QI’s Sandy Toksvig: ‘I’ve known I like women since I was four’

Sandy Toksvig is a broadcaster and comedian best known for hosting QI. The 64-year-old opens up about the influence of her journalist father, experiencing discrimination at Cambridge, and Bill Clinton.

“Bill Clinton is the most charismatic person I’ve met in my entire life, apart from my dad.”Credit: Steve Ullathorne

My father Claus, a journalist, was the single biggest influence on my life. He was quintessentially Danish for his generation, in that he had impeccable manners and was dapperly dressed.

He was a foreign correspondent, and we lived in New York for a long time. My older brother Nick and I were treated as small adults. From about the age of eight, I was expected to come to the table having read the first three pages of The New York Times, or at least the editorial, and to have some view about it.

My father believed in grabbing every opportunity life presented, and if that meant not going to school, that was fine. I was at NASA’s Mission Control Center and watched on the big screen as Neil Armstrong stepped from Apollo 11 onto the moon. We went to a lot of political rallies, which probably helped to shape me as the activist I am.

It was a great shock when my father died at 59 of a sudden heart attack. I miss him every day. He was a magical figure, and everything I know about broadcasting I learnt from him. I absolutely adored him.

I’ve never had an interest in celebrity. My father taught me early on that fame is utterly unimportant unless you use it for a good purpose.

My only celebrity crush was Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, when I was seven. I got to meet her in my 50s and I was completely tongue-tied – I don’t know why. I once hired The Sound of Music on a film projector and we watched it seven times in a row. I love that film so much.

I’ve known I like women since I was four. My sexuality has never been a long internal debate. I like
boys and everything about them, except I don’t want to share fluids.

I fell deeply in love with a woman at Cambridge University, which was both exciting and terrifying. But in the late 1970s there was no support, or LGBT groups, and so it was a secret. When the university found out, they tried to throw me out. The college allowed me to stay because of my academic record, but they inflicted a rule where nobody was allowed to speak to me, and so for my last year nobody did. Two years ago, the college made a formal apology and held an LGBT dinner in my honour and made me a fellow, but it remains a painful period of my life.

I have been married to my wife Debbie, a therapist, for 16 years. I have three children – Jesse, 33, Megan, 31, and Theo, 28 – with my ex-partner, Peta Stewart. Theo is fabulous. He is an actor and a writer and is currently playing Hamlet. He is the man in my life; he’s charming and lovely and wants to save the world.

I replaced Stephen Fry as QI host in 2016. I’ve known Stephen since we were 19. He is a very silly boy. There is no question that the expectations for a woman fronting a big TV show are absolutely different to those of a man.

There’s a general presumption that Stephen knew all these things without anyone having to tell him, and that I had to be schooled, which is just bizarre. Yet Stephen was given the answers just the same as anyone else. They were all on a piece of card in front of him and those cards weren’t as heavy as I was led to believe, so a woman was perfectly capable of hosting.

Bill Clinton is the most charismatic person I’ve met in my entire life, apart from my dad. We were backstage at an event, just Bill and me in this small room. He was mesmerising, and for those five minutes I was the most important person in the world to Bill. And even given where I am in my sexuality, I looked at him and thought, “I can see what Monica was thinking.”

Sandi Toksvig Live tours Australia November 12-28.

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