Sandi: Books saved me from schoolgirl torment

SANDI Toksvig said books saved her life when she nearly went off the rails as a lonely teenager.

The 62-year-old told literary fans: “I grew up all over the world.

“My fundamental childhood was in New York and then at 14, I got sent to boarding school in the UK, having been thrown out of three American schools in a row.” Sandi, who had never been to a British school and had an American accent, was sent to Coventry by the girls “and I didn’t even know where that was,” she joked. The QI and former Bake Off host said: “The first six weeks I lived in the UK nobody spoke to me. It was painful and difficult if I am honest.”

But Sandi found “a fantastic second-hand bookshop which saved my life”. She said: “They used to save books for me and gave them to me for almost no money. It is where I discovered Jane Austen and all manner of writers.

“And then I suspect I started to be funny and cracked them through laughter and people did in the end speak to me.”

Sandi, who spoke as she closed this year’s online Hay Festival, also put herself up for prime minister and said the Government was run by “a series of interchangeable schoolboys”.

She said: “I would much prefer a woman who knows what she is doing in the kitchen, has brought up a family and done a job as well. I am volunteering.”

She added: “Boys have been in charge for a very long time, I am just saying, you all look tired.”

Sandi revealed she and Bake Off co-host Noel Fielding had the most fun dining and drinking with the other show judges.

She said of Noel: “He is very good at bowling – for a Goth he looks excellent in bowling shoes.”