JOHN LLOYD'S WHIM OF IRON

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PAST GALLERIES

Charles Nevin meets the man behind some of the best television shows of the past 30 years, from “Blackadder” to “QI”, as he reinvents himself as a novelist ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, November/December 2011

South Oxfordshire is splendidly at peace this fine morning. The village church stands as it has for eight centuries, the cows are only marginally more mobile, and some light mowing is muttering away in the background. But the tranquillity of the English countryside has a long tradition of provoking bracing thought from sensitive vicars and eccentric squires; and, although his is a more contemporary calling, John Lloyd is cut from that cloth.

The name might not be familiar, but the output will be. Lloyd is Britain’s foremost provider of intelligent popular broadcast entertainment. “The News Quiz” on radio, “Not the Nine O’Clock News”, “Spitting Image”, “Blackadder”, “QI” on television: each in its own way novel, each, in the broadcasting way, daring, and very funny. You will know, too, the names Lloyd has made and abetted along the way: Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Richard Curtis, Griff Rhys Jones, Pamela Stephenson, Ben Elton, Douglas Adams. As a producer, Lloyd has been headmaster, nurse, analyst, butler, conductor, interpreter, flatterer, complement and chivvier of such talents, many of whom fit that common complaint concerning the talented: “difficult”. So you might reasonably expect to meet, up at the manor’s old farm house, a master of emollience and small talk, happy to beguile away the time in his anecdotage on a country morning. But Lloyd is not like that: more vicar than squire, intense, in thrall to ideas, the bigger the better, impatient with the complacent.

Lloyd has turned 60 this year, and is pleased to have some spare time, he says, sitting in his garden, because he is about to write a novel: “I’ve been sitting on it for about 20 years. Actually, it’s a trilogy, well maybe five books, I don’t know. It’s a big subject: everything.” Indeed.

“John is one of the most intelligent, intense people I’ve ever known,” says John Mitchinson, a publisher living serendipitously in the same village, who has been in on “QI” from the start. “Not exactly an easy person, but incredibly stimulating.”

Stephen Fry sends a message putting it his own way: “Impossible, improbable, impish, impious and unimpeachably peachy...John Lloyd stands alone.”

“QI” itself is an equally rare, possibly very odd, thing: a friendly parlour-panel game purveying quantum mechanics, philosophy, anthropology and “everything” under the cloak of comedy. It’s so detached from the instant simplicities of our twittering times that even the title is an understatement: as well as being a reversal of IQ, it stands for Quite Interesting.

“QI” is the broadcast expression of Lloyd’s manically insatiable curiosity, another unfashionable quality in a world where sophistication often involves ennui. “ ‘QI’ is a kind of search for meaning, for what the heck is going on,” says Lloyd. “The universe is the most extraordinary thing...even if you just look round this garden and think about the profusion of plants. There are a ridiculous number of plants and every one has got a story. Just in sight of what we can see could be the subject of a lifetime’s learning. It’s terrifying and marvellous at the same time. ‘QI’ is a successful television programme and people like it, but I don’t understand why it hasn’t become a kind of world obsession, like it is with me. We have a load of little mantras at ‘QI’, one of which is ‘Man is born curious but everywhere is bored stiff.’ ”

He is not a fan of the average dinner party. “There’s all this what I call ‘moasting’, a combination of moaning and boasting, which is what middle-class people do at dinner parties: they complain about the mortgage and the school fees and the trains and the traffic and the government, and then they show off about their holiday in Bali and their new car. It’s an absurdly small canvas given that the human brain is the most complex object in the universe, more complicated than a planet.

“Seeing the universe and the world and being alive as odd and wondering about it is something all children do all the time and almost no adults do, locked inside their own personalities worrying about what might happen and regretting what’s just happened. And yet inside the back of your head is this massive space, full of thoughts and dreams and fantasies and adventures and tons and tons of information. Look at the skeleton of a gorilla: it’s almost indistinguishable from that of a person, and yet we have this mysterious thing, the human brain, with which there’s no comparison. But we do have these three animal drives: food, sex and shelter. When we were pitching ‘QI’, we pointed out that the television was packed with cookery and property programmes, and the internet was awash with sex. But there’s a fourth drive. Curiosity. That’s what makes us different from bats, porcupines and squirrels. They’re curious, but only in ways that affect their survival, looking for nuts or following up interesting smells. As far as we know, only people look up at the sky and think, ‘what are all those sparkly things?’. If you don’t feed that curiosity, people will die inside...

“We’ve got aeroplanes and iPhones and we can make intelligent cruise missiles and so forth, but the one thing that hasn’t altered in 150,000 years is human nature. Not a jot. You can read the same stuff, with different uniforms and modes of transport, in Homer and Plato that we’re still going on about: the things that keep us from becoming supermen—the jealousy and the anger, the things that trap us in the mundane.”

This is how it goes on, at pace. Lloyd, being Lloyd, has an insight into the problem of our high promise and consistent failure to deliver it: “I have this theory that if Jung had been born when Newton was born [1643], and Newton had been born when Jung was born [1875], we’d have a much better society, we’d be better at understanding ourselves and our motivations for things. We’d have had 400 years of psychiatry and psychology and only 100 years of technology, so we’d all be these sorted, centred, easy-going, emotionally intelligent people who’d still be wandering around with horses and carts.’’

Which is a fine thought, in an Oxfordshire garden on a sunny morning. Other thoughts and facts come at will and random. A potato has two more chromosomes than a person and the same number as a gorilla. Why do all plants start off green? The number of people in the history of the world supposed to have achieved the enlightenment prescribed in Eastern philosophy is 14. And isn’t it remarkable that the big management consultants have higher profit margins than the companies they are advising?

Thus the guiding philosophy of “QI”: that everything is interesting if examined in the right way. Even dinner parties? “Yes, once you get away from repeating the same old stuff. It’s not that difficult, finding out something interesting. You’ve just got to use your curiosity, stimulate it.” And then he’s off again, talking about a recent holiday, in Scotland, fishing. “There was a copy of the Field in the house. It had a fantastically interesting piece on blackcurrants, which I’ve never considered before. Do you know that 90% of all the blackcurrants grown in Britain go into Ribena? Isn’t that an absolutely marvellous piece of information? And they contain four times more vitamin C than oranges.”