“I HAD TO STAND UP FOR THE LIFE I WAS LEADING”
Presenter, writer and comedian Sandi Toksvig is on a mission to boost the prospects of women across the country
Sandi Toksvig may have been born in Denmark and raised in Africa and the US but she’s become something of a national treasure here in the UK.
As well as confidently taking the helm of QI, The Great British Bake Off and Fifteen to One, she’s also championing the rights of women.
On top of juggling a myriad jobs in recent years – ranging from a cameo in the 2013 Call the Midwife Christmas special, to preparing for her “National Trevor” tour – she somehow found time to co-found a political party.
When it launched in 2015 with the motto “equality is better for everyone”, the Women’s Equality Party said it would campaign to introduce quotas for the number of female MPs, achieve fair pensions for all women, and tackle age discrimination in the workforce.
The move has been a long time coming. In her 2019 memoir, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Topofthe Number 12 Bus, Sandi said, “I have been a feminist for as long as I have had the ability to say such a thing.”
She explained why she was stepping out of her role as host of The News Quiz and into politics. “I am so optimistic about this. This is a formidable group of women and it’s a very simple message. We want equality for all our children, not just half of them.”
As well as presenting and campaigning, Sandi, 62, writes plays and books, tours, and as of the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, hosts a YouTube channel, VoxTox, posting short videos discussing interesting female characters from history. The videos birthed a podcast, We Will Get Past This, and the book Toksvig’s Almanac 2021, out in November.
Sandi’s career started at Girton College at Cambridge University. While studying law, anthropology and archaeology, she joined the Cambridge Footlights Dramatics Club with Emma Thomson.
Sandi became a household name in the 1980s on No 73, the ITV children’s show. Since then, she’s written for and performed on the stage, published more than 20 books, and raised three children who she had with her previous partner Peta Stewart. But her life has not been without its struggles.
In 1994 she came out in a broadsheet newspaper to avoid being “outed” by a tabloid. The tabloid, she says, were bullies and “you have to stand up to that when you can”.
She received death threats after the story. “For quite a while we lived in fear, spending our days keeping
our worries from the kids and letting them believe it was all a fun holiday. I knew I couldn’t give up. That I had to stand up for the life I was leading,” she says in her memoir.
She now lives happily with her wife, psychotherapist Debbie Toksvig. “Every room she’s in is a better room,” Sandi says.
Standing up for what she believes in is a common theme for Sandi. In 2018, the Women’s Equality Party marked the anniversary of some women (those over 30) getting the right to vote by projecting the words, “Deeds not words” onto the Houses of Parliament. “We discovered that this is, for reasons I can’t fathom, illegal but decided to do it anyway,” she says in her memoir.
While the coronavirus pandemic has paused most television projects, Sandi has kept busy.
She’s remained vocal about women’s equality on social media, particularly about the effect of Covid-19 on carers – the majority of whom are women – and families.
She’s a woman on a mission and, hopefully for all of society’s sake, won’t stop until she completes it.
To join or to find out more about the Women’s Equality Party, visit www.womensequality.org.uk/