Sandi Toksvig: ‘I’m not someone who’s going to sit and watch a meringue dry’

‘A lot of famous people are arseholes,” says Sandi Toksvig. “I don’t like people because they are famous or rich. My father was incredibly famous, the most famous man in Denmark. So I’ve seen it up close and have no interest in fame whatsoever.” I have been talking with Toksvig – broadcaster; quizshow host; author of plays, musicals and 30 or so books; pioneering feminist and LGBTQ+ activist – about her role as officiator at the wedding of Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus to his partner, Christina Sas, in September. Ulvaeus is indeed famous and rich but is firmly “not in the arsehole category. He is a good friend, very gentle and a humanist like me.” Claus Toksvig, who was a broadcaster and foreign correspondent – essentially Denmark’s answer to Richard Dimbleby – wasn’t in the arsehole category, either. He and his daughter were extremely close and he would take her on work jaunts, one of which, astonishingly, involved watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon from Houston’s Apollo Mission Control Center.

That Claus was so famous “should have steered me in the opposite direction”, says Toksvig, adding: “I didn’t set out to do what I did.” But while studying law, archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge – her plan was to become a human-rights lawyer – Toksvig joined Footlights, the university’s comedy society, “for a laugh. And a director saw me and said: ‘Come and work with me,’ and so I thought, ‘OK, I’ll do that and treat it like another gap year.’ And that was 45 years ago. I’m having the longest gap year in history.”

Toksvig and I had been due to meet in person at the British Library, but that plan fell through when I tripped over and broke my foot, and so we are meeting on Zoom instead. Toksvig, 66, brims with maternal warmth as she quizzes me about what happened; she calls everyone “darling”, but it’s still lovely when it’s directed at you. Rather than talk about my pratfall, we’re here to discuss the upcoming Sandi Claus is Coming to Town, a one-off evening of music, dancing and queer storytelling at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The show is written by Toksvig, who is also the host, and directed by Stacey Haynes, with whom she worked on Mamma Mia! The Party. Loosely, it’s about a man called Albert – so named after being left on the steps of the Albert Hall as a baby – who, having been raised by nuns, works at the hall laying out chairs for orchestras. Albert, we learn, is single, lonely and looking for love, and so Toksvig takes it upon herself to play Cupid.

The show will be “full of traditional Christmas things and have a happy ending”, she says. “And if the audience play their part, because they are very much part of the show, we hope it will snow inside the Albert Hall.” The show will feature the West End singer Carrie Hope Fletcher, organist Anna Lapwood and Toksvig’s son, Theo, and daughter-in-law, Maddie – even though Toksvig can’t tell me what they’ll be doing because “it’s a surprise, possibly even to them”.

It is, she adds, a show “for everybody. I’m always conscious of how lucky I am … especially at Christmas because I have this massive, warm, amusing family and I adore every minute of it. But there are so many people who don’t have somebody, or who feel a bit lonely or ostracised from their community. So this is really for them.”

It will also feature the Gay Men’s Chorus, whom Toksvig counts as “dear, dear friends” and who sang at her wedding to her partner Debbie, a psychotherapist, in 2014. Toksvig was given away by her daughter Megan, and walked down the aisle as the choir sang I’m Getting Married in the Morning. The service was at London’s Royal Festival Hall on the day gay marriage was legalised (they had a civil partnership in 2007). Just over 150 guests were invited, although Toksvig let it be known the public could attend if they wanted; in the end, 2,000 people turned up.

Yet, on this otherwise happy day, the couple had to have police protection after receiving death threats. This wasn’t new. It happened after Toksvig came out as a lesbian in 1994 and has continued to happen at intervals since. She notes there was never any question over coming out since she and her then partner Peta Stewart “were not prepared for our children to grow up in the shadow of a secret. So although there was pressure from the tabloid press, who were vile, I was fully prepared to give up my career for the sake of being honest and so my children could be proud of their parents.”

It’s no wonder there is a campaigning element to much of Toksvig’s work, whether featuring same-sex relationships in her fiction – her latest book, Friends of Dorothy, is a wry tale of a lesbian couple on the search for a sperm donor – or as the genial host of the quizshow QI. In the latter role, she became the first woman to host a major BBC panel show. In 1990, she was up for the job of host of Have I Got News for You against Angus Deayton. “I have a letter, still, from [the show’s bosses] which says: ‘We preferred you, Sandi, but the BBC decided we couldn’t have a woman making fun of the news.’ Has the world changed since then? Maybe. I hope so.”

Toksvig spent much of the last academic year leading a new research initiative at the University of Cambridge after being awarded a fellowship by the sociology department’s LGBTQ+ research programme. Part of her role has been the development of the Mappa Mundi project, a digital resource documenting women’s stories and achievements across the world. She says teaching is “probably one of my favourite things that I’ve done in ages, because I had to really think: what do I want to say? A lot of first-year students at Cambridge just want to be good and to do as they’re told. The [idea] is to challenge them and wake up their consciousness, especially waking up the feminist consciousness in the boys.”

Toksvig’s activism also led to her becoming one of the founder members of the Women’s Equality party in 2015, though, last month, in a vote backed by the leaders, the party was dissolved. “In the current climate, a small political party is not the best vehicle for change,” she says. “And just running a party for its own sake or because of sentiment is not the way we do things.” She remains fiercely proud of what they achieved, particularly standing five survivors of domestic violence for parliament in 2019 against five MPs who had been accused of harassment or violence. “Four of them stood down and one went to prison. I don’t care that we didn’t win a seat. Those five men are no longer in parliament, and we performed an essential laundry service for Westminster.”

She is saddened by the schism that has developed among feminists between those who support the rights of trans people and those who claim women’s spaces are under threat from them, and that the two sides “haven’t found a way to talk together … I co-founded a party called the Women’s Equality party. I don’t qualify the word equality. I remember when same-sex marriage was being debated and hearing a bishop say: ‘I think gay people have got enough equality,’ and thinking: ‘Can we just discuss the use of the word enough?’ So I can’t believe in equality and think: ‘For you and for you, but not for you.’ It doesn’t work that way.”

Toksvig – who has four grandchildren – has every faith that what has gone wrong with today’s feminist discourse will be righted by the next generation. When she came out, she says, anti-gay bigotry was rife and she had no role models. And “now the kids don’t give a damn [about a person’s sexuality]. So we will find this is a blip of prejudice and ignorance and move forward. I have to believe that.”

As a child, Toksvig was always moving homes owing to her father’s job, with the family variously settling in Europe, Africa and the US (her American accent still tends to come out after a few drinks). The peripatetic life taught young Sandi that “everywhere in the world has something to commend it and you need to arrive with open eyes … I always say you don’t need money to travel. Get on the bus at the end of your road and you will discover something that you didn’t know before.” Her ever-curious, have-a-go spirit is reflected in a career in which “I’ve never looked for work. I’ve said yes to things.”

Toksvig is keenly aware that women of her age remain a rare sight on television compared with her male peers and notes her “incredible luck” that her diary for next year is already full up. “But we still have a lot in the media that we need to look at. Like, why do we not have a woman as a late-night chatshow host? Is it that we simply can’t stay up because of our cycles?”

Yet she will happily call a halt when something isn’t working, whether that’s winding down the Women’s Equality party or leaving a high-profile job on The Great British Bake Off, which she co-hosted for three years. Having already got into hot water this year for remarking she never liked the show, today she is tight-lipped on the topic, although she will say: “It wasn’t for me. I’m not a person who’s going to sit and watch meringue dry.”

Two years ago, she added a new skill to her CV: chainsaw operator. She and Debbie live in the middle of 40 acres of woodland in the south of England (for security reasons, they don’t disclose where they live) which had been neglected “for generations”. And so, with the help with local friends and volunteers, they are bringing it back to life. Sick of being quoted exorbitant sums by men with chainsaws, Toksvig decided to learn to use one herself and went on a course. Now, every Sunday, she is out chopping trees: “I’m 66 years old and I’m wielding a chainsaw – and I can’t get enough of it.” Since they’ve been doing their work, the bluebells have doubled in the spring, the deer population has increased and they’ve rehomed animals from the local wildlife hospital. “Releasing a baby owl that’s never flown before is one of the great joys of my life,” Toksvig beams.

Crucial to her wellbeing and happiness, she says, is not making her TV work the be-all and end-all. “I have a wonderful family, and I’m grotesquely happily married and have been for 18 years. So if you told me: ‘It’s all over now, Sandi, you have to go home now,’ I’d say: ‘That’s great, thank you so much.’ And off I’d go.”

Sandi Claus Is Coming to Town is on 18 December at the Royal Albert Hall, London. For more information visit royalalberthall.com