Death threats forced Sandi Toksvig into hiding. Now strangers hug her in the shops

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Death threats forced Sandi Toksvig into hiding. Now strangers hug her in the shops

It’s hard to believe now, but the QI host once feared for her family’s safety and was told her career was over after being publicly outed by a UK tabloid.

By Stephanie Bunbury

Sandi Toksvig is touring Australia in November: “It had never occurred to me before what a worldwide audience there is.″⁣

Sandi Toksvig is touring Australia in November: “It had never occurred to me before what a worldwide audience there is.″⁣Credit:Steve Ullathorne

Sandi Toksvig is short and just nicely round enough that perfect strangers – quite a lot of them, apparently – feel moved to hug her. In the land of the stiff upper lip, this clever, caustically witty 64-year-old feminist and uncompromisingly out lesbian – who is, just to top this off, actually Danish – has somehow been designated as Britain’s teddy bear. How is that?

“It’s fine. People have been, lately, very anxious,” she says. “I get hugged a lot by people I don’t know, sometimes in front of the wet fish counter in Sainsbury’s supermarket. COVID has made it a little more anxious-making. But I love that people think they can do that. It’s nice. I make a lot of friends wherever I go.”

Toksvig is household name, famous thanks to broadcasting: the News Quiz on Radio 4, QI on TV, hosting The Great British Bake Off with Noel Fielding, and most recently on a travel program where she goes to remarkable places with friends and hugs more strangers. Toksvig is still very Danish at heart, she tells me, but decided when she came to England as a teenager from New York – her father was a foreign correspondent – to teach herself to speak like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.

“So my accent, which is the thing that makes most people think I’m very English, is entirely fake,” she tells me. “When I’ve had a few drinks, which I do occasionally, I become very New York again. It’s a construct, like most of us in life.”

That hasn’t stopped her from becoming a national treasure, a brand that doesn’t sit at all easily with her Danish belief in socialist equality. She doesn’t even like applause, although she loves an audience. Right now she is in the throes of a theatre tour, Next Slide Please, that is really more of a cosy evening chez Toksvig, complete with armchair and standard lamp, in which she tells stories, asks the audience questions and hands out prizes – pencils stamped with the show’s name – like a benevolent primary school teacher. It amazes her, she says, how eager people can be to win a pencil. She also invites her visitors to ask her anything they like.

COVID-19 has changed the way that works, she says. Cosiness is exactly what people want. “In the past I normally got political questions, questions about feminism, about women’s politics, domestic violence, equality, things like that,” she says. “This year, they want to talk about travel and whether I had a good time. I think they come to the show and they just want to laugh. And I hope it helps them to say ‘listen, I sometimes drank a bit too much, I sometimes felt a bit depressed, just like anybody else’. I hope it’s cathartic. When you sit down to write a show you think ‘what can I do so that two hours after I started, people feel better than they did when I came in?’ Do you think they did?”

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I have just been to see her in Dartford, Kent: solid Brexit territory, which certainly isn’t her natural political element. That doesn’t stop her from making them feel better; Toksvig is a great believer in the broad tent. “She’s so, so funny,” enthuses an ostensibly conservative woman behind me to her neighbour during interval. The old man in front of me slaps his knee with joy at any joke that has a bit of a go at men. When Toksvig’s dog Mildred, a scruffy cockapoo, takes a turn around the stage, the audience unites in a sigh of pleasure, but the clincher comes when she tells Dartford how she had her first gig in a pantomime in this very theatre, playing a fairy in Cinderella with the great Jack Douglas from the Carry On series coaching her from the wings on how to deliver a punchline. If rapture were a gas, the whole place would have erupted.

After countless stints as a guest of QI, Sandi Toksvig stepped into Stephen Fry’s shoes as host of the program in 2016.

After countless stints as a guest of QI, Sandi Toksvig stepped into Stephen Fry’s shoes as host of the program in 2016.

Toksvig found her way to this spit-and-sawdust panto by way of Cambridge Footlights, where she was part of a breakaway group who put on an all-women comedy show in which they got to make the jokes. (Her castmates included Emma Thompson. “Don’t know what happened to her,” she deadpanned in a recent radio interview, the sort of dry aside that made her so good on QI.)

There was also a gap-year gig as a follow-spot operator in the theatre playing Jesus Christ Superstar, as she tells someone in the audience called Jacob, who has the nerve to stand up and ask her for a job. There are a few small gasps. “I love that chutzpah, Jacob; that’s how you get ahead,” she says.

Staying afloat, however, is something else. She had her setbacks, but Toksvig refused to be discouraged by, for example, being told at the BBC that it was “inappropriate” for women to be funny about the news. She has a sort of sunny toughness; perhaps that’s also Danish. She could always find something else to do, to the extent that now – when they are screaming for women to be funny about anything – she has so much on her plate that the lockdowns were a marvellous respite. Mind you, this was the kind of respite where you write a couple of books, a libretto and do a series of podcasts, We Will Get Past This, about women in history. “I’m not a big sleeper, it’s not really my thing,” she says. “I’m up at six. I want to know what’s going on in the world.”

She and her wife Debbie, a psychotherapist, also bought a house in the country, largely to accommodate her books, although the property also has woods large enough to be traversed by a public footpath. “I just bought a log splitter! I’m very excited about my hydraulic log splitter.” For five years they lived on a boat moored in London, where they still spend a lot of time. “I love boat people. They’re interested in boats. They’re not interested in whether you’re on telly or not. They don’t watch television. Great!” she says. “The woman who lives next door to us at the moment is a contortionist. Don’t you think that’s a great job?”

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Coming out might have looked like a setback at the time she did it. It was 1994, which doesn’t sound very long ago, until you read that she was instantly dropped from a forthcoming gig as compere of Save the Children’s 75th anniversary. It wasn’t as if she had a secret life: she and her then-partner, Peta Stewart, had been together for years and had three children together, including a newborn baby. It was the Daily Mail that decided to make a scandal of it, knocking on the door to tell them they were putting this BBC presenter’s lesbian love nest on the front page.

TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO SANDI TOKSVIG

  1. Worst habit: A secondhand outfit from the Sisters of Orderly and Surprising Mercies, Heidelberg. The cincture is way too loose.
  2. Greatest fear: Finding God. I wouldn’t know what to ask him/her except “where have you been?”
  3. The artwork you would like to own: The Last Supper. It’s nice seeing the men who ate it but I’d paint in the women who cooked it.
  4. Biggest regret: That I didn’t go for that leg-lengthening operation.
  5. The line that stayed with you: Mason-Dixon.
  6. Favourite room: My library.
  7. If you could solve one thing... 12 across on today’s cryptic crossword in The Times.

“That was a Friday and they said they were going to reveal it to the world on the Monday, so I did a spoiler interview in The Sunday Times just to upset them, which it did, enormously,” she says. “It’s hard to believe now. The Mail’s headline was something like ‘If God had wanted lesbians to have children, He would have made it possible’. Well, as we were lesbians and had three children, I thought God must have indeed made it possible. But it caused us death threats. We had to go into hiding. It was a frightening time, but I would not have my children grow up in the shadow of a secret.” There were no other “out” women in entertainment, as far as she knew. “I was told my career was over.”

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Clearly, her career was not over, but her scandalous relationship eventually was. In 2000, she met Debbie. They signed a civil partnership in 2007 and married in 2014. Toksvig quotes her several times during the Dartford show. Some members of the audience shift uncomfortably on the couple of occasions when she swears for theatrical effect, but mentions of her marriage pass without a ripple.

“I mention about our life as casually as anyone would mention anything about their personal life but of course I do it with some quiet determination,” she says. “Because it has been part of my life to try and normalise – well, my life.” Job done, I’d say, at least in Dartford.

That life changed enormously for the better, she says, during COVID-19 lockdowns. “It really was life-changing for me in a positive and good way. Of course I’m incredibly privileged, I had a house and a garden,” she says. What she learnt was to sit still under a tree. “The thing I can’t do is just sitting and being, although I’m getting better now at it since I moved to the woodland.”

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Truly, I have never met anyone with such a horror of having idle hands. The single most astonishing thing she tells me is that when her children were small, she learnt how to turn all their favourite outgrown clothes into rag rugs. And during lockdown, there were the podcasts. It was when she realised that her historical podcasts had found a big listening audience on the other side of the world that she decided to extend this tour to Australia and New Zealand.

Sandi and Debbie Toksvig renew their vows at the Southbank Centre Celebrates Same Sex Marriage Act event in London in 2014.

Sandi and Debbie Toksvig renew their vows at the Southbank Centre Celebrates Same Sex Marriage Act event in London in 2014.Credit:Getty Images

“I had thought I was speaking to a British audience. Because I don’t do social media, I don’t do YouTube and that kind of thing, it had never occurred to me before what a worldwide audience there is and I really enjoyed some of the conversations I had in the margins as it were. So I thought, ‘when this is all over, I’m going to go out in person.’”

She has been to Australia before. “We were invited to a lot of parties,” she says. “I don’t like parties.” This is the second astonishing thing I learn about Sandi Toksvig: the friendliest woman in Britain hates parties. “I like chatting, but an actual party, with music and canapes: everyone’s too tall and I don’t know what we’re talking about. I have no small talk. None.” Doesn’t she dance? “Oh God no.” That’s also quite surprising, given the pumping ’80s tracks that play before her show, but she waves away my suggestion that this could be her next self-improvement after tree-hugging.

She has no fear of ageing, she says, because she always thinks the most interesting thing ever is just around the corner. “I probably haven’t done the show I most want to do. I probably haven’t met the great friends I’m going to have, haven’t heard all the wonderful music and read all the great books. And I will always feel like that, I will always be passionate about life. I genuinely wake up and think ‘oh, this is very exciting, what am I going to do today?’”

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Her next trip is to Bradford, where she will explore a river under a cathedral. She is excited just about the fact that they wanted to know if she had her own hard hat. She loves having children old enough, as she puts it, to make a martini on demand. She loves having grandchildren. “So I like ageing. I’m fine!” I absolutely believe her.

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Sandi Toksvig is at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall on November 25 and Sydney’s State Theatre on November 28. Tickets at bohmpresents.com

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