I’d never heard of Bake Off until I was given the job
She’s always cooking up something new, on TV and off, but as Sandi Toksvig insists to James Rampton she is no national treasure
SANDI TOKSVIG has a confession to make. Before she took the job as its co-presenter on Channel 4, she had never even heard of The Great British Bake Off. “To be honest,” she says, “I had never seen it. I don’t watch a lot of television. I don’t even know who Danny Dyer is. I can read a whole copy of Hello! magazine and not know who a single person is.
“So I phoned my daughter, who’s 30, and I said, ‘Darling, I’ve been offered this thing called Bake Off. Do you know what it is?’ And she replied ‘What is wrong with you, Mum?!’”
But once Toksvig, 60, joined, she found out exactly what it is: a huge source of joy to millions. “I was so gratified by the warmth that people feel towards it,” she says.
Sandi is charismatic, compelling, charming and comic and our hour having a quiet drink is filled with laughter. She says that in an age when so many reality TV shows revel in being nasty to their contestants, Bake Off is a breath of fresh air. “How great to make a programme that’s not horrible about anybody. How great to make a programme that’s intergenerational. And how great to make something that makes people feel good.”
Sandi was also intrigued by the fact that in this age of streaming, everyone is eager to watch The Great British Bake Off the moment it airs. “So much television is watched on catch-up now. But people like to watch Bake Off as it’s going out because they don’t want to be the one who doesn’t know what’s happened.
“They don’t want spoilers. They don’t want somebody at work to go, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe what happened to Ruby’s cake last night...’ So it’s event television and that’s wonderful.”
The Great British Bake Off is just one of the subjects Sandi addresses in her live show, National Trevor. The title comes from a friend who misheard when Sandi was called a “national treasure”. It’s a term of which she heartily disapproves. “When you’re called a national treasure, does it mean that you’re going to be put in a glass case and kept in the British Museum next to the Rosetta Stone?”
She believes we should wean ourselves off our obsession with fame. “Our culture has become fixated. I don’t know what it means to be a celebrity any more. It used to be that you were celebrated for achieving something. Now I meet young people who say, ‘I want to be famous’. But for what? If you want to be famous, invent something, write something, do something.”
Sandi argues that we should be ignoring wannabe celebrities and paying more attention to members of the general public so her show is touring the country celebrating the people of Britain and searching for “National Trevors”. “We are going to give them badges. You too could be a National Trevor!”
Sandi gives an example of the sort of person she is looking for. “When I did a show recently, it turned out that the chairwoman of Moth Awareness Week was in the audience. She told us all about the moths we should be looking for. The woman was rather marvellous. She’s a National Trevor, if ever there was one!”
Sandi is clearly in a good place, in both her professional and private life, married to Debbie and with three children from a former relationship. “I’m absurdly devoted to my wife,” she says. “It’s nauseating how much I love her. A lot of my friends find it ‘eurgh’!”
She is also having a ball on BBC Two’s QI, which she took over from Stephen Fry. She says: “The thing which is so amazing is the range of people who watch it. We had a builder who worked on our house. He had left school at 15. He said he felt he was getting the education he never got by watching the show.”
Sandi is delighted, too, by the prospect of continuing on Bake Off. “I’m loving it,” she beams. “I particularly love the fact that you really get involved with those contestants. It might look like 20 minutes of telly to you but it’s five hours’ baking for us. I’ve been through every bit of eggshell and every single tear. I don’t even like cake! Imagine if I did. I’d be the size of a horse!”
The obvious chemistry between Sandi, co-host Noel Fielding and judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith is also a great draw. “It sounds mushy but we all properly love each other. I did Christmas dinner for them all last year.”
Sandi, who is co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, has also written the book for a musical version of Treasure Island, which premiered at Leicester Haymarket Theatre last month. “I wrote programme notes about female pirates today. There was a marvellous female pirate in New York called Sadie the Goat. Apparently, she used to headbutt people she didn’t like.”
NEXT, she says, is “a big project which hopefully will change the way we access information. That is going to be a global project. It should be this autumn.”
So what drives Sandi? “Well, I get bored unbelievably easily,” she smiles. “So it’s probably best for me constantly to be doing different things. I like to do anything I haven’t done before. For instance, today my wife and I grouted tiles. I hadn’t tried that before.”
Doesn’t she ever worry about fitting in so many professional commitments? “No,” she replies, her laughter filling the room one last time. “I’m a woman, darling!”
‘I don’t even like cake. Imagine if I did, I’d be the size of a horse’
National Trevor is at London’s Royal Festival Hall tonight and touring until February 8 (sanditoksvig.com)