Even though Radio 4 is a talk radio station, it’s actually the music they play that sticks in my mind the most. There was the time I was on a long car journey with my dad, and our hands collided as we both slammed our fists towards the radio’s “off” button when The Archers nauseatingly perky theme tune sounded – the ultimate moment of father-daughter bonding. There’s “Sailing By”, played every night at 12.45am just before the late Shipping Forecast, which I can remember hearing drifting from the cabin radio as we sailed across the North Sea in the middle of the night when I was a child. Finally, there’s “The Typewriter” by Leroy Anderson, which is used as the theme for The News Quiz. It’s an upbeat, no-nonsense bit of brass that suggests cheerful Friday evenings in the kitchen with the weekend and all its possibilities before you.
Except that now its cheery burbling has a new layer, a melancholy one, because this evening’s episode is the last time that Sandi Toksvig’s warm tones will come over the end of the tune, welcoming you to her show. After nine years, 28 series and over 200 episodes, she’s leaving to work for the newly-founded Women’s Equality Party (a level of political activism that clearly wouldn’t be possible while still the host of a Radio 4 show, whatever the “BBC bias” truthers would have you believe). At last night’s recording, it was clear that Toksvig found the music affecting, too – she was wiping away tears as the last notes sounded and the credits were read.
For a recording of a light-hearted comedy show, last night was a surprisingly sad affair. I have to confess here, that as a pretty committed News Quiz fan, this was far from the first live show I’ve been to – but it was certainly the most muted. Part of this was down to the topics the panel had to discuss: even the highest calibre of comedians can’t help but be a bit depressing on the subject of Theresa May deporting thousands of NHS nurses, Michael Gove closing courts in the name of better access to justice, and rich people owning most of the land. But there was also a sense that with Toksvig’s departure, the show is losing its defining force. Since her replacement has yet to be announced, we don’t know what direction it will go in next, and as Radio 4 mostly stands for some kind of continuity in a changing world, this is unsettling.
The panel and the audience. If you enlarge the photo and look just to the left of Sandi’s head you can just see me! Photo: BBC/Lucy Eliot-Higgitt
Appropriately, Toksvig’s last News Quiz recording was full of reminders of the show’s long, very BBC, history and her connection with it. Introducing Toksvig at the start was Charlotte Green, the beloved former BBC newsreader who retired in 2013. John Lloyd, who originated the format back in 1977 via an idea from Nicholas Parsons, was in the front row of the audience and one of the first people Toksvig hugged after it was all over. On the desk in front of her was an old-fashioned BBC microphone, which she held up during her welcome to the studio audience. She explained that her father had used one just like it when he worked at the BBC in the Fifties, a position he got because her mother – one of the BBC’s first female studio managers – put him there.
Toksvig had asked the panellists, audience and production team to come in black tie if possible, so there was a kind of awkward glamour about the whole evening (awkward because most people looked a bit uncomfortable in their unaccustomed finery, typified by Jeremy Hardy, who was swamped in a too-large double-breasted dinner jacket I suspect he has owned for several decades). Before the red light went on, plastic glasses of warm Prosecco were raised to the show and its departing host, as well as friends of the show who have passed away, like newsreader Rory Morrison and panellists Charles Kennedy, Linda Smith and Alan Coren.
One of the things that has defined Sandi Toksvig’s time as host of the News Quiz has been the way the show has bucked the trend on representation and equality. There’s such a lack of opportunity given to woman and BAME comedians elsewhere on the BBC’s comedy shows that last year the director of television Danny Cohen had to issue an edict that no panel shows were allowed to go out any more without at least one woman on the team. Meanwhile, Toksvig’s News Quiz on the arguably more traditional and less responsive Radio 4 frequently has more women (and lesbians) on it than men. People like Rebecca Front, Samira Ahmed, Sue Perkins, Susan Calman, Sarah Millican, Bridget Christie, Holly Walsh, Roisin Conarty and Francesca Martinez can be found there more often than they ever can on one of TV’s numerous comedy panel shows. Change is good, sometimes, as News Quiz producer Lyndsay Fenner explained to me via email:
I don’t think you should carry on doing something just because it is the way it has always been done, if someone spots a better way to do it. A lot of the way we work now is led by the way Sandi is involved with the whole process, so I imagine it could change a little when the next host takes over.
Toksvig is a warm and generous host, often easing first-timers through the show with her avuncular, maternal approach.
Francis Wheen, Sandi Toksvig, Neal Sleat and Jeremy Hardy. Photo: BBC/Lucy Eliot-Higgitt
Fenner again:
Her hosting style also ensured that the show is collaborative, rather than competitive and she fostered a relaxed, fun environment for the recording, which I think came across on air.
As sometime News Quiz producer Ed Morrish has written before, making sure the guests aren’t all white men is only partly driven by the desire for equality. He does it himself “for the selfish reason that it makes my show better”, and there can be no doubt that part of what makes the News Quiz endure in its decades-old format is the diversity of ages, backgrounds and opinions it features. The likes of A N Wilson like to chortle from time to time about the show’s left-wing bias and the “Leftist apparatchiks” who appear on it, and lament how it isn’t funny like it used to be – exactly proving the point that there will always be those who define comedy as something supercilious said by a white middle class man to a panel of his fellows. The consistent popularity of Toksvig’s News Quiz, though, suggests that there are plenty who disagree.
Given that, it was a little odd that for her final show Toksvig chose an all-male panel – a fact she herself freely acknowledged when she introduced them. But as she tearfully thanked her “fantastic boys” – Francis Wheen, Phill Jupitus, Andy Hamilton and Jeremy Hardy – at the end, it was clear that she’d just picked her best and oldest friends for her last time as host.
Sandi’s News Quiz colleagues bid her farewell
After watching her in action for the final time, I found myself wondering why I and millions of others tune in for Toksvig, whether on the radio, the iPlayer app, a podcast, whatever. The answer, I think, lies in that feeling you get in your kitchen on a Friday night – she fits easily into your evening, being sharp, but not too mean; political, but not preachy; friendly, but not sappy.
And, of course, as Phill Jupitus put it in the little poetic ode he wrote to Toksvig to use as his soundcheck last night: “There’s nothing like a Dane.”
A tearful Sandi bids the show farewell. Photo: Photo: BBC/Lucy Eliot-Higgitt
Sandi Toksvig’s last News Quiz is on BBC Radio 4 at 6.30 on 26 June, and is repeated on 27 June at 12.30pm.
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