my brother and I just wandered around.

And my dad, I think I'd persuaded him,

he told me a huge Texas cowboy hat, massive 10 gallon hat.

And I was a tiny little thing.

So I'm walking around with this big hat on.

And then there's the moment Neil Armstrong's about to step out onto the moon

and slightly flub his lines.

And I'm standing there as a woman standing next to me.

And I must have looked very curious, this massive hat on.

I said to her, are you all right?

She said, I'm a little nervous.

I said, oh, why?

She said, my boss is about to step out onto the moon.

And it was Neil Armstrong's secretary.

So I said, as you would as an 11 year old,

I said, oh, don't worry, I'll hold your hand.

So when he stepped out into the moon,

I was holding Neil Armstrong's secretary's hand.

I don't know whether she remembered it as well as I did,

but it was an extraordinary thing.

I told my dad afterwards and he went,

I can't believe I didn't have a camera on that.

I'm sure she remembers the girl in the 10 gallon hat,

the little girl holding her hand.

So what were you like as a school kid

once you were at school going back and forth, Sandy?

Oh, I don't know.

Mouthy, I think probably.

Mouthy?

I liked facts to be correct.

I remember I had a teacher in the fifth grade

in the United States.

She was from Arkansas.

And she was called Miss Strange.

That's a great name, isn't it?

Miss Strange.

And she said, the thing about Africa,

children's very hot, hot all the time.

And I said, excuse me,

a monkey manjaro's got snow on it.

You're a liar, Sandy.

You're just a liar.

There is no snow in Africa.

And I just thought, oh my God.

So I think that must be very annoying.

I'm sure Miss Strange went home

and thought I was a nightmare.

I've got the mental picture in my head now,

the famous picture of Mount Kilimanjaro.

And it's always snow capped.

Thank you.

I rest my case.

Thank you very much.

So this is why you were absentee so often?

I found school a bit boring.

We were given catcher in the rye to read,

which is a slim book, frankly, by JD Salinger.

So I went home and I read it,

fully prepared to discuss it the next day.

Had a discussion with my dad about it in the morning.

I went in and realized they were going to read it

one word at a time all year.

So I thought, you know, I'll come back when they finished.

I'll go find something else to do.

And what was that?

It makes me sound like a smartass.

It makes me sound like a smartass, which is not nice.

I should have just sat there and done what they said,

but I've always been impatient.

I was impatient with the rest of them to read the book.

So where did you go if you went to school

while they were plotting through catcher in the rye,

page by page?

So I used to hang out at the local theater.

I used to hang out backstage.

Sometimes I ashamed to say,

I took the train up to the city.

We were in the suburb called Maranek,

which is the suburb of New York City.

And I would take the train up and sneak into a matinee.

That's terrible.

It's terrible.

If my children did this, I'd have to sit them down

and say, well, I'm very disappointed,

which is my go-to word with my children.

So I'm not proud of it, Richard.

I'm not proud.

It's not good.

So what happened when your parents

went to one of those parent-teacher nights

at one of these schools you were supposed to be attending?

Well, fortunately,

my parents had a very lackadaisical,

mildly indolent attitude to parenting.

So mostly they didn't go

or ask me what I'd been up to.

On one occasion, for reasons I can't recall,

maybe there were free drinks.

I don't know what happened.

They went to a parent-teacher association meeting.

Couldn't find a teacher who knew me.

So the game was up.

Apparently it was not enough to just turn up every day.

And hang out at the local theater.

And so, slightly despairing,

because I was 14 by then,

they sent me inexplicably to boarding school in England.

My mother's from England.

My grandparents were still alive then,

living in England.

And I think my English grandmother had a say in this,

because I went to the school

that her best friend's kids had gone to.

I say school.

I'm going to say slash jail.

I was going to say,

for someone who's been a pretty free-range kid,

I just felt my heart sinking then when you told me

you were sent to a boarding school in the UK, Sandy.

It was hideous.

I have a theory about British boarding schools.

I don't know if it's the same in Australia.

I think they are funded by therapists to breed new clients.

I think that's the main purpose of boarding schools.

It's a patient factory for therapists.

I say this, I'm married to a therapist,

so I have some understanding of how I'm born.

So I'm grateful.

So who was that agreed to on your first day

at boarding school in England?

So Matron.

Matron was a large woman.

She wobbled.

She didn't really walk.

She wobbled.

And she opened the door.

I was very friendly.

I had a big New York accent.

I've been living in New York for years and years.

I said, hi, I'm Sandy.

And she said, I'm Matron.

I said, oh, why does that like your first name,

your last name?

How does that work there?

Anyway, she hated me on site.

So that was good.

She made the next four years of my life help.

And because I had a thick New York accent,

this is my sub story, Richard.

Are you ready?

I'm ready.

I'm bracing myself.

Totally over it.

A little violin, if you wouldn't mind.

For the first six weeks living in the UK,

Barry Munn had never lived in the UK.

Nobody spoke to me.

So the whole school sent me to Coventry.

How long did you say six weeks?

It was the first six weeks of living there.

And was that your accent?

Yeah.

And how did you change your accent?

Because you're not using a New York accent anymore.

I know.

I said, speak like I'm trapped in a black and white film.

And that is because I am trapped in a black and white film.

I, very occasionally, we weren't allowed to watch television

because it was too exciting for the girls.

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 I speak like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.

However, even when Richard, you and I,

enjoy a small spooner 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.

It's to keep it quiet.

Podcast.

Broadcast.

This is Conversations.

With Richard Feidler.

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Once the dreadful business of school

was over for you at boarding school,

you went to Cambridge to study law

and archaeology and anthropology.

Good God.

Did universities suit you much better than school?

I'm assuming it did, Sandy.

Initially, I found it hugely exciting

because the presence of clever people

is always energizing, 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

when 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.

And so I'm possibly a rare atheist

who's read the whole of the Quran

and found it interesting.

And I loved all of that side of it.

And then very sadly,

between my second and my third year,

I became extremely ill

and had to have a life-saving operation.

How did you notice something was wrong?

When did, what were the signs

that something has gone badly wrong?

Well, I didn't.

I have a terrible disconnect, I think,

between my brain and my body.

I sort of paid very little.

Scant attention.

Scant attention to my body.

Scant attention to your body.

And I had lost an enormous amount of weight

and had gone down to five and a half stone.

I don't know what that is in real life.

Oh, dear.

Oh, dear, that's not good.

That's five times 14,

76 pounds.

Is that not a lot?

I only know what it is in the old money, too,

so that's fine.

That's thin.

That's real thin.

That's very too thin.

Let's go with real thin.

Cartoon-like thin,

but with quite a large belly.

And to my English grandmother,

who was mostly not a terribly nice person,

said to me,

oh, you're pregnant?

And I said, no, you're pregnant.

Then I think you're ill.

And I went to the doctors,

and indeed I was extremely unwell

and had an operation.

And so I was advised not to go back for my third year,

but...

I asked, what was wrong?

What did they find?

Oh, darling, it's...

I was written up in the Lancet,

which is a medical magazine.

I had the largest varian cyst ever seen,

and the real issue was not the cyst itself,

but the fact that it was crushing all my organs.

They had never seen something like it.

In order to...

I think they had to wear wellingtons

during the operation.

I think there was an awful lot of liquid.

But I have a scar,

about 10, 11 inches across my whole system,

because they couldn't get to it.

Oh, my God, Sandy, that's extraordinary.

I know, it's weird, right?

Why not have...

Why have something dull?

Why not have something interesting?

It's a typical attention seeker you are appearing in the Lancet too.

She's like, look at me,

look at me all the time, isn't it?

Look at that.

Look at this thing.

Look at this thing.

Seriously though,

I suppose you don't know how bad you feel

until you have your giant ovarian cyst cut out of you.

Was it like to then recover?

Did it take forever to recover,

or did you recover quite quickly?

No, it took a very long time.

The scar was very large.

I had lost a ridiculous amount of weight.

I was very poorly, very weak.

Did you think you were going to die?

I did, because they didn't know what it was.

I had one of the world's first ultrasounds,

and they thought it was a tumor.

So there were...

It was not a...

It was not a happy time,

but my dad, bless his heart, used to come...

He was very excited.

I remember that he had just found...

Do you remember Portable Radius?

He had just found the world's first portable, tiny television,

black-and-white television,

and he used to come and watch the cricket on a screen

that was about two inches square.

I don't think he could see the ball,

but I remember him sitting by my hospital bed

just holding my hand,

and they didn't really chat, so it was two weeks,

but it was nice that he sat there with me.

He was very excited by this new piece of technology.

I often think how excited he'd be

by all the stuff there.

It would be so amazing.

Does the wind still trouble you?

Does that hideous experience still cause you physical pain?

Well, the scar was very helpful.

It tells me when the weather's going to change.

So I get a twinge.

Are you serious?

I get a twinge of my scar.

I never know what to make when people tell me this.

I had a brother-in-law who said,

I could absolutely tell when it was going to rain,

but I said, I've been sniffing up the chimney,

and I said, what are you talking about?

He was right.

Are you serious?

You can tell when the weather's going to change?

I can, and as I get older,

I had my first tattoo at 60, and I'm 64 now.

I was thinking, because it's a straight line across my stomach,

I was thinking of having a small zip tattoo

on one end of it, just like, hey, help yourself, open up.

I think you could do a really interesting sort of

bizarre meteorology section at the end of the news,

and I think you'd be following in your dad's footsteps,

and I think it'd be a marvellous thing all around.

Can we go over to Sandy's scar?

What's going to rain, everybody?

And you could say, yeah,

don't listen to what that fool just told you,

I'm telling you, it's going to rain.

Yes, it's going to be marvellous, tremendous.

My God, anyway, was this the same year

you fell in love for the first time?

Yes, no.

So I was already...

I fell in love with my first year at university

with the third year, which was, you know,

shocking, isn't it, 32 years apart,

but when you were in first year, you just think,

third year, so amazing.

And how did you feel in love?

Well, she lived in the room above mine in our halls,

and she came down to complain about the noise I was making.

And she never quite left?

I was laughing, I was laughing and laughing,

and she came down and stayed.

Oh, how nice was...

What was that like to have all that sort of reveal to you

all the time, you know, first of all, love and your sexuality

and all those sorts of things,

sort of hitting you in that flood tide of youth

and being a Cambridge and all of that, Sandy?

Well, it should have been wonderful

and it should have been amazing,

but again, we're talking about the late 70s.

We didn't know anybody else.

We didn't know, there was no...

I don't know what you'd call it, a gay society,

gay sock, we used to say.

There's no such thing, but there was maybe,

but we didn't know about it.

We didn't know anybody else.

There was a secret.

We couldn't tell our friends, we couldn't tell the family.

So that moment when you fall in love,

which should be so thrilling and exciting,

you know, I was 19,

was marred by the secrecy.

I'm so proud of young people now being who they want to be.

I'm so proud of the new language.

I'm so proud of what they're all doing,

because to go back to those horrible, dark,

shadowed days would be horrific

and is positively dangerous for people's mental health.

Terribly cruel.

How did the college react when they discovered

that you were sharing a bed with another lady person?

Well, it's so ridiculous,

because the college I was at, Gertin College,

was founded as far as I can work out by a lesbian couple,

but I always seem to have forgotten that.

But anyway, so she came up to see me.

She had graduated, but when I was very ill,

she came up one weekend to look after me.

I was really still very weak and very unwell.

And she came up to look after me and they found out

and decided that they would discuss at board level

whether I should be, what Cambridge School be sent down,

be thrown out.

Even though the girls up and down the corridor

had boys living full-time, but that was fine.

We were fine with that.

And she didn't come up for the weekend to check on me.

Anyway, after three weeks' discussion,

I can't imagine what the discussion was like.

They decided I could stay because of my excellent academic record.

So, lessen to you all, people.

Be gay, but be clever about it.

So it was the old don't frighten the horses thing.

Was that the idea?

Honestly, yeah.

And then, again, for the second time in my life,

people didn't speak to me.

I was sent to Coventry by the people at the college.

And I think there's something in me that just...

I think they wanted me to leave because it was so uncomfortable.

I think what they were trying to do was to get me to go

because it was so awful.

And don't do that to me because that will just make me stay.

But my best friend at the time, the university,

still my friend, Helen Gavin, amazing, amazing woman.

Helen is a very passionate Catholic.

She goes to Mass, I think every day, but I mean a lot.

You're like a lot. It takes up a lot of time.

And she just carried on the same.

She's carried on speaking to me.

She's just carried on being my friend,

carried on having coffee with me.

She was the only person who would eat lunch with me.

She just sat with me the whole time.

And I said, why are you doing this?

Surely the Pope would think that I'm a very bad person.

And all she ever said about it was,

I think the Pope may have got this one wrong.

And I love her to this day.

She's a passionate, loyal human being.

Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous person.

And years later, she broke at a deal.

She spoke to the college and said,

what happened to Sandy?

Is it disgrace?

And it has stayed with me.

And maybe three, four years ago, we went up to the college.

They made me a fellow.

They apologized publicly.

And we had the college's first ever LGBTQ plus dinner in the hall

with 450 students who identified as queer and rainbow flags flying.

And it was great.

It was great.

And she did that.

She made that happen.

At the time experiencing all that awful disdain

and the alienation that must come with that,

this is around the time you're doing footlights,

doing improv, and then doing comedy for the first time.

I just want to know about your irreducible.

Is there some kind of invincible core about you

that knows that you can win people over or something?

Is that what it is, Sandy?

Well, of course, I don't know a single comedian

that doesn't stick crying in the dressing room.

I'm trying to make the world a better place.

My life's terrible.

Most comedians have a fairly dark streak in them.

But of course comedy is a great way to try

and see the world in a slightly better light.

I mean, you, though.

I mean, to take that step out of the alienation

and onto the stage where you make people laugh.

I'm kind of just Miriam Margolies did the same thing

in Generation Before You as well.

There's speaks of something unconquerable there, I think.

What do you think?

I don't know.

I mean, I think sometimes it's so painful

that you just literally feel like you can't bear it.

And so the only thing to do is to try and turn a spotlight on it

and make it funny.

I think it's so painful that you can succumb,

which is very sad that some people do,

and they never fully recover.

Their mental health doesn't recover.

Too many LGBTQ plus people have been lost to suicide.

It's a very high percentage

because of the way in which they've been treated.

And I hope if just one person looks at me and goes,

okay, let's keep going,

then I feel like I didn't become a human rights lawyer,

but I did something.

I read that you performed on the very first night

of the comedy store.

Was that before it went to Leicester Square

when it was still in Soho back in those days?

Alexi Sale was hosting and all that?

Was that that night?

Yes.

It seems extraordinary.

They came up to Cambridge to look for people.

And I was at the time doing a very strange double act

with a guy called Simon McBurney.

And Simon has gone on to run

the most astonishing theater company

called Theater De Complicité.

And Simon was at the time going out

with the girl called Emma Thompson.

And so they asked me and Simon

to come down to the company store.

And it wasn't a real comedy club.

When I stand up comedy clubs, it was absolutely unheard of.

So what they'd done is they'd taken a Sunday night

at a strip joint.

And I remember it going into the bar area

and it was called the doubles bar.

And the woman behind the bar was very gross

because she'd been made to wear a top for the evening.

Which she didn't normally wear.

And I was, you know, 19, 20 years old.

I was, what?

I don't know what was happening.

And I think Alexi was hosting that night

and Simon and I went on and did the thing.

Anyway, they have a list in the current

incarnation of the company store.

They have a playlist from that night

of all the people who performed.

And for me, it just says,

Simon McBurney and Sandy with a Y,

which is not how I spell my name,

and no surname.

It looks like he came on with his dog.

I just think, wow, that's how I'm going to be remembered.

Simon McBurney's dog.

And Emma Thompson did sound effects for us.

I think it was her finest moment in show business.

When you say sound effects, do you mean like with a cowbell

or was she making vocal sound effects?

We had one of those football rattles

for reasons I can't recall.

Used for comedic effect.

So then you're on television all the time you're doing.

Have I got news for you?

And whose line is it anyway?

And you're quite a well-known figure.

In 1994, you and your partner at the time

had a young family.

And then you heard the Daily Mail

was going to have a crack at you.

How did you find out about that?

I don't know if you know the Daily Mail here.

Oh, yeah.

Don't.

I'm just going to say don't.

By then I had three small children.

And I just decided to out myself

rather than let the Daily Mail do it.

And we went and did an interview with The Sunday Times.

And as far as I am aware,

there was no other out woman in entertainment in 1994.

I mean, you mentioned Mary Muggley's Mary

and didn't come out until many years later.

So you spoiled it.

You spoiled the Daily Mail's headline.

I spoiled their story.

I spoiled their story.

So it was you then.

That was it.

You were the only out gay woman in public life

in the UK at that time.

Yeah.

And then immediately the death threats start.

It's sad, isn't it?

They all come from evangelical Christians.

I'm afraid without exception.

They were going to kill me on God's behalf

because apparently God's incredibly busy

and didn't have time to do it himself.

So we had to take the children to hiding.

We had to have police protection.

And at the same time,

it looked as though my career was going to collapse,

which I was fine.

Actually, to be honest, I was fine with

because much better to have your children grow up

proud of who they are

than to have any kind of career in show business

It really wasn't a battle for me.

You know, it sounds like I was brave

and they'd give up my career,

but actually it was no choice for me.

My children have always come first.

How did they remember that now

that they've grown up that incident in that time?

What did they tell you about that?

Yeah, they're so wonderful.

They've grown up and they're so proud.

And I remember when my oldest daughter

went to university and she got flu

and both me and her other mom

raced up to look after her.

And we were in her rooms

and one of us was pumping up her pillows

and one of us was making soup

and one of her friends walked in and went,

Oh my God, two mums, not fair.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, you get double mummied.

Double mummied, if you're with us.

You mentioned a career.

Have you ever seen yourself as having a career?

Because I noticed, like, I mean,

I feel like it could just be just as well

likely to be talking to you

as someone who's just emerged out of some pit

in Jordan having pulled out some ancient

urn from Asia Minor or something

or something like that.

Had you pursued archaeology,

it seems like you're a serial enthusiast

for the things that you love and are interesting to you.

Was that right, Sandy?

I think the world is fascinating, Richard.

I never cease to be amazed.

There's literally something every single day

that I'm fascinated by.

I'm always learning.

I'm always going, oh, look at that, look at that.

We've just arrived in Melbourne.

I've never been here before.

And I'm like a child in the taxi.

What's that?

And what's that over there?

And I love it.

I'm as happy in a new city,

sitting in a cafe, just watching the world goodbye,

talking to anybody who will talk to me.

I don't understand getting bored, really,

other than reading Catcher in the Right One

word at a time.

I think there's so much out there

that I don't know.

The older I get,

and the more time I spend on shows like QI,

which are ostensibly all about knowledge,

the more I realize how little I actually know.

And that's a wonderful position to be in,

because it makes you hungry

to try and learn the next thing.

So at the moment, I'm reading endlessly about trees

and about woodland.

It's become a new passion of mine.

I'm going to learn to do metal detecting.

There's just a million things that I want to do.

So again, if my career stops tomorrow,

then who knows what the Daily Mail have got?

I don't know what they've got.

If my career stops tomorrow, I'm fine with that

because I'll just go off and do something else.

Has that been a shield against depression?

Sure. Of course.

I'm not immune.

Nobody is.

Nobody is immune to...

When the world treats you badly,

you feel horrible.

And I have to stand up constantly and say,

well, I'm still going to be me, guys.

Nothing must irritate the Daily Mail more

than the fact that I'm still working.

Still laughing.

Still having a go at them.

Must be very annoying.

So, of course, you have moments

when you have your dark days

and that's what you have your family for

and your dog.

You have your dog to sit with.

What I mean is, can you use your curiosity

to shrug it off?

To shrug it off?

No, it sits with you.

It sits with you.

Of course it does.

It is like a scar.

It's like another scar in you.

But what I think now

of all the things I've been through,

I like to think it's made me a nicer person.

I like to think I have more empathy,

a kinder person that I understand

a bit more about difference

and what that feels like,

which, you know, I might not have done

had I not been through the things I've been through.

So take the scars,

but use them for a good purpose.

I love you as a host of QI.

I think you're wonderful in that role.

Thank you.

I really do.

And you look very, very comfortable in that role.

You're sort of both ringmaster and provocateur.

I like how you do both those things.

You sort of keep the show on the road

and sort of keep it moving along.

Then you also kind of give it a bit of a whack

around the head every once in a while.

You seem to know exactly what the right moment

to do that in, Sandy.

Well, you say I sit uncomfortably.

So here's the joke of it.

So I took over from Stephen Fry,

who's absurdly tall,

and I'm absurdly small.

And for the first two years,

they wouldn't give him my own chair.

So I sat in Stephen's chair for two years

with my legs dangling.

And in the end, I said to them,

guys, I'm not doing it again

unless I can get my own chair.

It's enough now with Stephen's chair.

Please could I have done now I have my own chair.

And it's adjustable.

And I spend time racing around

out of camera shot on my chair.

It's got wheels and it makes me very happy.

It's ridiculous.

My sign of success is that I've got my own chair.

What a pleasure it's been speaking with you, Sandy.

I've so enjoyed this conversation with you

and thank you so much.

Pleasure.

You've been listening to a podcast

of Conversations with Richard Fidler.

For more Conversations interviews,

please go to the website

abc.net.au

slash conversations.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.