Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Sandi Toksvig is a superhuman and she is a legend in her own lifetime. She is probably best known as a broadcaster, a comedian, a writer, a presenter of TV programmes. I grew up watching in the early ‘90s, huge shows like Have I Got News For You, Whose Line Is It Anway. Sandi took over from Stephen Fry as the host of QI in 2015 and spent ten years hosting The New Quiz on Radio 4. In addition to all of that, she’s the author of over thirty books, she’s a political activist, she’s a woman on a mission to rewrite the internet and to overhaul the House of Lords and she’s the owner of several axes. We’re here today to talk about her latest book, Friends of Dorothy, and then hopefully we’ll have some time to get into the rest of it. Sandi, welcome.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Oh thank you, that’s overwhelming actually.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Before we get to the book, I just want to doublecheck, we are the first, the only law firm on your book tour, is that right?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yes, yes, and also, I realise that I don’t have a lawyer so I’ve just signed Emma.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Excellent. We haven’t got an engagement letter signed yet but you’re all witness to the fact that she’s signed up.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, this is my new, I’d like you to meet my new lawyer.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
This is my newest client. One of my favourite clients. Tell us about Friends of Dorothy. Wait, wait, first book first. My lesbian sister has a cat called Dotty because she is a friend of Dorothy.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I love that.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
But many people don’t know where the phrase is from.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well, in doing, my wonder editor who is, where is she, she’s over there, who I’ve worked with for many, many years now and I said I’ve got a great title for the book, I said let’s call it Friends of Dorothy and she, she went “Why?”. She’s, she’s, Lennie, I do a very bad impersonation of Lennie, she’s Canadian but she’s very, asks very straightforward questions like, “Why do you need to Chapter 1?” and you always think what, this is my, okay, it’s gone. So Friends of Dorothy, if you don’t know, it’s not all that long ago that it was illegal for men to be in a homosexual relationship and they needed a way to as it were recognise each, I’m just going to turn this way because I feel like I’ve got my back to you, they needed a way to, who was on the team, find out who was on the team, and so it was an expression, “Do you think he’s a friend of Dorothy’s?” and it comes from one of the original Wizard of Oz books so, published in 1909 and there’s a character who meets Dorothy on the road as you may know, Wizard of Oz, you’ve got the Tin Man, the Lion and the Scarecrow and he says to her, “You have some queer friends Dorothy” and she says, “Who cares if they’re queer as long as they’re friends” and it just became a thing, it became an expression. So because the main character in this is Dorothy, a 79 year old, foul-mouthed, cantankerous woman, I thought it would be entertaining to call it Friends of Dorothy. Doesn’t work of course if you don’t know what it means but there we are, I have explained it now.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
And also you put a rainbow cushion on the sofa…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
As a hint.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
…just to make it clear. It was quite handy because I was on a train showing everybody like, look, look, it’s a queer book, you should read it. Tell us about the, there’s a lot of lovely friendships in the book and a lot of wonderful characters, very complicated, involved characters.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, so, I, so, we were just talking just now about what it was like growing up when you didn’t have anything that you could read that made you feel okay about your life. So the very first book I ever read which had a lesbian character in it, although nobody used that word because it was horrific, was Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Now just the title, you think what? How is that an exciting and energising book? Oh my god, The Well of Loneliness, argh, but you read it because that’s all there was, you couldn’t find anything. And there is, sadly, we have moved forward in lots of ways but there’s still a lot of aggression towards the LGBT+ community which makes me very sad so I thought I’d write a book which is for everybody, it’s, it’s a book where there are gay people in it but it’s not a book for gay people, right, it’s not a sort of niche publication so, it’s about a, a young lesbian couple, Amber and Stevie, one is a paramedic and one is a police officer and they buy their first house, they’re very, very excited and on the day they move in, they discover that the person they purchased it from, who they had not met when they bought it, the 79 year old Dorothy, has failed to move out. Now, as lawyers you’ll be interested in the fact and I researched this, it is quite difficult to get rid of somebody if they haven’t moved out. If they are an elderly person and they, and you’re worried about what might happen to them, if they’re not causing any damage, it would take quite a considerable amount of time and legal work to get them out of your house.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I think we should be reporting the conveyancer to the SRA by the way.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Do you? Okay.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Yes. Next time you write anything on this, do ask me to…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Thank you.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
There should be a footnote here.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
But you know it’s Stevie’s cousin who doesn’t really know what she’s doing and is much better at getting people off drink-driving things so, it’s not really her speciality area.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
She dabbles.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
She dabbles, yeah.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
We avoid dabblers. The characters are multi-layered, multi-faceted, they have really deep and interesting back stories and I was quite interested to hear you discussing on a podcast how you and your therapist’s wife discuss your characters as if they’re real people and she helps you to flesh them out and challenge what you’re saying about them. Talk to me about that.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well you’ve met her, is she not the nicest person you’ve ever met.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I want her to adopt me.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
She is just…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Am I a bit old for that?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, you’ll be fine. It’s fine, it’s fine.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Again, witnessed. You’re going to both have to adopt me now.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
That’s fine, we’ll take in anybody.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Excellent.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
My wife’s a therapist and the kindest, gentlest person I have ever met in my life. We’ve been married eighteen years I think it is, I should know, I can’t remember, not enough anyway, not long enough. And so we’ve started doing this very weird thing which is that I say I’m going to write this book about this thing and then the, and then we have to analyse all of the characters like why would Dorothy not move out and what, why might they let her stay and why might these three find that they have created something. The thing I’m really interested in, and it isn’t just true of the LGBT+ community, the, what we used to call the ‘Oxo family’, the traditional family of mum, dad and two kids, about 5% of the British population live in that situation. Everybody else, it’s a blended family, it’s a single parent family, divorced, widowed, there’s a million different arrangements. So what we think of as ‘the normal family’, it’s not really a thing, it’s actually a tiny percentage. The rest of us live in some kind of other arrangement and for me and for a lot of people in the LGBT+ community, particularly the ones who have been removed from their families because of cultural reasons or for religious reasons or whatever, we form our own families, what I call logical not biological families and there are certainly people I’ve been friends with for more than, I’m so old now, more than fifty years, they’re my family. I have friends who if they called me, live all over the world, if they called me I’d go now, I would go, I’m there for them and I’m lucky enough that’s also true of some of the people in the village where I live and I, and I wanted to write that, I wanted to write about how we make our own families when we need them to provide, to provide the support that we need, you know, I don’t think you can have enough grandmothers in your life can you, I don’t think.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
No, no.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Old wives, feisty ladies, aren’t they a marvellous thing, you know the backbone of society.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I’m adding godparents to my children on a daily basis.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, but I think it’s, but we need it.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Feisty ladies.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
We need feisty ladies.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
There are quite a few cantankerous, feisty ladies in the book who are not law abiding, who do things like you know eat hash cakes and, and, and…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I like that you’ve taken the legal approach to this book, I like that, there’s a see how many crimes have been committed.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I also like the fact they were kind of getting high on pure oxygen at parties. So, I don’t think we should skip over the fact that the theme is women behaving badly or women coming into their power.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well, it’s interesting but are they behaving badly or they’re just not doing the thing that we think of as feminine, is that the thing?
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Mm, when I’m old I wear purple.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, so, my, one of my dearest friends, one of the people I include in my family is Helena Kennedy, the great human rights…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
That’s a name drop.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well I just, but she is honestly, she is family to me and she’s been one of the people that supports me and in legal terms, what she says is that most of the women in prison, had they committed the same crime as a man would not be imprisoned and you have committed a crime not just against the law but against femininity. So the things that I suggest that these old ladies are doing, these old ladies have got arthritis so they eat cannabis cakes because it makes them feel better and good heavens, what’s the problem, do you know what I mean, when a young man smokes a spliff, nobody says anything about it but the fact that old ladies are busy baking brownies with good stuff in it, seems more outrageous doesn’t it than a young man just you know having a toke, so.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
So you trained as a lawyer and you’ve been rebelling.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I did, I did.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Tell us why you didn’t go into the law. Or why you’re a recovering lawyer.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
All my life growing up as a child I wanted to be a lawyer. I watched Perry Mason, I thought it was the most marvellous thing and I thought I want to be a lawyer and I specifically wanted to be a human rights lawyer and in fact when I went to Cambridge and they offered in my second year, they offered Islamic Law as one of the courses and there were only three of us who took it, three women, two Muslims and myself, and I took it because I wanted to understand how Islamic law had, had, had gone from the purity of what it could be and how it had been interpreted into things that were not always nice for women with the Afghanistan and the Taliban and so on. So it was all set, I was going to be a human rights lawyer, that was my big thing. I was also doing the Footlights at Cambridge which is a sort of comedy review and I was in the Footlights in my last year and the director happened to be, professional director happened to be in the audience, a man called Richard Digby Day and he said to me afterwards, he said, “I’ve just taken over Nottingham Playhouse, why don’t you come and do a year of rep with me” and I thought that’s a very good idea, I’ll get it out of my system, I’ll have a gap year after university as well as before, I am, I mean it’s 45 years ago, I’m having the longest gap year in history, that is what’s happening. I always meant to be a human rights lawyer.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Perhaps you’ll get to that.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well, so, Helena, who I mentioned, Helena said sometimes the work that I can do now with the voice that I have is just as important in terms of standing up for things and trying to, so I’m touring around the country at the moment and one of the things that I tell the audience, apart from talking about my book and making them laugh and so on, I talk for example about Rukhshana Media, which maybe most people in this country haven’t heard of. Check it out, Rukhshana Media is a fantastic thing, I’m so upset by what’s happening in Afghanistan. It is run by a woman, it’s run by a woman called Zahra Joya who has escaped from Afghanistan three years ago and it is a, it is a website with stories by and about the women of Afghanistan who risk their lives to bring us the stories. It’s in English and if we don’t tell the stories and if we don’t know what’s happening then we can’t continue to stand up and say to our governments, you cannot recognise this administration as legitimate because it’s horrific. So every night I talk about that, every night I mention Rukhshana Media and I talk about us telling stories. Maybe that is a different way of doing the human rights thing without, without actually being a lawyer, I don’t know.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I think it’s very effective.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I mean you’re my lawyer now so I don’t know, I take your advice on this.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I think it’s very sensible course of action.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Thank you, darling, thank you very much, that’s good, that’s good.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
You get that for free. How many countries, this is a question for the audience, how many countries do you think in the world allow representatives of the state religion to be automatically given seats in parliament?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Anybody know?
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Quick ques. Come on. Two? You’re correct. Well done, Alex.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Do you know which two?
Audience member
Is it the UK and, and another country.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I like that as an answer.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Not one that we’d want to be associated with maybe.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, I like that as an answer. Yeah, the UK, I mean it’s astonishing. It’s astonishing that’s…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
The answer is UK and Iran.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Are the only two countries in the whole world where members of the state religion are automatically given a seat in parliament.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
We have 26 bishops from the Church of England, we don’t have them from the Church of Scotland, we don’t have them from the Jewish faith, from the Muslim faith, I mean pick a thing, we just have them from the Church of England and I’m not a fan of the House of Lords in general, I think we should, it’s a democracy, crazy, let’s vote, wow, and we have the most inflated second chamber other than China. It’s a, it’s a shocking state of affairs and when the bishops voted about same sex marriage, nine bishops turned up and they all voted against and I think it’s time that we all grow up and decide to have an elected second chamber.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
This is why I don’t think you need to be a lawyer to be powerful in trying to make change. Sandi’s career as political activist and bringing up these points for debate.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, it was bizarre, I, I published an open letter to the Archbishop saying, “Shall we have coffee?” and we did, I mean who knew that would happen.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Who’s going to say no?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I don’t know. We had very bad cake.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Oh god. You co-founded the Women’s Equality Party with Catherine Mayer nine years ago. Tell me what’s, where that started, what the goals were and, and where you think that’s going to head.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well when we started the Party, which is 2015, we had reached a stage where there were so many examples of sexual impropriety within the House of Commons, it was, it was, you got a bigger punishment for misusing House of Common’s stationery than you did for sexual harassment or abuse. That is, that is what the actual law was, it was sort of breathtaking and we were tired of, of all the parties saying, “yes, yes, gender equality, good idea, we haven’t got time right now” or “we haven’t got the money right now”, it’s what they’re doing about climate change. Climate change, excellent idea, yeah, ooh that’s very expensive, let’s not do that yet. So it’s always something that’s put on the backburner and so Catherine and I were talking yet again at a feminist conference and just sort of tired and so we thought fine, let’s just start a political party. Now, it’s quite difficult. We didn’t know that, we had no idea. You know you say something and go right, I’m going to do this thing and…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Going to do it tomorrow.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Oh my goodness. What happened was that we were overwhelmed by the number of people who contacted us. We were, it was breathtaking the number of people who said please, please can we do this, we really need to put things on the agenda. Now, over the years it’s been hard because small parties in this country don’t do well, it’s incredibly expensive to run any political party, it’s incredibly expensive to stand candidates and the fact that it’s so expensive means that we don’t get, I think, the multiplicity of views that we could do with in Parliament, I would prefer a system more like the Scandinavians where it’s always a coalition so that you hear a range of opinions and you move forward in a cooperative, hopefully in a cooperative manner. So, for example, I’ll give you a good example, 2019 I would say we were the most successful political party in the country but we didn’t get a seat, so it doesn’t seem, that doesn’t seem sensible, right. We had the money to stand five candidates so we stood five survivors of domestic violence against five existing male MPs, each of whom had outstanding allegations of sexual impropriety and four of them stood down and one of them went to prison. So, job done.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Excellent.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
That was it, we just thought yeah, we did that. What did we set out to do? To make sure they didn’t come back to Parliament and they didn’t. So, is that a success? I think so.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Incredible.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
We’ve just had our first borough councillor elected which in Basingstoke, the great feminist enclave of Basingstoke. So, is it, are we going to continue? It’s really hard, it’s really, really hard particularly in the current financial climate, I think all small parties find it difficult unless you want to make some kind of you know extremist agenda like a party which will remain nameless. I am concerned, I’m concerned about populist campaigns, I am concerned about the continuing fight for gender equality because honestly, gender equality, it’s like gravity, we all need it but I don’t do this because I’m some woman ranting, I do this because I have daughters but I have a son and grandsons, I have two grandsons, it’s better for everybody, it’s better for the climate, it’s better for all our mental health, if you look at the happiest countries in the world, the Scandinavian countries, they’re the ones with the highest degree of equality. So, would you like to be happier? Yes, great, vote for equality. Would you like to make more money? Businesses that have a good gender equality programme do better. Great, vote, do you know what mean.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Make better decisions.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
If women are at the peace table, the chances of peace continuing after the initial negotiations goes up exponentially. I can’t see there’s no downside to it and yet we still, and yet we still don’t do it, we still don’t fight for it.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Switching onto another outrageously outlandish idea that sounds expensive and challenging to complete, talk to us about the Matta Mundi, Mappa Mundi project. Changing the world and how we view it by rewriting the internet.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I don’t know why I can’t just stay home.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
People might have these ideas but no one actually says well I’m, I’m going to start doing that, that’s a good idea, I’ll make that happen. Talk to us about how that’s going to work. How it is working because you’ve got data scientists in Cambridge working on this.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Oh yes, I mean it’s, it does seem to be happening. It does seem to be happening. So…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Mappa Mundi.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah. You’re all very clever people and I’m sure you’ve read lots of books. The largest collection of knowledge in humanity’s history is Wikipedia. In the last twenty years it has grown and grown and grown and I’m sure there’s, none of you who’s got a computer will, will have avoided at some point looking at a Wikipedia article and it’s great, it’s lots of fun, I, I don’t know if you’ve done the thing where you pick a topic, you choose an article at random and pick up a topic, it could honestly be anything and see if you can get there in less than six clicks through the links in the thing, the most common one to do is Jesus, I don’t know why people do Jesus, or Shakespeare, but just pick anything like gaslighting and see how quickly you can get through, it’s usually less than six clicks into the internal, anyway there’s lots of games you can play.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
To get you back to Wikipedia?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
To get you through the, so the Wikipedia has links within it to other articles and you’ve got six goes to get to Jesus or six goes to get to Shakespeare or whatever.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Fun game.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
It’s a good game actually.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I like it. You could make it a drinking game, I’m sure.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yes, that’s good fun, it’s a good waste of time. Anyway, the downside of Wikipedia, there’s lots of good sides about it, is that because of the way it’s been sourced, so imagine you crowdsource something which is crowdsourced by the people who’ve got the time to input and the people who have the technology to input. If you do it that way, you are going to end up with white middleclass men inputting and in fact Wikipedia is, no offence, 85% by and about white men and this is seriously problematic because AI is coming, it’s here, it will scrape this data which is so skewed and not only will women be written out the past, they will be written out of the future. Now, women being written out of the past is not a new thing. Women, despite having always been half the, half the population represent .5% of all recorded history. Indeed if you walk around London, you will find more statues and engravings, tributes to pineapples than you will to women. If you look at the top of St Paul’s, two large pineapples. It is just the most astonishing thing how women have been written out. So, I, I…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
What did the pineapples do to get that recognition?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well it was a great symbol of, of colonial wealth and became a symbol of hospitality. Back in the day when pineapples first came to this country, you could rent one for a party…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
To show everyone that you were successful.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
To show everyone, £7500 at the time, which even a lawyer would think was a lot of money.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Wow. Yes but you couldn’t eat it because you’d have to give it back.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, absolutely but it showed how wealthy you were. So Christoper Wren wanted to be put a 60 foot pineapple on the top of St Paul’s rather than a cross but he was fortunately overruled. So, I know, it is sort of mad. So, we do need to do something about this record and there have been lots of editor 20.43 where people have tried to input women and in many instances the women inputted are subject to what’s called a ‘drive-by deletion’ so somebody will just decide that this person is not worthy. Donna Strickland is a really good example, Canadian physicist, for years people tried to get her biography put in Wikipedia and it was always a drive-by deletion to say she wasn’t notable enough. It finally went up on the day she won the Nobel Prize. So, that’s what it takes for a woman to be considered notable enough and do you know what I always think about young people if you can’t see it, you can’t be it, please can we have a record of the most amazing people out there, people like Donna Strickland. So I’ve tried over the years and I’ve talked about it and talked about it and I just thought do you know what, I think Wikipedia is so broken we need to start again. So, I don’t know why I do these things, I sat down to write an atlas of how women are doing around the world and I got this commissioned and it was supposed to be 80,000 words and when I got to 220,00 words I thought, this is probably not a book, this is probably not a book and it’s also going out of date as I’m writing so, you know, by the time I, when I sat down to write it, the Taliban had not issued the most recent, and I am slightly obsessed with it because I’m so distressed, they can’t sing, they can’t speak in public, they can’t, it’s so horrific, so I needed to do something else and I didn’t really know what to do so I was giving a talk last May at the Royal Festival Hall and I took my manuscript out, it’s enormous, 220,000 words, and I said I’ve written this thing and I think I’ve wasted my time because it’s not possible and again, by chance, this is my life, somebody in the audience, Professor Sarah Franklin from Christ’s College in Cambridge, she came backstage and she said, “Come to Cambridge and do it. If you can’t do it at Cambridge, I don’t know where else you can do it” and by October I was a Fellow at Christ’s College and I spent the last academic year living in college, I had 500 year old rooms next to where Darwin used to live and it was rather marvellous sitting next to somebody at dinner, “I do Etruscan coinage”, “Do you really? Good lord”.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Wow.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
And we continued our work with the Computer Science department and we made a prototype and the idea is to create an app, an app where you would be hold the world in your hands and we have problems with anywhere with how we view the world with the north always on the top and the south down at the bottom and everything the wrong size and you know Greenland is enormous and is in fact the size of Algeria, you know we could do with a new way of map. So this will spin and you could then click on any country in the world and you could, you could extrapolate the information about that country and we could begin to have an overview so that politicians who are difficult to get them to focus, if I asked a general question of this app and I said, “Can you tell me where domestic violence is up worldwide since Covid?”, the whole world would light up and I think that is much more powerful for them to see because there’s not a single country in the world where it hasn’t gone up since Covid, that’s a very powerful argument in 30 seconds rather than making them sit and read a long report that somebody, somebody has written. So the idea is that it will be curated around the world, each country will curate their own, we will form global partnerships with universities around the world, we will ask for experts to tell us what’s it like, we’ll have a template of pay, parliamentary representation, literacy with the basics and then upload videos of women telling us their stories. This marvellous woman, Zahra Joya who runs Rukhshana Media, just incredible story, when she was five the Taliban first banned girls from going to school, she dressed up as a boy, she called herself Mohammed and walked two hours to a school where they didn’t know her, because she was determined and I want to see that story told, I want to see that, so it will be a mix of videos. Now, we have found office space, we will work within the Women of the World organisation. What we lack, and this is true of so many of these projects, we lack funding and that’s where I am now, is trying to work out a model for funding this because it’s you know just hosting the website is hugely expensive, we know how to do it, we know it needs doing. This is my next big challenge.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
We might need to start talking about people that we might be able to connect you to.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well I, I feel…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
This is why she’s come to tell…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I feel so passionate about it. You know, we’re thinking maybe a Mappa Mundi club where different universities will contribute a sort of fee and then they could put research students onto it and do PhDs and things but we have to do this and then link it to Wikipedia, so it’s not a rival to Wikipedia, it’s, it’s an add-on, it’s just telling the other half of the story.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Broader picture.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah. So, Mappa Mundi map of the world based on a map from 1300 made in Ebstorf, Germany by nuns and it was a 12 foot square depiction of what they knew about the world and I just thought well let’s do another one but let’s make it bigger and better and amazing and the wonderful thing is, again I’ve been working with lots of amazing women in Cambridge but also incredible male allies, this is not just some programme that women are just doing on their own, this is something where we all go, because it’s about knowledge, this is how can we not want this knowledge, we must have it but, you know, money, I’m not just, not my best thing, I’m not good, I’m n showbusiness darling, I don’t know about money.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I’m going to quickly talk about Bake Off and turning down the biggest paycheque.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I know.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
For the principles and for the, for the soul.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Maybe you should do more of that. Then you could fund this project.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
So, so, the thing is, the thing is, I’m very lucky and I’ve had a wonderful career so far, I’m 66, I’m still working. So I got offered this thing, Bake Off, I’d never seen it. I phoned my daughter and I said, “Darling, I’ve been offered this thing called Bake Off”, she said, “Oh my god mum, just step onto the planet”, so I have no interest in popular culture whatsoever, I’d never seen it, so I didn’t watch it before I was in it, I didn’t watch it while I was in it, I’ve certainly not seen it since because it doesn’t interest me. I get it, it’s cake, okay. But it did seem like an enormous…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
You’re not even into baking?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, not in the slightest. Cake is readily available in shops, extraordinary to me. Like, how does it further your life? I don’t know. But it coincided, the offer, with me having an unexpectedly large tax bill so…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Gladly accepted the gig.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Rather sensibly, I took the gig and I did it for three years. Here’s the thing when you watch the show, right, apparently, they say oh it’s a five hour bake and you watch it on telly and it takes fifteen minutes. In real life, it takes five hours. You literally watch meringue dry. I could feel my brain atrophying. And of course, honestly, it was the biggest paycheque of my whole life but I have stuff to do.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Busy stuff to do.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I have stuff to do.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I want my children to grow up in a world where they have access to Mappa Mundi but I was surprising my team I think who were in their twenties and thirties, when I was describing the, what the world was like in 1994. I was fifteen in 1994 and I’ve grown up under Section 28 and we didn’t have the internet and I knew I fancied women, I don’t think I knew the word ‘lesbian’ and when you came out or were forced out, I suddenly started hearing the word ‘lesbian’ but people weren’t saying it in a very kind way. The world has changed a lot since then but I wondered if you would reflect a bit on how that was and how the world, where we are now in terms of embracing diversity and the LGBT community and if things are very different from how they were when you were…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I mean it’s, things have changed and lots of things for the better. I went into television in 1980, made my first children’s television show called Number 73 and so this is a weird thing, the younger people won’t know this but there were only three channels okay, there was BBC1 which was for everybody, there was BBC2 which was for anybody who’d read a book and then there was ITV which was commercial and cheap and tawdry. My grandmother wouldn’t even put ITV on. I was on ITV and um.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I wasn’t allowed to watch ITV.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, no, no, it was very common to not be allowed to watch it.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Channel, BBC had children’s things that were acceptable for children. Channel Three was like that’s where naughty things happened.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, no, no, very, very bad, yeah. Err yes, you run the risk of seeing an ad for toilet paper. But because there were only three channels, you became famous in a way that I think is possibly not quite the same today. You became famous very quickly because there just wasn’t that range of television so, aged 23 I became quit publicly well-known so it’s been a long time and then I fell in love and my partner and I, we had children and then in 1994, under some pressure from the tabloids but also because my then partner and I, we had three children and we did not want the children to grow up in the shadow of a secret, we made the decision to come out on our own terms. Now, this is unheard of, there was as far as I am aware no out woman whatsoever in public entertainment but you know finally I was going to be that human rights lawyer and give up showbusiness, I think that was the plan. So, I came out and the very next day the Daily Mail had a headline, front page, “If God had meant lesbians to have children, he would have made it possible”. Now, as I already had three children, I feel this shows the level of intelligence of the Daily Mail, so clearly it was possible but immediately the death threats came and we had to take the whole family into hiding. I think it’s possibly one of the lowest moment of my life, carrying my baby son in the dark through to a gate in the back garden into a waiting car to take us to safety. So I, yeah, it was terrifying.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Absolutely terrifying. And everybody told me I’d never work again and my career was over and somehow I’ve managed to struggle on.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Somehow.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Much to the irritation of the Daily Mail.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Oh brilliant. Did I read somewhere you had to have a police guard at your wedding?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yes.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
But that was years later.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, yeah, years later so, when did we get, when were we allowed to get married, was it 2014?
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
You made a bit of a song and dance about it.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I mean, well, so I had campaigned all my life, all my public life for this so I said to my wife who is a therapist and lovely and quiet, I said, “I think we should get married at the Royal Festival Hall” and she said, “No, no, no, that’s like 2000 people”, I said, “It’ll be fun”, “It’s not fun” she said, “I’m not doing it.” I said, “Well, what would make you do it?” “Well, you’d have to get me personally dressed by Vivienne Westwood.” So I did. Do not set me a challenge. I phoned Vivienne Westwood, I said, “You don’t know me,” she said, “Oh I do” and I went “Okay.”
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Excellent.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
“Could you dress my wife please.” Yeah, we got, we got married with two other members of the Gay Men’s Chorus on stage and my good friend Sheila Hancock and my son officiated and it was, it was a beautiful thing but we had close protection police because it was, because of the death threats. It’s okay, I don’t want to make it a big, big thing, you know, you learn that’s fine, it’s fine, you learn to…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I think though, since straight people often say to me, “Oh, you know you’ve got, because you’ve had so much progress, you’ve got marriage now, oh god, you know, have we not moved on from this” and I think that there is a real sense of complacent well you know in certain quarters there’s a sense of complacency and a sense of like, you know, let’s move onto the next thing and I know that you have expressed a sense of frustration and fear that we are slipping backwards and we have to…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
But we are, darling. So, all of the diversity and inclusion programmes are under threat. So, big companies, Harley-Davidson, Ford, have decided to withdraw from any form of diversity and inclusion, they no longer want to sign up for these LGBT+ programmes.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Because they’re concerned about the backlash? Because they’re concerned about looking, and being divisive?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Because the trans debate has become, I don’t even like the word ‘debate’, has become so toxic that it has then infiltrated through into the entire community, which is devastating and so, more and more people feel it’s okay to say hateful things. Homophobia is back, both micro and macro. I don’t get so much of it myself now, the Daily Mail can manage to write about me without putting “Lesbian” in the title, so things are you know, but I’ve been around for a very long time but I hear about it from the younger community, the mental health statistics for the gay community are horrific and, and unfortunately we are at another stage where we have to stand up one more time and say, “Please, could you all just be nice.”
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
And in particular to the trans community. I, we have a very mixed audience, I, I wanted to ask you about, there’s, we talked about the word ‘lesbian’ before the session started and how for a while that was weaponised and gay women distanced themselves from it and they I think they have again more recently because of its association with, with transphobia and I know that that’s something that has again been quite divisive in our LGBT community.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Just love everybody, like we’re all different. I have a photograph at home which means a lot to me where I don’t know, we were on holiday in Copenhagen and there was this photographer who said, “Let me take a picture of your eye” and you just think what, that’s weird. So it’s a closeup of the iris of, of my left eye and the iris of my wife’s left eye. Now, we have a lot in common, we’re white, we’re lesbian, good income, good education and so on. Her’s is this deep caramel pool of lusciousness and mine is this artic ice, like I’m like Elsa from Frozen, it was like this, this extraordinary thing. We are so different and all of us in this room, our eyes are different, our fingerprints are different, we are unique and interesting and allow for that, allow for all of us to be individuals. I, I am so desperate about this, and I don’t understand it, I don’t understand, for example I don’t understand the whole thing about trans women and toilets or whatever, this has become a big thing. I have travelled the country now for 45 years, up and down the country, every time I go to a service station in one of the motorway places, there’s a big sign up that says, “Male cleaner in attendance”, right, I’ve seen it. Has there ever been a campaign to stop this? Has anybody ever said, “That’s very dangerous, why have we got… this is outrageous”? Why would a man bother to dress up as a woman when he can pick up a cleaning cloth?
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
It would be a lot easier.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
So much easier, right. High heels are hard to find in a large size. I don’t get it. Why are we suddenly making this big deal about it?
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Also, when you go into a cubicle, can you close the door, you do your business, lock it and then get on with your day.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Shut the door. Yes. But what I can tell you is that the impact of what’s happening, I’ve a really wonderful trans friend of mine, she no longer goes to the gym because she doesn’t feel safe, the mental health stats are horrific, one in two trans people will be assaulted in their lifetime, one in two, that’s not okay, it’s not okay, these are human beings trying to be their best selves, these are human beings, you know people talk about sport, dear gods, sport’s already not fair, right, sport is not, make it, sort it out, just sort it out. Sport is elitist so when my wife was growing up, her father worked in a mill, she grew up in a working class neighbourhood in the North and she said “We only did sport that didn’t requite a kit. We did swimming because a swimsuit, you could manage” right. No working class child grows up wanting to be an equestrian Olympian, right.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Or cricket.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Or cricket, or sailing, or skiing. It’s already unfair. Could we work on the elitism first before we start having a go at people? Somehow boxers manage to sort out different weights, right. Sort it out. Human beings are built differently, let’s figure it out, let’s be nice, I know it’s old school isn’t it, can we just be nice and stop having a go, stop punching down, especially if you’re a powerful person.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
And you’re going to lead me onto axes. I’m going to open the floor to questions, so start in one…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I do have a lot of axes.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
…in one minute, so think about your questions. We haven’t got a lot of time and you’re going to have form an orderly queue. How many axes do you own and why?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I mean, I think I have three at the minute.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Why does a woman need so many? Why does a person need so many axes?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
So, amongst, my life, honestly. So, I’m very, very concerned about climate change because of my children, my grandchildren and so my wife and I moved out to the country about three years ago and I’ve always wanted to own a woodland and we bought 40 acres of ancient woodland and we live right in the middle of it and we are currently restoring it with my beautiful volunteer group from the village, who we call my ‘Branch Managers’. One of them’s a police officer, he’s my ‘Special Branch Manager’.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
That’s brilliant.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
We’re calling it ‘Toksvig Masculinity’, which I think is, is very good. Because sometimes you have to walk the walk. It’s all very well me talking about climate change, let’s do something, let’s actually do something. So every time I called out somebody with a chainsaw it was 500 quid and I thought can’t be that difficult, he can do it, so I’ve been on a course, I’m terrific with a chainsaw now, I can split logs and I’m out there every single Sunday that I’m not working on something else and we’re clearing the woodland, we are bringing light back down onto the forest floor, we have rehoused so far nine creatures from the wildlife hospital in Leatherhead so we’re, to release a baby tawny owl from your hands and watch it go, “What the f*** is this? This is fantastic!” Well listen, that owl literally went “Haaaa, look!” and for a while lived on a tree directly above my study which is in the garden, which was really lovely and I hear them at night hooting. I’m trying in everything I do to walk the walk, I really want, there’s no point in just saying you want to make change, you have to actually, you have to give it a go.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Amazing. Right, any questions please?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Hello darling, what’s your name?
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I thought I was your darling.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
You’re my lawyer, your darling days over.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Oh okay.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
What is your name?
Audience member
Hi. Adam.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Hi, Adam.
Audience member
Lovely to meet you. You’ve portrayed yourself as very much a bit of an autodidact, you know you see a challenge or something that interests you and you feel, you take on, you feel that you want to take on that challenge, maybe teach yourself something new and then tackle it. Is there any skill that you’ve taught yourself that you’re particularly proud of or that is particularly unusual?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well, chainsawing is up there I think with, so chainsawing is up there. There’s lots, I mean do you not think the world is fascinating? I think the world is so interesting, I don’t know how anybody ever gets bored. I get up literally every day and think oh I did not know that, that’s fantastic, I just discovered, this is so boring, I just discovered I love the animal kingdom and I discovered a moth in southern California which has got, it’s blonde with tiny genitals and the man who discovered has named it ‘Neopalpa donaldtrumpi’ which I just think…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Oh that’s brilliant.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
It’s just so brilliant. There’s so many skills that I don’t have that I would like to have. The next thing that my wife and I are going to go on, we want to learn wood carving so that when we do cut down a tree and maybe sometimes there’s a stump left, you might carve it into some marvellous creature, we want to try, there’s public footpaths through the woodland and we want to make sure that children come and feel that they want to be there. I take my young grandchildren out with magnifying glasses and we could be out there for an hour and a half, two hours, so nature, I’m obsessed with learning much more about nature. When I first bought the woodland three years ago, I didn’t know one tree from another and now I realise I can read the woodland, I can go oh that oak tree or that beech tree is overshadowing or we really should get rid of this yew just here or whatever. I now can read it in a way that I wasn’t able to before but that work is, my goodness, that work is ongoing. And all of you, all of you, there’s woodland near you or there’s trees near you or there’s…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I thought we were going to get an open invitation then.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, no.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I thought you were like, “Bring your axe.”
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Sweetie, you can come, you can come.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Okay, I’ll bring my little ones.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, do, do.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
They’ve got micro… they’ve got microscopes.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
But you feel good, you know the Japanese call it ‘shinrin-yoku’, forest bathing, it’s good for us but the trees don’t look after themselves, we have to go and, we have to help. Yeah so, more, learning more, always, every day. Anymore?
Audience member
Thank you so much for your talk. So, within the fight for gender equality, with things in the news such as the Gisele Pelicot case which is horrific and I found it quite distressing hearing all about it and there’s been a lot more narrative recently about what men can do and their role and I wondered what your opinion was with regard to that?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well, I mean it’s essential we have to do this together. We don’t see this as a fight for women, you know by women, I don’t see that at all and the men in my life who are on board are my most valued allies. So, I have two daughters and a son, my son is definitely my best feminist, he gets so enraged, as we all should because, because the world will be a better place for all of us and it’s, I’m at pains, it’s a bit like this book, I’m at pains to tell people it’s a book that’s got lesbians in it but it’s not a book for lesbians, it’s a book for everybody and gender equality is for everybody. Genuinely, the world would be a better place. So, Toksvig Masculinity is a sort of, is sort of a joke but I’m saying shall we stop talking about toxic masculinity, embrace the good sides of masculinity and find a way forward that we can all work together. And certainly at Cambridge I had had the most wonderful response. Simon McDonald who is the Master of Christ’s College has been one of my most active champions because they can see the value in what I’m trying to do. So really, I would like to stop this divide, I don’t, I don’t believe in it, I don’t believe it much like the trans thing, I don’t think I believe that people come in just boxes, there’s the boys who are on this side and the girls on this side, I don’t think that’s right.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
And you can’t make any changes if you’re alienating part of the people who need to be part of the debate.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, no, no, no but, but why anyway? Also, boys are very useful for getting things off high shelves so, you know, I, I’m in favour, I think they’re marvellous.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Jo.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Hi, I’m going to guess you’re Jo.
Audience member
I am Jo.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Hi Jo.
Audience member
Thank you so much and I’m from Basingstoke and feminist enclave it definitely isn’t but thank you for putting us on the map. I just wanted to know you’ve mentioned so many projects that you’re working on and issues that you’re looking to tackle and then also you mentioned receiving death threats when you were, you came out and things and the importance of mental health, I was just wondering with all that going on, what do you do to protect your own mental health because the issues you mentioned are big, you know, it’s a lot of responsibility on one person?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
So, it is an issue as I worked too hard, I was writing…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
So you married a therapist.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I did marry a therapist, yeah.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
It’s cheaper in the long run.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Although, although she’s always been like “I’m not working. I’m not interested. Shut it down.”
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
“We’ve already discussed all your characters, now we’ve got to discuss this.”
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, it helps that I, I, I have a partnership with somebody who’s very good at, very good at listening so, my favourite thing, this is so ridiculous, I have three grandchildren and one on the way and the youngest at the moment is fifteen months and I’m afraid to say we call him ‘Fat Baby’ and he’s got those luscious features, my favourite.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
And rolls.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Nice.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
And we have an American style porch on the front of our house which looks out over a lake and the woodland and to sit there with Fat Baby and then I go, “I can’t help, I’m really sorry I’d love to help with the cooking but baby and I are sitting and he’s calm” and for some reason he really likes sitting with me and that moment when he and I are looking at the trees and he’s not really saying anything yet, he and I are looking at the trees and we’re just sitting enjoying nature and I can hear the family in the kitchen all getting Sunday lunch ready or that, that, it’s those moments literally when your feet are on the ground and you can snuggle into the baby. But otherwise, like on the way here I’m writing a big show that’s going on at Drury Lane in November, it is too busy, it is too busy but we should all, everybody should have therapy, it’s very, very good for you, everybody should find something. Deb and I are going to go on a woodcarving course as I said, which I think might be calming but it’s, heavens, we need to find the time all of us don’t we to just take a minute. I don’t read for pleasure, which is sadness to me, I’m always reading for a work project, it would be nice to have a bit more, have a bit more time but it feels like there’s a lot to do.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I appreciated reading this for pleasure.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Did you?
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, I really did.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Thank you.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Although I was joking on the way, I didn’t, I had to read this before the actual book came out so the lovely people in distribution printed for me a PDF and they spiralbound it and did it A5, double-sided, and it’s laugh out loud, there are some one liners in this that, you know I’m standing on sweaty trains cackling and I looked over more than once and people all looked at me like, “Is she reading law? Like what’s she, what is she?”, so if you’ve got the book at least people know it’s by San Toksvig. It’s funny. I think I looked a bit deranged. But this was really a pleasure, a real pleasure to read, it slowed me down, I don’t read hard copies enough, it’s nice to hold something even if it’s a spiralbound…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I love books, I’m obsessed, we have thousands of books at home and it is one of the things I’m, I’m proudest of my, I’m the President of the Writers’ Guild which is the trade union for writers and I think we must continue to encourage, you know, last year the United States banned more than 10,000 individual book titles, three times more than the year before, including in some states, ‘I am Malala’.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Really?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Mm hmm, mm. So, you know.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Does anyone have a library named after them? Isn’t that cool. Isn’t that cool. If you’re a lover of books, where is your library?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
The local school just built a new library and named it after me, which is, that’s pretty cool, right. But I think of it, it says ‘The Toksvig Building’ and I think of my father was a writer, my sister and my brother are writers, my son is now a writer.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
They’re all in it though.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
My grandfather, my great-aunt, it’s a, it’s not for me, it’s, it’s for the family.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
It’s lovely. There are a couple of more questions I think I saw hands going up. You’re next.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Hi darling, what’s your name?
Audience member
I am Louise. First of all, I want to say I really enjoyed you on Bake Off.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I did it for you.
Audience member
Thank you. But I wanted to ask about QI and what your experience was like doing that show because it seems like there’s a lot of facts, that’s very intense filming and a lot of different guests. Do you have like a favourite fact or a favourite guest that you had on that show?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
So I’m coming up, I’m just about to start the next season and I’ll be ten years in charge of the show, it’s probably the favourite thing that I do in terms of television because it’s that combination of, of ridiculous things about moths and entertainment. I love all of the guests who come on. I wrangle it a big, the boys sometimes try to misbehave but that doesn’t last very long. The first two years were difficult because they weren’t sure I was going to stay, so I had to sit in Stephen Fry’s chair and I had to have a little step to get me up into it because I was too small and I knew I had arrived when in the third year I got my own chair.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
They invested in you.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
So, they finally decided I could have, so that’s when you know whether you’ve arrived or not. I, I’m interested in the world and so I enjoy all of it. I like the spontaneity of it so we do it without stopping when we record it in front of an audience of about 600 people and it’s, obviously it’s heavily edited but we don’t stop at all and there was a thing we did where we had coconuts and screwdrivers and hammers and we’d see who could open a coconut the quickest, that was the, you know give Alan a screwdriver and a hammer and a coconut, nightmare, but anyway we happened to have Sindhu Vee on who is one of the most brilliant standups and she’s originally from Mumbai and she watched us all being idiots and then she went, “Oh for goodness sake”, we did not know she was going to do this, she picked up the coconut, she went round to the front of the studio floor, she hit it on the floor like that, she picked both halves up, didn’t lose a single bit of liquid and came back and went, “That’s how you do that”.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Oh my god.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
And you just go, “Okay, that’s, you know, cultural differences, look at that, that’s so fantastic.” So, moments like that when you just didn’t know that was going to happen. And the show continues to surprise and the thing I was trying to write in the car, we’ve taken Drury Lane Theatre for two nights in November, we’re going to try a new thing which is to drill down deep into a subject the way we do on QI but do it live, so there’ll be no panel, it’ll be me talking and we’re going to use the subject of ‘theatre’, it’s the biggest theatre stage in the West End. Why are we doing this? I don’t really know but I’m passionate about theatre and I want to make sure people continue to do the live experience so we’re trying to do a QI version of what the live experience might be like.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Amazing.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, or, or disastrous. Amazing or disastrous.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Either way, great to watch.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
It should be good. So if you’re interested in QI, come along because I think it’ll be fun.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I came to see Next Slide Please and it was the first time I’d been around so many people after the pandemic and I remember for the first couple of minutes thinking ooh there’s a lot of people in a quite small space…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Oh that was my one woman show.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
But it was brilliant and within two minutes you’re like laughing and sharing air with those people and sort of like “Covid, what the hell”.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
It’s good for you. It’s really good for you. I’m touring at the moment with Friends of Dorothy and just seeing people crying with laughter, that’s, that’s a nice feeling. Yeah, that’s good.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Got one more question here and I think we might have to call time. Might be time for one more question.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Hi, what’s your name?
Audience member
Hello, I’m, I’m Jessica, it’s very nice to meet you.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
That’s my daughter’s name, it’s nice.
Audience member
Thank you. I, I share sadness that you won’t be returning to Bake Off, it doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, no.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Unless there’s another tax bill.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I’m just going to call you, help me, help me.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
You know I can’t get you out of tax liabilities.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I don’t really know what you do so…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I stand up against bullies.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Then you’re in my people, then you’re in my people.
Audience member
Oh and I was wondering what’s sort of the next big thing is that we can look for or are you in the woods for the foreseeable?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
The next big thing. I’ve just married Bjorn from Abba, I don’t know if you saw that.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Wedding officia… officiator.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I was the officiant, officiant?
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Wait, so your son officiated your wedding and you officiated Bjorn’s wedding?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, we like to get around the Toksvigs, we’re busy.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I like it.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
We wear the same frock for the thing. The next big thing that I’m doing is that I’m doing a big show at the Royal Festival, a the Royal Albert Hall at Christmas which is going to be called ‘Make the Yuletide Gay’ because I just thought we’d have a sort of silly thing, we’ve got the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Gay Men’s Chorus and the amazing Carrie Hope Fletcher is going to be singing for us and I will be hosting that because I think it’s important that we can all relax and have a nice time together, so if, if anybody’s interested, come along to that. And then I’m, I’ve just signed for a big documentary next year which is going to involve a lot of travel and I’m going to Osaka in Japan to open the Women’s Pavilion for a big women’s conference so, it’s, yeah, other than that I’ll be home.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Just chopping down trees.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Making stuff out of them. Quite relaxed.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Chilled.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, didn’t Debbie tell you, you weren’t allowed to have any more ideas?
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, so, new rule in the house, I’m not allowed to have a new idea before she’s had tea in the morning.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
So once she’s had a cup of tea…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Oh I’m off.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Oh fine.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I’m off, yeah.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Reassuring. Good. There’s no stopping you.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
No, no, no, this morning she phoned down, I was already, I was already working in my office and then she, I always answer the phone in the morning and say, “Room service” and take her tea.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Do you take her tea and then right, right, here’s what I…
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I have to wait until she’s ready. “I know that look, I know that look, I’m drinking my tea.” Okay, okay. I was thinking, let’s change the world by…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
It’s wonderful. This has been joyous and lovely and maybe one of my favourite days in the office ever.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
And you’re lovely.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Thank you so much.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Well I’ve just gained a lawyer, that’s very exciting.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, it’s really good.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, now I need to get into some trouble.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
No. Okay. Not on advice but if that happens, you know where I am.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
We met over a meal didn’t we and it was honestly, we just got on straight away.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
It was wonderful.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah, it’s just really nice when you meet somebody and you just think oh yeah, she’s cool, let’s, let’s be friends with her, she’s fine.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Okay, I’m keeping you.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Okay.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
You saw it here.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I’ve adopted you so we’re good.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much all of you for coming, thank you everyone on screen.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Can I just say…
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I’m now a bit nervous.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
The fifteen year old you would be so proud of you right now.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
I told her not to make me cry.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Take it, take the compliment because that is the fact. Look what you grew up into, how fantastic.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for, thank you for being, coming out authentically, it was so important, even though I did hear my grandma saying “lesbian” you know like a bad thing.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Ooh no, so my, my grandmother was told, she’s, my mother told her and my grandmother went, “oh that, I thought you were going to say she’s ill, we had those in our day”.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Oh. I gradually came out to lots of different people in different places and I, and I, the big pinnacle was telling my granddad and I muttered and muttered and muttered and when I told him, he was just like “oh, god people make such a fuss about these sorts of things” and he didn’t say love is love but he essentially was just like why are you so flustered like this always happens. We knew these women in the village and, it’s always been around and you know if this is treated with kindness, it’s you know. Anyway it was so affirming and wonderful to see you come out and exist and I’ve been watching you for about 45 years.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
I am very old.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
But thank you, thank you for being so authentically you, thank you for all of your passion projects and the change you’re making without being a lawyer and thank you for hiring me as your lawyer.
Sandi Toksvig OBE
Yeah! It’s all worked out.
Emma Woollcott, Partner
Mishcon de Reya
Massive privilege. My new favourite client, Sandi Toksvig. Thank you.