Imagine you discover the meaning of life and you turn it into a TV panel game.
Imagine that you conclude that the panel game is the meaning of life.
Imagine, in other words, that you are John Lloyd - and imagine how hard it
is for me to decide whether Lloyd, the man who made Blackadder and Spitting
Image, is on to something or has gone charmingly, garrulously, eruditely
barmy.
The panel game is QI, the BBC show in which Stephen Fry taunts Alan Davies and
guests with tantalising evidence that the Universe is more paradoxical and
complicated than they thought. Its initials stand for Quite Interesting,
which undersells its creator too, a 56-year-old TV producer who, 14 years
ago, survived one of middle-age's more productive crises of ego, conscience
and income.
We are in the sitting room of his manorhouse in Oxfordshire. Still boyish, if
a little Chris Patten around the eyes, Lloyd does not take much warming up
on the subject of QI. “It's an all-encompassing idea, QI. It's a way of
life. It's a philosophy. It's a way of teaching children. It's a way of
re-educating adults. It contains - without being too pretentious or pious
about it - a way to be, a way to look at the world and which has an effect
on all kinds of things.
“The core idea of QI is that we're taught the wrong way up. We're taught all
the important things, all the boring things, all the lists, all the things
that are hard to remember, such as times tables and irregular verbs and
vocabulary. Meaningless stuff. And then if you get through all those and you
get to do a PhD, eventually they start telling you how things really work.”
Lloyd, with a team of seven researchers, sometimes known as the QI elves, cut
to the chase. The more they write down, the more it connects. There is one
rule: only the quite interesting stuff gets in. For instance. Dmitri
Mendeleev, who invented the periodic table, established that the best vodka
was 40 per cent proof. Somehow, QI sparkles. Or, at least the game does. The
original QI masterplan was for it to launch a TV channel, make educational
videos, publish a magazine and own shops that sold only interesting things.
After the failure of the QI Club, which he opened a few years ago in Oxford,
most of these ambitions are in recession. The programme has, however, spun
off into several bestselling books, DVDs (a new one now out) and on to Radio
4 in The Museum of Curiosity, in which comedians and academics nominate
interesting facts for inclusion in a notional treasure house of ideas. Lloyd
is its chairman and a radio natural, although by now, in a saner world, he
would surely be running Radio 4. On the face of it, Lloyd's life in his
early forties could not have got any better, and maybe that was the problem.
Born into the sort of family that has a heroic Great War brigadier-general
in its family tree, he sailed through exams at the King's School, Canterbury
and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied law. There he was
recruited to the BBC and the lazy student was transformed into the
workaholic radio producer of The News Quiz and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy (from which his friend Douglas Adams would later fire him). In 1979
he moved to TV and co-created Not The Nine O'Clock News, although his
greatest triumphs came the following decade with Spitting Image and
Blackadder.
By 1993, he was happily married (and still is, to Sarah Wallace, then the
publishing director of Century), a father and living extravagantly in
Oxfordshire on the back of the commercials he was directing for Barclaycard
and Boddingtons. “Then one Christmas Eve I was 42 years old and the whole
point of anything disappeared. It was just like somebody pulled the rug and
I found myself feeling alone and terrified. What was I supposed to do with
the rest of my life? I'd ticked all the boxes, got two cars, got a country
cottage, had two children and a bathroom full of all the awards. It was the
most awful few months. I quit my job and I started thinking I was the most
boring person I'd ever met.” He started reading: art and photography first,
then physics and Greek philosophy, on to theology, then back to science and
next to languages. At moments he lost his “sense of self”. The “meaning
flooded in” and still does when he researches QI.
I haul him back to his Scrooge-like Christmas Eve. Had he also begun to
question what sort of person he was morally? He had and his belief that he
was one of the good guys ebbed away. “A manhole cover opens up and you look
down and think, ‘I'm awful. I'm terrible. I'm so selfish. I'm fantastically
lazy. I've got no patience. I'm cross nearly all the time'.” He emerged, he
says, understanding the “mechanism” of who he is. He had, for instance, won
many prizes, but never one for Boyfriend of the Year. Before his marriage,
girlfriends fired him when he gave the wrong answer to the question “What's
it to be? Your work or me?” When he saw Four Weddings and a Funeral, written
by his friend Richard Curtis, he looked at Hugh Grant's character and saw
himself.
“I used to say to people, ‘How do you know when you're in love? How do you
know when you want to get married?' And they all said, ‘You'll know. You'll
know'. And it happened to me. You suddenly think, ‘If I don't marry this
person I'll be making the biggest mistake I ever made'.”
One lucky ex who got away was Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones's Diary,
whose first novel Cause Celeb featured a driven, boozy, egotistical TV
producer. “I rang her up to say that it was fabulous. It was a lot to do
with us because there are lots of anecdotes that happened to us.”
Like falling asleep during sex? “All sorts of things, but what did hurt me was
when Douglas [Adams] decided the main character was about me and faxed the
manuscript to friends. So I spoke to Helly about it and she said, ‘There's
only one person in the book that's taken directly from life and that's
Douglas'.”
The one who demands an upgrade on the Live Aid flight? “Yeah, that's Douglas.”
Yet one of the objections to Lloyd's pretensions for QI is that it promotes
perfection in our heads rather than in our relationships, which is where
fulfilment lies for most of us. What if family does make you happy? “You
look at other people and you think, ‘She's very pretty. He seems to be doing
rather well'. It's all bollocks, you know, everybody's got trouble,
everybody.”
My next suggestion is that engagement in a wider cause than intellectual
selfimprovement might be just as desirable. Richard Curtis, so involved in
Comic Relief and Live8, has, I say, emerged from the comedy scene respected
as a serious person. “Has he? Do you think he's serious?” He looks
embarrassed at his outburst. “Yes, you're right, he's serious. But I don't
know. I think the only journey really, in my opinion, is yourself, the
internal journey.
“I mean, the answers as to why we are here are multifarious. I know. But I am
not going to tell you.”
I tell him I start to worry when he says things like this. Can he assure me he
does not believe in anything weird? “Depends what you mean by weird.”
Supernatural? “There is no such thing as supernatural. Everything is what it
is.”
Outside, in his garden, we hit surer ground: Lloyd's contempt for contemporary
TV. He takes apart Wife Swap, Big Brother, Dragons' Den and Headcases, and
the recent attempt by ITV to resurrect Spitting Image. “Why don't people
watch television? Because it is s**t basically,” he explains, contrasting
its current offerings to those provided by Bill Cotton, Cliff Michelmore,
David Attenborough and Eric Morecambe. What the BBC needs now is a new
Morecambe and Wise Show. He could even come up with it. “But they are not
going to ask me because they think people of 56 who are white and middle
class have no chance of appealing to ordinary people.” He has decided, and
he may not be joking, that he will not work for television again unless as
BBC Director-General.
For a successful man Lloyd has had failure enough in the past couple of
decades. Apart from the closure of the QI Club, which, he says, came close
to going bust, his bid for a comedy radio franchise, Radio Barking, failed
and his comedy website, Comedy Box, has been sold. A TV series of Bill
Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything failed to win UK funding. It
has taken, assuming it happens in January, five years for QI to win
promotion to BBC One.
It says something that Lloyd, once deemed to have the Midas touch for comedy,
can say that he has never been happier.
QI The C Series is out on DVD at £19.99
A documentary that aired every last detail of a pettily divided ruling family
