John Lloyd

The peerless QI, Blackadder and Spitting Image producer shares the secret of funny stuff, learning stuff and The Meaning of Liff. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:15

What better way to glide towards the end of the first series of Just Between Us than to welcome the person responsible for making me laugh throughout my life. Not constantly, John, I should say, but at regular moments throughout my life, John Lloyd. Hello, Jeremy. I had this habit of sort of trotting through a CV of sorts. So I'm going to do that, but interrupt me absolutely whenever you like. Back in the midst of time, you studied law at Cambridge. Yes. You became close friends with Douglas Adams, with whom you collaborated on Hitchhiker's Guide, and then briefly fell out. You found yourself in radio. You were a ridiculously young producer of something called The News Quiz. And quote unquote, which I still think has got the best theme music of any radio for sure. Don't particularly like the show anymore, but I love the theme music. And then you moved into Telly and you started producing the programme of its time. I stress that, that it was before water coolers were invented, not the nine o'clock news was the must be. Oh, thanks for remembering that. I don't know where I was the other day. Somebody used the word livid. Yeah. That was all it took. Do you want to explain?

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Yes. Um that is from a sketch called Gerald the Gorilla. Yes. Where Mel, playing an anthropological professor, had captured a gorilla called Gerald in the jungle. And he's sitting there in the television studio with Roan as a gorilla in a costume. And he said, When I caught Gerald in 1977, gorilla says 1978. So they've got this peculiar relationship, which is obviously slightly there's something slightly not quite right about it, isn't there? As if they he's a bit jealous. And um when I caught Gerald in 1978, he was completely wild. And the gorilla says wild, I was completely livid. I was absolutely livid. It's a very, very good nine.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

And that word, that it's all it takes to remind me of the whole thing. So that was, as you said, Mel Smith, Ron Atkinson, Griffiths Jones, Pamela Stevenson, and an extraordinary array of writers. Don't know what's become of them since.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Well, a lot of them have done awfully well.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

Clive Anderson, David Rennick.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Well, Richard Curtis, isn't it? Richard Curtis, yeah, Richard Curtis. He made something of his life. He did he disappeared, didn't he?

SPEAKER_01 2:54

So after this is not necessarily following well, I'm certainly not um trying to fill in all the gaps. But the next big monumental thing after not the nine o'clock news. Well, I suppose Spitting Image. Have I got that in the right order or have I mixed up?

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Black Adder slightly predates um Spitting Image, yes, by a year.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

So you kind of sort of modestly chuck in the name Black Adder, which is a series that I mean it really, really, really had such a profound influence. And a little bit like Faulty Towers in the sense that there were only two series of Fawty Towers, and I think only four series of Black Adder. So the impact it had went way beyond the number of series. Were they well, let's make it about you. Were you upset when the decision was made not to do any more and to kill everybody off?

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Well, it wasn't really anybody's decision. It's just that we'd, you know, w it's very hard to top that last scene when they go over the top. Absolutely. And, you know, people had the ideas over the years that maybe we would. But then one of the things about Black Adder was because we recorded them every two years, the series, in between, everybody would have got twice as famous as they were beforehand. So by the fourth series, you know, you've got the guy who started Comic Relief and one of the most famous film directors in the world, and you know, Ben Elton with all his novels and his musicals, and you know, Stephen Fry, national treasure, Hugh Laurie went on to become the best paid television actor in the world. The amount of talent in that room, which is part of the reason it's so good, is that everybody, you know, chipped in bits. And not to take away from Richard and Ben for their brilliant scripts, but it's the little curlicues, you know, the little extra bits that that give it that zing, you know, makes it terribly dense as a piece of work. You can go back to it again and again. Of course, the other thing, Jeremy, obviously is unlike, say, you know, Python or Faulty Towers, obviously the probably the greatest sitcom ever. But it's strangely dated now, isn't it? You know what I mean? The trousers, the haircuts. You think this is kind of slightly alien. Whereas Black Adam never goes out of date. It just feels timeless.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

That's true. I mean, it sounds a bit like a sort of salesman talking there. I mean, it clearly is true. Will they be watching it a hundred years? Maybe they will. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Why not? I think there's lots of comedy. You know, I mean, Dad's Army is another very good example of something that is obviously set in ASPIC in time, but it's as funny today, I think, as it as it ever was. And that will never go out of date because it's, you know, historical.

unknown 5:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

I mean, by contrast, you you mentioned splitting image. Splitting image in the 13, 14 years or whatever it ran, never won a BAFTA for best comedy. Because what would happen was that what was on the week, people got all the references and they go, oh, that's brilliant. It's so topical. A year later, when the avatar well, you know, when the when the awards committee came to view it, half of it didn't make any sense. I didn't even know what that's about.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

But bits of that have also lasted, stood the test of time. Maybe because they shaped what we thought of somebody forevermore, the most obvious perhaps being John Major, you know, the grey John Major and the peas.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Yes, and going back beyond that, Norman Tebitt as the in the biker jacket. Yep. Mrs. Thatcher in her pinstripe suit smoking a cigar, you know.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Do you believe that secretly they all loved it? I mean, that's the received wisdom is that, you know, they would desperately hope they were gonna star in the next week's episode.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

And yes, and people used to to ring up and say, Can I have a puppet made of me? Noel Edmonds. No, I'm sorry, Noel. You're you're just not famous enough, mate.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

You've just reminded me of a time when Noel Evans tried to buy me out, but I'm not gonna tell that story. I said no and he left the lunch. It was quite bizarre. So I have told the story, dear listener. So the point is Spitting Image was the show, again, like not the nine o'clock news, which defined or voiced what those of us who were engaged felt about those who ruled over us. Which is a big job. You know, it's a lot of responsibility. Did you take it seriously in that sense, or were you just conscious of how lucky you were to be having fun doing something that was talked about?

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Well, I'm BBC trained, you know, as you know, I was very young. I was 22 when a guy walked into the writer's room and said, Would you like to be a producer? And I said, Really not. What do they do? But here I am 50 odd years later. And if they catch you young, a bit like Miss Jean Brodie, especially the old-fashioned BBC, those values, that sense of integrity and that things matter and you must tell the truth all the time infests all of us. And I would spend a lot of time in the early years of spitting image saying, I don't think we should do a puppet of that person. I don't think they've done anything to deserve it. Do you know what I mean? We shouldn't just do people because we can do a caricature. We need to have a an attitude as to why because we can't make everyone in the world. Let's focus on the people we have something to say about.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

Who did you decide not to make a puppet of because they weren't that bad?

SPEAKER_00 8:23

I think there would have been a a lot of people early on that uh you know, we'd all have a veto on everything. It's very democratic. I think the first time they did Cleese, long after my time, I thought, What why have you done him? You know, it's like just because you can do a funny impression. That didn't seem right to me. Who were the voices then at the height?

SPEAKER_01 8:46

My old university friend, Harry Enfield, I know, was part of the gang and his lot was, and blah blah blah.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Yeah, Harry was particularly amusing because I had a call from Alan Yentob, the late lamented, who's then producing Arena, or might have been head of BBC Arts, I can't remember. And he said, I've just had this extraordinary guy in my office who's produced a script about somebody called Norbert Smith that he wants us to make arena about, but he's a completely made-up person. I think this guy's demented, but brilliantly talented. Would you meet him? So we went to the pub, and indeed I thought, yeah, immediately became best friends with Harry, as I still am, I hope. And he was just terribly funny, but the Norbert Smith, he could do two voices. It's the Chumley Warner, you know, who's the 1950s thing rather like that, you know? And 1950s working class blow. So I said, You I've just started this puppet show, you've got to come on and do some of the voices. But Harry could only do these two voices. Those are the only ones he'd done. So to convince the rest of the team I wasn't sleeping with him, I had to always have a pathe news sketch with Harry going, Did I done the all that stuff? Or or a character, you know, is doing a bit of a geyser thing. And about week three, he suddenly came up with this voice, and we thought, Who's that? Oh my god, it's David Steele. To the life. Nobody'd ever impersonated him before. And, you know, then he was off. Then he he could do everybody. He just discovered this gift, rather like Pamela Stevenson on Not the Nine O'Clock News. Yes. I hired her because she was absolutely luminously gorgeous and great singer, and you know, we had obviously we had to have a woman because it was modern, unlike, you know, we were trying to be a bit progressive. You know, and she was a straight drama actress, if she'd been in Minder and things like that. So we thought, well, we don't really know what to do with her because she's gorgeous, but you know, she's not a comedian, she's not a funny writer and things, so we gave her the newsreader parts. And one day you're thinking, why has she put on that ridiculous voice? What a ridiculous voice. Mr. Mugabe and his guerillas. You think, what is she doing? And you shut your eyes and think, my God, it's Angela Ripon to the life. And then she went on to do, you know, all the other newsreaders and suddenly discovered she could do that as well. It's amazing what you discover if you're sort of open-minded to people.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

You know, I I very nearly ruined Harry Enfield's career. I mean, he recovered from it, but he and I went to York together, and after we left, I'd got a job as a booker. And I had a call. I wasn't, you know, I was very green, didn't know what to expect. I had a call from I assume it was the promoter of a forthcoming Stranglers tour. Wanted one of these new alternative comedy acts to go on the road with the Stranglers and support them. And I persuaded Harry and Brian, his then partner, and so they went out and they did it. And I went to one show in London at Dominion, and I remember sitting there in the stools. I think the only person actually sitting in the stools. And they died. They died a horrible, painful, humiliating death, apart from one laugh where they both turned around and on the back of their jackets they'd had stitched fuck off back, you wankers. And I went to see them backstage and I said, I'm very sorry, what can I say? And I remember Harry turning to me and saying, What do you mean? Tonight's our best show yet. And that was the end of my friendship with Harry Enville. Oh. So I'm in awe of the ability of people like Yentop in those days, and you to recognize talent and give it a break, which might not be quite so easy these days.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

But the thing is it's something that I find one of the things of get getting a job, a responsible job at 22 is you've only got one compass, which is what do I think? And that's what I was told by David Hatch, who recruited me. I said, Well, what do the producers do? And he says, Well, you make stuff you like. I said, But I'm a kid, why would anyone care? I said, Well, you get an audience of one, you'll be sure of that, won't you? And as a writer, I was used to sometimes be asked to sit, you know, behind the producer in the gallery. And if one of my sketches came on, I was howling. He said, Why are you laughing at your own jokes? I said, Well, because they're funny. And it's that simple thing is you get to a venerable age and people say, Oh, you know, you're a company this or a company that. And I think, well, it's not me. I'm not the I'm just the guy who sees people and says they're good. That's so I'm not half the actor that Griffh Reese Jones is, or, you know, and certainly not anything like as good a writer as Ben Elton and Richard Curtis. But I know what I like, and I know when it's not good enough. That's what I do. And I sit on their shoulders saying, I know you're better than this. What you did last week, you can be that good this week, too. So it's a peculiar thing, especially nowadays. I know what I like, and I'm implacable about that. And no amount of polling, you know, and surveys is going to change my mind. I don't care what it is, the ties I wear or the food I like, I don't care what other people think in the nicest way. That's very unusual now. If you think of what's happened to politics, nobody does anything until they've got a poll saying, oh, that's what people want to hear. And the same with tell and the same with newspapers. Everybody's trying to work out first what other people like and then deliver it. Whereas the way we used to be trained was the best respect you can pay to other people is this is what I like. I hope you like it as well. The minute you start trying to guess what young people like or old people like or French people like, you're sunk, really.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

I'm going back to this idea of times changing. Maybe the pressure's much higher these days. Maybe there's something happening in the commissioning, maybe it's not such a closed shop anymore, whatever it is. The entry costs are higher. And people, commissioners and whatever, are not taking risks. So that presumably is why people find out whether or not there's going to be an audience before they dare do it. Because it's part of the pitch, or am I wrong?

SPEAKER_00 15:06

But it's odd, isn't it? You'd think you say the stakes are higher, but actually, you know, these big streamers, they're in massive debt. They're just punting for eventually there'll be a monopoly and there'll be only one way to get your streams, and then they'll be fine. That's what happened to Amazon, basically. There'll soon be only one shop in the world. Brilliant though it is. And when you think when I was working in telly in the 80s, there were I think 12 ITV companies. All of them were what Lord Thompson used to call a license to print money. They were all making shed loads of money, so everybody ITV was paid twice as much as people at the BBC. There's now one ITV company, and obviously Channel 4 is the public service version of it, and both of them are struggling. What's happened? You think of advertising, for example, I did 12 years as a commercials director, mostly in the 90s, and I would shoot commercials with a million dollar budget, just a one-minute commercial. Where's all that gone? What's happened to all the fantastic ads we used to repeat at the schoolgate and, you know, know off by heart? It's very odd that there are more billionaires by a factor of I don't know how many, but there are many more billionaires than there were 30 years, 40 years ago. But there seems to be less money for everybody else. It's it's odd, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 16:24

I wonder whether you can help me out on something. Actually, this is more, we haven't talked about QI yet. This is more of a QI type question, in a way. What's a billion? Because my contention is that in this country it's still a thousand million. In America, so far as I know, it's always been a hundred million.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Well, the old definition of a billion, I think, in British English was a a million million.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

It was a billion.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

And the American American is a thousand million.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

So less.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Right. But what I'm trying to say in a ham-fisted kind of way is that there are more billions in our lives these days. There used to be a very rare thing to hear a news report and hear the B word. It's used a lot now. And I'm not completely convinced that it always means the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Well, again, uh here's an interesting QI thing. Ninety percent of all the trade in the world consists of financial instruments. Unreal stuff with numbers on a page that doesn't actually exist. That's mainly what the world economy is. So when you say Elon Musk is worth 380 billion, to actually actualize that into cash is more or less impossible. It depends on the share price at any given moment, and it can go up and down. You know, Elon Musk will be worth 70 billion yes in a tick, and suddenly 100 billion more. So it's not real money. It's not necessarily you can't you can't convert it suddenly.

SPEAKER_01 17:55

I get that. I'd just like there to be a definition that we all accepted. And I'm not convinced there is, but it's the cross that I bear from a distance, you understand?

SPEAKER_00 18:06

You're just bitter, you're not a billionaire, Jeremy. Let's come clean with this. This is what you're skirting round, this difficult subject. As we sit in this tiny pot of the shed with mould growing on the ceiling. He made up the mould.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

You're right. I'm not sure I ever would have wanted to be a billionaire. I think it takes a very special or unusual or mad, ultra-competitive person to want to be a Well, it's money is a drug like drugs are, or alcohol, or fame.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

You know, they are things where the more you have, the more you crave. That's the thing. There's no end to it. You think they've got enough money now. No, that's not the point. It's a scorekeeping. You've got to be doing better than the next person. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

And there's also an element of fear, though. I remember talking to one well-known Radio 4 presenter about fees, who found he was doing more work than he could handle outside the BBC. So sought advice, I think, from Arthur Anderson back in the day, before it became whatever it became. Accenture. And Anderson consulting, I think, in the middle. And they said it's very simple. What you need to do is double your fees. And then the work goes down and you're better off for it. And so he did that and quite quickly found that he was getting as much work as before and that it hadn't worked. But here's the thing, going back to what you were saying. He had a fear, a genuine fear, when he went to sleep, of ending up in the workhouse. Yes. So he was worth a colossal amount of money, especially for a BBC person. But was genuinely afraid that it would all go. So money does do funny things here, doesn't it? I sort of stopped halfway through the CV. I don't know if you noticed that. We started talking about QI. But I want to spend a bit more time on it because it is now and has long been an institution, but it's also an empire. I mean, a huge string of books, DVDs as they were all over the place. I don't think the s the show sold or is selling much around the world. Perhaps you can tell us about that. But it is a phenomenon. And it's a phenomenon built on Well, I you know, I looked to the website and I just thought I shall copy and paste this. Everything, even that which appears to be boring, is quite interesting if looked at in the right way. So this entire empire, huge commercial and creative success, is built on helping us to learn stuff.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Well, it's an insight which I had. It's over 30 years since I took credit for any ideas, because I think somebody said ideas are like fish floating by. And what so-called creative people do is they notice the fish. That's all. That's all it is. And they remember them. They dwell on them and they wonder what to do about it. And I had this epiphany in 1999. I was sitting down, about to start writing the novel that I've been trying to write for however many years it is. That one. And this thing happened. The top of my head opened, as I've said, like a boiled egg, and into it poured this idea. QI, it stands for quite interesting. It's the same as qi, the Chinese life force, or qi in Japanese. And there is only one mantra, which is everything in the universe without exception is interesting if looked at closely enough for long enough or from the right angle. And that is the basis of everything that QI tries to do. And I remember thinking, I'm like the guy who discovered aluminium, okay, which was discovered in a well in in France by some cows in Libaux, as hence Bauxite, in the 1830s. You couldn't run a modern society without aluminium. All aircraft are made from it, all the saucepans is the third most common element in the Earth's crust after oxygen. And whatever the other one is, iron maybe. And yet nobody even knew this chemical element existed until the 1830s. I felt like that guy who goes, interestingness. When you think about it, if a thing isn't interesting, a conversation, a movie, a book, you know, an evening with friends, it doesn't start. It's a very hidden thing. People think more important things as, for example, things have to be relevant, or it has to be sexy, or it has to be contemporary, or it has to be politically correct. All these values, you see them, they infest everything, don't they? But interesting, that's the starting block. If you don't have that, you don't pay attention. And so I know QI's been here 23 years now, so it seems quite a long time. But it's not what I thought it would be. I thought we'd have a hundred schools around the country around the world now, where every lesson begins with something interesting and funny. And if you could do that for every child in every country, in every school in the world, the human race would have an IQ leap of about a hundred points overnight.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

That's the point I was trying to make is this link between entertainment and education.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Well, here's a good quote for you, Marshall McLuhan. Anyone who makes a distinction between education and entertainment does not know the first thing about either. Which is that is all you need to know. All great entertainment, all the good stuff is also educational. And all the good educational stuff is also entertaining. There's just no doubt about that. The best stuff.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

So why aren't you redesigning and running the country's education system?

SPEAKER_00 23:41

I thought you were going to say a knight of the realm, weren't you? And I guess suddenly I thought you were going to make me an offer there, Jeremy. Well, I've been trying. I had a you know talk to somebody about this exactly last night. Is like this is what the UK is one of the if you just say the measure of Nobel Prizes, we punch way above our weight in terms of creative science. My own college, Trinity Cambridge, has won more Nobel Prizes than the whole of France, and I think Italy together, one college. This is what we need to focus on, is not learning lists of, you know, battles or chemical elements, but thinking creatively and thinking openly. We need to not do a sort of one size fits all imperial educational model, which is essentially like this. The British educational system is designed to fit an empire and needs to find two kinds of people. Those people who are able to process very boring documentation accurately. So those are all the bankers, the lawyers, and the colonial administrators. That's one that they all get the A's. And the other lot, the people who don't do that very well, but are very good with their hands, you know, people who dig ditches and mend lorries and all that kind of stuff. And all the people in between, who actually all the people who make a difference, these are the revolutionaries, the entrepreneurs, the guitarists, the you know, the screenplay writers, these people are considered irrelevant at school. These are hobbies. These are things that they're not part of the curriculum. No school, as far as I know, teaches rhetoric. What this is insane. All the all the ancient Greeks and all the way all the way through the Middle Ages, every child who's in a school was taught rhetoric, everybody should be able to stand up in front of between 20 and 10,000 people and make an articulate speech. But that's like hobby stuff. That's oh, you want to be an actor? Okay, fine. As if actors weren't important. So after finance, I think the second greatest export of the UK is copyrights. In other words, all the novels, all the films, all the music. Did you know, for example, the UK is about 1% of the world's population, and we make 9% of the world's music. I mean, you know, we're nearly ten times above our own weight. This is the kind of thing. And because there's a sort of element in the UK that thinks we're still the greatest empire the world's ever seen, therefore we need to be the world's policeman and fight all the wars and things, we really should be more like the Dutch, specializing in things we're very good at. In the case of Dutch, they're brilliant at growing fruit and vegetables, among other things. You know, the Irish are very good at pharmaceuticals, and Britain should be good at ideas. That's what we should be doing. But you know, if you've ever seen Ken Robinson's talk on TED about why don't we teach creativity in education, it doesn't make any sense at all. And we're we're just banging our head against a brick wall if we we just want to teach people who can remember information.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

So what are you doing about it, John?

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Well, I'm sitting here talking to you, Jeremy, wasting my life faffing on about things that are ideas. And obviously the thing is anybody can have an idea is doing something about it. But in the meantime, you know, the people who work for the company, they're all like that. I would say generally true, I'm the oldest person in the company. I think virtually everyone in the company would say their actual education began when they joined QI. Because you think in a completely different way. You're able to process information much more quickly and you're able to remember it much better.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

I think what I'm trying to say is this has to be distilled in some way and spread in some way. Maybe in a small way to begin with, maybe not. And you know, because we were talking about it the other day as well, about education. In my own provincial way these days, I want to open a miniature school for grown-ups, which will stretch people's minds and fill gaps and things like that. And I think from very different starting points, and we ain't gonna be the only ones, there are gonna be hundreds and hundreds of people, many of whom have enlightened ideas and a bit of energy and a bit of resource. We need to do something about it, I think. I'm not suggesting you are or I are whinging, but it's gotta be something that isn't just sort of doesn't get filed under should have.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

Just apart from anything else that as a way of living, I'm addicted to QI information, and it isn't good for me that I'm addicted to it, because I have to do it every day. The next series that we're researching at the moment is about things beginning with X. So that's quite hard. Fourteen shows about things. Can you think of how many things can you think of? Let me test you, how many? Come on. Uh no, I I X-ray xylophones. That's that's it. That's the two everyone says. Do you know what a xylophage is? Not yet. It's a wood-eating animal. Right, okay. And I've been researching something called shipworms. Do you know what those are? They were the bane of every wooden navy from the ancient Greeks onwards. Shipworms ate and sank all four of Christopher Columbus's ships in Jamaica. They've spent hundreds of years trying to fix them. And now there's a guy at Cambridge who thinks we should eat these things, because they're not worms, they're clams. And so having shells around their body, the shells have evolved to be incredibly amazing wood boring jaws. And they call them naked clams, and they're basically delicious clam. They grow twenty times as fast as mussels, which are blue mussels, the commercially grown crop, and you can actually save world poverty with these things. And I'd never heard of a xylophage last year. This is the thing, if you are engaged and interested in everything, there's really n nothing you can't do, or nothing you can't approach. This is your fault, though, if I remember correctly.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

I think you told me one day that your genius, if that's what it is, is to decide to name each series after a letter of the alphabet to guarantee that you had 26 commissions.

SPEAKER_00 29:38

Um that's quite untrue, if I said that. I'm mistaken. That was my idea, the alphabetical thing, but when we made the pilot, it wasn't alphabetical, it was just generally interesting stuff. And general ignorance was the first round, not the last one. And it was things you didn't know about generals, you know. Right. That was the gag. And we took it to well, we had a deal to do a book, and we took the pilot along, and we said, because we had to start somewhere with the researchers, we've just asked one of them. Molly took the Oxford English Dictionary and started on A, and Sophie took the Encyclopedia Britannica and started on A, and they had to gut it. And so at the end of that, we had 800 pages of interesting things about things beginning with A. And we said, we've done the pilot, it's going to be a big hit this series. And the book we'd like to call the Book of A, which is a kind of rather Egyptian sort of thing. Oh, it's interesting, what's that? And it was a dictionary of things beginning with A. And the editor said, Well, yeah, but that's nothing to do with the programme. It's got to be, you know, obviously, if you if a television spin-off, it's got the program has got to be in some way to do with the book. And the program's random. I said, but this is random, it's just beginning with A. They're still random. They just all begin with A. So he said, No, no, it's not going to work for us. And I said, Well, how would it be if we did a whole series of things beginning with A? And as I'm saying this, I think I've just shot myself in the head here. This is insane. And he said, Oh, well, though, yes. I mean, obviously, if you could do that. And so we did. The first series was all about things beginning with A, just as a Yaboo sucks to the publisher, and now we're stuck with it. Are you going to start all over again? Well, start on the numbers, Jeremy, as you can imagine. Of course, of course, of course. That goes to the case. I'm going to be here for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

We've been through quite a lot of the CV and we've missed something out. Well, it was deliberate on my part, actually, because I wanted to make sure we sort of worked towards this moment. Way back when, as in fact you explain in the preface, you and Douglas Adams spotted a void that had been ignored by stuffy dictionaries until that point. And you came up with the idea of the meaning of Lif, subtitled The Original Dictionary of Things There Should Be Words For. And hugely excitingly, the 42nd Anniversary Edition has just landed. And I mean just landed. I appreciate that dear listeners will be uh hearing this who knows when in the future. But for the eager ones who catch it when it drops, notice that? For the eager ones, the timing could not be better for Christmas. And the motto about dogs not being just for Christmas applies exquisitely to this. Because it is I mean, I'm almost doing it an injustice by calling it a stocking filler. It's much, much more than that. I have several editions. I am a devotee of it. So I'm probably not the best one to explain what it is for those who aren't yet familiar with it.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

Well, it's a very simple idea. It's a dictionary of things there should be words for but aren't. And all the actual words themselves are recycled place names. And it's based on a game that Douglas is an old English teacher, used to play in free periods at school. What's a kettering? What do you think epping might mean? What's shoeberiness? Shuberin, that's an odd word, isn't it? And so you get common experiences everyone knows but often has never actually named, and you put them together with a place name. And I was reading an academic journal only a couple of days ago about shoeberiness and shoberiness in Essex. Shuberiness is the vague, uncomfortable feeling you get from sitting on a seat still warm from somebody else's bottom. We've all had it, but if you don't have the word, this is a concept called hypocognition. You're more likely to get shoberiness now, now that you know the word. In fact, every time you sit on a tube, you'll get oh no. And so it's got into academia, and there's a few words that have definitely stood the one I use all the time is lamblash. Lamblash is the folder on a hotel dressing table full of astoundingly dull information. Or a sheppey, for example. A sheppy is a measure of distance equal to about a seventh, seven-eighths of a mile. And a sheppy is the nearest distance at which uh sheep remain picturesque. Because you know, sheep over there, they're gorgeous. Ups oh no, I don't want to even look at that bottom. So there's uh particularly words ending in are very useful. Kettering, the marks left on your bottom and thighs after sitting sunbathing on a wickerwork chair. Woking, standing in the kitchen, wondering what you came in here for. Epping, of course, I mentioned earlier. Epping is the fruitless movements of forefinger and eyebrows when failing to attract the attention of a waiter or barman. We've all done epping, haven't we? The thing is you will find this book gets into your bloodstream, and then you will use these words in your daily life. I picked up the new edition a few days ago.

SPEAKER_01 34:53

And I started flicking through it, and I admit I've written this down. And I discovered that I'm an obligo, possibly a bligo. I struggle with chailing. I've got quite a lot of sympathy sometimes for clicksby politicians. I've spent my entire life making Folsters. And whenever I see a baby, I can't resist a Garvock like my father before me. Would you like to explain any of that?

SPEAKER_00 35:21

Oh no, that's too difficult. I've been through the whole book picking out the ones I like, but it's impossible. Remember, there are hundreds and hundreds of these things.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

The Garvok I particularly like. And that is, see, I won't be able to describe it as well.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

It is forty-two years ago as well, Jeremy. I wrote this book.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

I mean, I'm doing it won't come across. The Garvok is sticking a finger into your mouth against the side of your mouth. And trying to You see, I couldn't even do it. You did it one for the amusement and hysterical laughter of a baby.

SPEAKER_00 35:53

Aaron Ross Powell, see now you you'll start to it'll uh generate memory. So leeming is making silly faces at babies, that's one thing. And I don't know why I suddenly thought of Peoria, Illinois. Peoria is the fear of peeling too few potatoes, which I have I agonize about every Sunday lunch.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

Well, yes, coming up to Christmas, of course, people will be experiencing that up and down the case.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

And I don't know, you said the Clicksby politician, I can't remember that, but I can remember firebag. A firebag is a remark intended to cue applause at a Tory conference, isn't that? Oh, there's a firebag. So good.

SPEAKER_01 36:30

The Clicksby politicians are quite rude, quite peremptory, and quite vague. And the reason I sympathize with them is it very much depends who's asking the question. Right. But if it's one of those occasions as it often is, where they cannot afford to say something interesting because it will be misconstrued and used against them and used to form or argue with government policy, then they have to brush it off. And as I understand it, that's being Clicksby, and all I'm saying is I don't like it, but I sympathize with it. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

You said QI was an empire early. We used to call it the smallest media empire in the world. And we have done a lot of things, but the traction has not been as great as it might be. We used to have a QI club in Oxford, which was the most fun I've had in three years. We lost all our money, but we had the most fun, the amazing membership list. And one of them was an absolutely charming Japanese woman who'd many years before come to the UK and married a Brit, and she now spoke indistinguishably perfect English. But when she first arrived in Oxford, you know, 30 years before, couldn't have been 30 years ago, 10 years before, maybe, somebody had given her, as a Japanese who spoke only broken English, a copy of The Meaning of Live, and she thought it was a genuine dictionary of British English. So she goes around saying things like, I was caught in a grimbister the other day, and people go, A what? A grimbister? A large body of cars on a motorway, all traveling at exactly the speed limit because one of them is a police car. Don't you speak English? And they go, No what? Well, I was a I've had a nad just now. What's a nad? A nad is the distance, the slightly too long distance between your outstretched fingers and the ticket machine in a car park. That's a nad. It's 1.84 meters exactly. You know, she honestly thought these are all real words because they sound like real words. They've got proper definitions, and they're all real things.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Like everything else, sometimes it's hard to take if you find yourself on the reactionary side, but it only takes usage for a word to become commonly used. And this could happen with the meaning of live. I mean, you've proved to some extent it does already, it could happen more. I think I I mean this by the way, this is not a puff, this is not made up. I genuinely believe that every household should have a copy of the meaning of live.

SPEAKER_00 39:01

Thank you. That was a well-spent £10 on my part, Jeremy. Thank you. So you've got to let me. Have another one. But for example, that was a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 39:08

And if then but can I just say this? If anybody who knows me well enough to think of buying me a Christmas present thinks, oh, I'll buy him a copy of the Book of Live, please don't. Because I now have two.

SPEAKER_00 39:21

But it's the thing, it's it's a there's a universality in here. Douglas and I always said it was the best thing we'd ever done. There's something very pure about it, and it bespeaks some human ability which is hidden most of the time, which is perception, attention to detail. So, for example, you know when people blow their nose into their hanky and they look into it, what are they looking for? And what they're looking for is Massachusetts. There's tiny little particles of things. I don't know what they are, but they want to see if they're any Massachusetts. Well, you won't forget this. Naples, okay. Do you know what Naples are? No. They're the tiny depressions in a piece of Rivita. So when you next see a rivita, you won't be able to forget that. Kentucky, this is something I use all the time. Kentucky is fitting exactly and satisfyingly. So the last book that fits in the shelf perfectly, or the cardboard box that fits in the garage on the pile, fits real nice in Kentucky. Real nice in Kentucky. It's useful, isn't it? It's a public service.

SPEAKER_01 40:26

I'm going to be using it. I'm ashamed to say, John, I'm well, I am it's a bit like getting up to somebody and asking if they're autograph. Um since the book arrived a few days ago, I haven't been able to stop jotting down my own ideas. Oh, good. And I've come up with two. May I? Yes. One is some Keradigion. In Wales. In Wales. Which I decided is the word for a person usually male who gets sexually aroused by tractors.

SPEAKER_00 41:00

I think that was just definitely that that MP, wasn't there?

SPEAKER_01 41:05

Exactly. And and one more, then I'll shut up. And don't you know and this is just, you know, this is of its time, but will be forgotten tomorrow. Great Dixter. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

Oh, I don't want to know. Why? Well, it's something to do with the tractor and the exhaust pipe, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 41:19

Is it? I've got it done as somebody who behaves in the manner of Andrew Mountainbat and Windsor. But no, the exhaust pipe is more fitting. We'd all have forgotten Windsor by next Tuesday. Surely. It's been such fun talking to you. Likewise. We have, you know, gone off on tangents. I haven't quite got to the end of your CBE, but I don't suppose that matters. Didn't even mention the fact that you got you mentioned me, uh me. You mentioned being knighted, but you hadn't been knighted. But you didn't get a CBE. Yes, yes. I mean that's that's that's a big one.

SPEAKER_00 41:55

Well, I I was so sure that and being on Desert Island Disc, I thought they were obviously wind-ups. Somebody's gone and got faked the headed paper. I know lots of graphic artists. And I actually went to the it used to be under the arches in uh at the end of the mall where they had the cabinet office.

SPEAKER_01 42:11

Oh yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 42:12

And I went and knocked on the door and said, I've just had this faky letter, apparently from the Queen, offering a CBE, because that's obviously not going to happen. He said, No, it is real, sir. It's absolutely real. I couldn't believe it. I didn't tell anyone until the night of the uh it was announced on on New Year's Eve. Because I thought I I thought, you know, she's going to go, oh no, no, no. Oh, that John Lloyd. Oh no, we don't want him. But she was absolutely charming in in the as you know, we all totally fell in love with her, of course.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

We've got to draw a line somewhere, haven't we? Thank you for listening, by the way. This um I should say, not this week, but next week's episode is the last of the first series. So watch out for that. And if you haven't already, I've no idea whether I should be saying this or not. I'm not quite sure of the protocol. But if you follow Just Between Us, then you will get notice, not just of next week's episode arriving in your something or other, but it will also give you advanced notice of the beginning of the new series, which will start at the beginning of January. So there you have it. John, come on, let's let's go out on one more meaning of live. Your favorite if you haven't already used it. Oh gosh, let me think. And we'll cue up the outro music.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

And you can hear it distantly in the background. There's so many. Um Barry Willock, which is on the back cover. Barry Willock is an unknown workmate who writes all the best on your leaving card. I think that's appropriate to get sign off on, don't you?

SPEAKER_01 43:48

I do. It couldn't be more appropriate. Thank you, John.