Writer, broadcaster and activist Sandi Toksvig is touring our shores in early December with her new show, in which she explores reasons to be cheerful after long months of coronavirus-induced gloominess.
In Aotearoa, Toksvig is known for her role as the host of QI and she’s appeared regularly in many other British quiz series, as well as programmes such as Extraordinary Escapes and The Great British Bake Off — and most recently as the host of The Great Big Tiny Design Challenge.
Sandi Toksvig. Photo: Oli Scarff / AFP
On The Great Big Tiny Design Challenge amateur crafters put their miniature-making skills to the test and compete to transform a derelict mini mansion.
“You’re talking things that are twelfth the size of normal life and … they filmed it so that it looked as though I was walking through the doll’s house when it was finished at the end. I just felt it was the show waiting for me.”
As a keen crafter herself, she enjoys making miniatures in her Hampshire house, which is conveniently located near an aging woodland.
She says she is obsessed with learning about the history of places, including her own neck of the woods.
“There have been trees growing here for more than, in this particular woodland, 600 years.
“The original cottage of where we live belonged to a brushmaker, so it was a guy who used to go out into the woods … and get the materials to make brooms and brushes.
“I like the fact that whatever we all do, it doesn’t really matter because life will go on and that there were people here making a living all those years ago.”
When she comes to Aotearoa for her shows, Toksvig says she'd like to visit Te Papa and the underground bunker at the Dominion Observatory in Wellington’s Botanic Gardens.
“When you’re scared about the present or indeed the unknowable future, sometimes to look at the past and know actually we’ve had all troubles before and we’ve somehow managed to get through, maybe that just makes you feel a bit better.”
Politics and positivity for the future
In addition to her comedy and television work, Toksvig also co-founded the Women's Equality Party, which she says was the single most successful political party in the UK’s last election even though they didn't win a single seat.
She says that’s because they only had enough money to stand five candidates.
“Five survivors of violence, women, stood against five men who had outstanding allegations of sexual impropriety and four of the men stood down and one of them lost his seat.
“So we didn’t win the seat but those five men are no longer in Parliament so to me, what we set out to do, we achieved.
“And that is what we’ll do again, we’ll target where we stand our candidates based entirely on where we think we can have the biggest impact.”
On the UK’s process for selecting a new prime minister, she says it’s like writing “a sitcom about the worst way to choose a prime minister, and then you’ve thought ‘oh no, I’ve gone too far’.”
“If I was just to choose the leader of the Conservative Party, I would choose Liz Truss because in about two seconds, she would destroy the party.
“Who do I want to have as a prime minister is a different question, preferably not Conservative, they’ve been in charge for 12 years and have made a right old mess of everything.
“I think the least scary of them is Penny Mordaunt who seems a perfectly sensible person who might put some order back in.”
She says it breaks her heart to see immigration policies that turn away people fleeing their own countries.
“As the world decides to become more frightened, I think we’re going to see this, we’re going to see a sort of closing down of borders and we’re going to see a hideous reprehensible policies like Britain sending people who have tried to come here as refugees to Rwanda and things like that.
“We need to stand up all the time and say, I’m sorry, you can’t, this can’t be right that you’re planning to do this and a lot of the immigration policy in Denmark honestly makes me weep when I read about it.
“Except, here’s the thing Kim, I remain an optimist, I believe in people, I believe there are wonderful people, I believe the next generation are amazing and full of fabulous activists and we just have to go with that, we have to decide to be positive.”
