John Lloyd interview: ‘We need more comedy on TV – for the health of the country’

“Oh God, what if that happens?” John Lloyd is mulling over the possibility of embarrassing personal questions ahead of his show at Edinburgh’s Fringe festival: an unstructured hour in which audience members can ask him, well, anything. It had seemed to make sense, when he was offered the slot. Now? “It sounds – it is – completely mad, because it might be a complete car crash. You just don’t know.”

With Lloyd attached, that seems unlikely. The 70-year-old producer behind Blackadder, Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image, QI and much of the comedy to have graced Britain’s screens in the past five decades is second only to Judi Dench for the number of Baftas won. He also has an Emmy, a Grammy and a CBE for services to broadcasting.

Besides, Lloyd has done a test run which he says “worked really well”. Afterwards, “we all went to the bar, and had a really good time” – a backup plan, if required, for his fortnight at the Fringe.

These solo enterprises are far simpler than his days wrangling Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Rowan Atkinson et al. Making Blackadder involved “a lot of argy bargy”, he says, where the men would refuse to say their line if they thought another’s was funnier.

“There was quite a lot of grinding of teeth, I think, from the writers,” Lloyd recalls. “Actors who came in who weren’t part of the group were astonished that we’d spend 40 minutes arguing about whether a cabbage was funnier than a courgette. The result shows we must have been doing something right. But it was very unusual.”

The programme, which ran between 1983 and 1989, is still regularly up there in polls of Britain’s favourite sitcoms. How often does he get asked to revive it? “Usually, Tony Robinson gets asked – and he’s still hoping. I think the problem is that everybody’s relatively old now. Everybody’s so successful. And so famous. Why would they?”

Even during the original filming, managing the egos of the actors as they became increasingly well-known was a challenge. Richard Curtis was running Comic Relief, his co-writer Ben Elton was staging “massive” musicals, Lloyd was in charge of Spitting Image.

Getting back to that “collegiate way of working together, and not arguing about every line” was not easy. “We were the bosses of those things, and then to have to sit down and listen and disagree and compromise was quite hard.” A few ideas for a fifth series have tempted him, he says, in particular a plot that sees the characters reinvented as a Dad’s Army-esque patrol that is kidnapped by a submarine in the Second World War and forced to escape from Colditz. “They’d be the right sort of age for that,” says Lloyd. Years ago, he also got quite close to agreeing to the characters taking part in the Royal Tournament – with “galloping horses and tanks and, you know, people assembling cannons and things and abseiling”.

But “honestly, let sleeping dogs lie,” he says – not least because trying to outdo the show’s poignant finale, when Blackadder, Baldrick and co go over the top and charge towards German machine guns in the First World War, is virtually impossible. “You’re not going to get better than that.”

He is still friends with Atkinson, though doesn’t see him “nearly as much” since the actor left his wife, Sunetra Sastry, for comedian and actress Louise Ford in 2013. “We two families were very close, so it’s slightly muddied.”

Lloyd has been married to his wife, Sarah, for 33 years – the past 10 of which have been spent running QI together. We meet in the programme’s central London offices, where microphones propped up on dictionaries are following a recording of the team’s hugely successful trivia podcast, No Such Thing As a Fish.

Being surrounded by primarily millennial staff has been an education for Lloyd. He is grappling with the shifting mores of the modern world: at a recent university talk, he was told to avoid the term “ladies and gentlemen”, “because the student body sometimes gets upset”. He had “literally never heard that before,” he says. “The continual movement from one orthodoxy to a new one can catch you by surprise.”

He has also become very aware of privilege, and the perception that he has truckloads of it. The son of a naval officer, Lloyd had a peripatetic childhood and attended boarding school before reading law at Trinity College, Cambridge. “People say, ‘It’s easy for you, because you went to Cambridge.’ What about all the other people who went to Cambridge, and also came from much richer families than me, who haven’t done what I’ve done? It isn’t necessarily the case that because you’re male and white, you’re going to do terribly well in life.”

The world is ultimately changing for the better, Lloyd thinks. But he is clearly concerned about being “cancelled” and our conversation repeatedly drifts back – unprompted – to what he calls “the wokey thing” and his fear of saying something incriminating enough to send five decades of work up in flames.

When a 1976 episode of The News Huddlines was re-broadcast recently – prefaced with a content warning about the material – he had to go on BBC Feedback afterwards to defend the language used. “The landscape you have to navigate is so complicated,” he says. “I used to pride myself back in the 80s that, because I’d done so much satire in the past, I knew where the line was. Now, I don’t think I would.”

He is relieved he wasn’t asked to be involved in the 2020 reboot of Spitting Image, he adds, which has been hamstrung by its fear of causing offence. “Maybe that’s the management at [TV subscription service] Britbox, I don’t know. But there are certain things we would definitely have said on Spitting Image in the old days, but you probably couldn’t say now unless you wanted to be eaten alive.”

The Government has also played a part in satire’s dissolution. Lloyd believes Britain to be as divided as it was during Spitting Image’s original run, but that Margaret Thatcher “had an amazing strategy, and she had a lot of big ideas, and was determined to carry them out”. Boris Johnson’s administration being so “all over the place” has left little for writers to push against.

He hasn’t really watched anything on the small screen in “decades”, though he has seen an episode of Love Island, which he found “compelling”. He wants more topical programming and laments that the BBC produces half of the comedy it once did. “There’s not enough comedy on television for the health of the country,” he says.

In lieu of binge-watching he researches trivia, which he feeds into QI, his Radio 4 show The Museum of Curiosity and his work at Southampton Solent University, where he gives talks in his capacity as “Professor of Ignorance”.

Spending his time on the less serious parts of life has been non-negotiable since a depressive episode 30 years ago. Lloyd, then in his early 40s, “really defined myself by my work. That’s what drove me”. He had hit a wall with comedy, so directed adverts. But, after being fired in 1993 (something that has happened “really a lot”, including from a directing gig he’d been “handed on a plate” for Naked Gun 33 ⅓), he felt lost. “I didn’t know who I was,” he says. “I was very angry and resentful and miserable.”

He had everything really, he sees now, “except peace of mind”, and thinks this is true of many men for whom “the doors shut”.

“Whether that’s the way we’re trained, or whether it’s genetic, I don’t know, but most men are stuck inside going, ‘My life is s—. And I can’t tell anyone.’”

Being a “crazed perfectionist” doesn’t help, he adds. “It’s a curse, really. I’ve only got two modes: one is brilliant, and one is not good enough.” Lloyd sought to fix the problem by acquiring more knowledge: setting himself the task of deducing “what the meaning of life was, because I couldn’t see there was one.”

He has since found it – and a lighter way of living. But he won’t share, “because you have to find it out for yourself.” He adds: “That is the journey we’re all here to do: who you are, and what you should do about it.” A smile creeps in. “You can see how hideously dull this hour’s going to be.”

‘John Lloyd: Do You Know Who I Am?’ is at the New Town Theatre, Edinburgh, Aug 5-15. Tickets: edfringe.com. 
‘222 QI Answers to Your Quite Ingenious Questions’  by the QI Elves will be published by Faber in November