‘A lot of famous people are arseholes,” says Sandi Toksvig. “I don’t like people because they are famous or rich. My father was incredibly famous, the most famous man in Denmark. So I’ve seen it up close and have no interest in fame whatsoever.” I have been talking with Toksvig – broadcaster; quizshow host; author of plays, musicals and 30 or so books; pioneering feminist and LGBTQ+ activist – about her role as officiator at the wedding of Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus to his partner, Christina Sas, in September. Ulvaeus is indeed famous and rich but is firmly “not in the arsehole category. He is a good friend, very gentle and a humanist like me.” Claus Toksvig, who was a broadcaster and foreign correspondent – essentially Denmark’s answer to Richard Dimbleby – wasn’t in the arsehole category, either. He and his daughter were extremely close and he would take her on work jaunts, one of which, astonishingly, involved watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon from Houston’s Apollo Mission Control Center.
That Claus was so famous “should have steered me in the opposite direction”, says Toksvig, adding: “I didn’t set out to do what I did.” But while studying law, archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge – her plan was to become a human-rights lawyer – Toksvig joined Footlights, the university’s comedy society, “for a laugh. And a director saw me and said: ‘Come and work with me,’ and so I thought, ‘OK, I’ll do that and treat it like another gap year.’ And that was 45 years ago. I’m having the longest gap year in history.”
