Quite Interesting things you never knew about Sandi

◆ Sandi’s father, Claus, was a Danish journalist and broadcaster. In 1969, while he covered the Apollo 11 Mission, the 11-year-old Sandra Birgitte Toksvig held hands with Neil Armstrong’s secretary as the astronaut stepped on the moon. ◆ Her early school years were spent in New York, where her family was living. Sandi admits she was expelled because she spent too much time skipping lessons to watch plays on Broadway. ◆ She was sent to boarding school in England and arrived with a thick American accent. So she taught herself to speak with a posh British voice. ‘I watched Brief Encounter and learnt how to speak like Celia Johnson,’ she says. ◆ After school she read law, archaeology and anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge, and shared the Footlights stage with fellow students who included Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson. ◆ Twenty-five years ago, both Sandi and eventual host Angus Deayton recorded pilots as chair of the panel show Have I Got News For You. ‘I was told by the producers that they preferred my version, but the channel decided they couldn’t have a woman in charge,’ she says. It’s taken a quarter of a century, but times have certainly changed.