John Lloyd

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Presenter0:33

My castaway this week is the director, producer and writer John Lloyd. If you've laughed at all over the past thirty years, there's a pretty good chance he's the man you should thank. Spitting a Mitch, Not the Nine O'Clock News, Black Adder, QI, they are just a handful of the programmes that he's helped to create. And if the comedy work ever dries up, he could open a shop flogging second-hand BAFTAs. He's won a huge stack of them, and a Grammy, and an Emmy.

Presenter0:59

Which isn't to say it's been an easy ride. Fall outs, multiple sackings, and missed opportunities have also peppered his stellar career in comedy. He says I like starting things. There are starters and finishers in life. That's the great divide. I like the fight and the passion and the difficulty.

Presenter1:16

Well, I don't like it, but it's what I do. You make it sound, John Lloyd, as if it's almost like you're the the midwife at a difficult birth. Would that cover it?

John Lloyd1:24

That's a very good line. Um, yeah, I I think a lot of stuff that I do in retrospect it all looks, you know, great and lovely and easy, and I passionately believe that nothing great is achieved without difficulty. Not exclusively true, but the Navajo have a proverb which is

Speaker 11:38

Yeah.

Presenter1:38

Mm-hmm.

John Lloyd1:42

Everything easy is evil, everything difficult is good. I sort of live by that really.

Presenter1:47

In film and T V I I often think it's pretty easy to make people cry, it's very difficult to make them properly laugh. Why do you think that is?

John Lloyd1:55

I don't know. I think laughter is one of the great mysteries of the universe, along with music and consciousness and life itself. I've been asked occasionally to do serious drama, and I think how would I know when I'd got it right? Whereas comedy you're flying by wire all the time. You're in it's intuitive and uh and you don't quite know where it comes from, but you definitely know it when you see it.

Presenter2:17

And a very successful career you've had so far, as I said, but but not one of unalloyed joy. I mean, there have been a lot of bumps along the way. Are you a tricky character, or is it all the rest of them?

John Lloyd2:29

It's all my fault, Kirsty. Yes, I want a bit of a confessional.

Presenter2:32

Just as long as we've got that out of the way.

John Lloyd2:35

Well, I struggled for a long time, particularly I got a bit lost in my forties. I struggled to think why I was continually, serially being fired, particularly by people I was very close to. But I'm over that stage now. And one of my little mantras is disaster is a gift. Because when you look back on your life, the disaster, you know, being sacked by your girlfriend or your head of department or best friend as a co-writer.

Speaker 12:58

Uh

Presenter2:58

Yeah.

John Lloyd3:00

You look back and you think, Thank goodness that happened because if I hadn't been sacked, I would still be there.

Presenter3:06

Let's have some music, John Lloyd. What's your first track of the day?

John Lloyd3:09

My first track is Van Morrison and Bright Side of the Road, and this is the song that Sean Hardy, my co producer on Not the Nine O'Clock News, used to play when things were going really badly, which was quite often.

Speaker 13:23

I love the street

Speaker 13:27

To the bright side of the road

Speaker 13:33

We're in love with once again.

Speaker 13:36

Rats and hello

Speaker 13:44

The ball and come with me.

Presenter3:49

That was Van Morrison and Bright Side of the Road. So, uh John Lloyd, I know it's a rather vulgar subject to ask you how many BAFTAs you have exactly, but you have just one less than Dame Judy Dench, isn't that right?

John Lloyd4:00

Yes, it's a it's a strange aberration. Um one year, I think it was nineteen ninety one, ninety two, BAFTA decided to have BAFTAs for advertising, and I won six BAFTAs on the same evening, and towards the end of the evening the booing was heard as I clutched another mask and went back to my seat.

Presenter4:17

I was going down the list of what what you got BAFTAS for, and very interestingly to me, Spitting Image, which got fifty million viewers, critically acclaimed it was a very populist programme as well as appealing to the critics and so on, and never won a BAFTA. Did that matter to you?

John Lloyd4:30

It just got a bit tedious. We were nominated for years, and you'd turn up, and then once again, you would not get a prize. And of course, you know, I was younger then, I was only 30-something, and it did matter to me. It mattered. You can't understand this because not only did it get huge ratings, but it was. I used to say to MPs when they used to criticize me, people would say, Well, you know, if you don't like this country, why don't you go and live in Russia? Why don't you go and live in Russia? And I say, Well, that's one of the great advantages of living in a democracy, you're allowed to criticize.

John Lloyd4:59

And one Tory MP once said to me, You shouldn't be allowed to do this. And I said, Well, look, we get every week one and a half million more viewers than it took to elect the Tory government, which was thirteen and a half million people it took to elect Mrs Thatcher's government. So hey, you know, we are being voted for more than you, and we're being voted on a weekly basis.

Presenter5:20

You did a very good impression there. You never did any of the voices for it, did you?

John Lloyd5:23

I would have liked to have done that. I started out meaning to be a writer performer.

Presenter5:28

Right.

John Lloyd5:28

And somehow along the way I never asked to be a producer, you know, I got the the poison chalice there, but somebody's got to do it.

Presenter5:35

Um you said of yourself once, the only thing that is different about me is that I am more determined than other people. And I wonder for determined if we could read sort of tenacious and bloody minded

John Lloyd5:46

Yeah.

Presenter5:46

Thank you.

John Lloyd5:46

Thank you. I think that's true. And I think the way that I think is I like to be ahead of the curve, you know, one wave ahead. And so nearly all the stuff I've done, the first series, has been a thoroughgoing disaster because people say, well, puppets and politics, how does that work? Or sitcoms sit in the middle ages? That's never going to happen. And it's really trying to get the audience to kind of catch up with you. I do have this powerful sense of vision, particularly when I've come up with many ideas, but the ones I have, it starts with what it will feel like to experience the programme, to listen to or watch it. So not the nine o'clock news, but it's like going to a rock concert with your best friends and having a really good laugh and going to the pub. That's the feeling and how you make the programme, you're sort of colouring in the bits.

Presenter6:34

Let's have some music, then, John. What's next?

John Lloyd6:36

Well, this is an Irish band called The Water Boys who I'm very fond of, and a song called The Raggle Taggle Gypsy, and I come from an Anglo Irish background, at least on my father's side.

John Lloyd6:49

and he was in the navy, and so as children we were shipped all over the world, and so the gipsy side is that sort of wandering sailor's son thing.

Speaker 16:59

There was three old gypsies came to Earth Hall door, They came brave and boldly oh And the one sang high and the other sang low And the other sang a rifle title gypsy oh

Speaker 17:10

It was upstairs, there's just a lady when we're on our sit and leather old And there was a cry from around the door She's away with the Raggle Gaggle Jump CO

Presenter7:25

That was the Water Boys and the Raggle Taggle Gypsy O to put you in touch, John Lloyd, with the early days of your life. You did spend a lot of your life moving from one place to the other. Tell me more about that.

John Lloyd7:34

Yeah, my dad was in the Royal Navy. He'd been sent away to Dartmouth at 13, as a child, really, to join the Navy, because his uncle, General Hardris Lloyd, who was a general in the First World War, and my father used to say, He said, You can have any career you like, my boy, as long as it's the Navy. So off you go. So my dad went off and he had a brilliant time as a midshipman in the thirties, going all round the world. There's a famous line in Black Adder where Hugh Laurie says, Up to Liup, down to Liam, down, and back home for tea and medals. And that was based on my father's life in the Navy. And they had this back home for tea and medals life. You know, they'd be based in Felixo or Dover and then zoom across the channel at fifty knots, blow up a couple of destroyers or some docks and come home again.

John Lloyd8:21

And my father once told me this extraordinary story about how they'd come home from an all-night engagement on the Belgian coast, and he had a call on the radio from the C and C saying, Lloyd, the Scharnhorst and the Neisenau, two German pocket battleships, have broken out of Brest, and you are the only British allied forces between them and getting back to the Kiel Canal. I order you to go and sink them.

John Lloyd8:44

And my father's dog tired. They'd been up all night, and the dawn was just beginning to break. So he said to the coxswain, We ought to turn round and there's two boys off the coast of Dover which you've got to be careful to turn round the right one and because the coxswain was tired, he went round the wrong boy, and they looked up and they saw this what looked like an amazing cloud bank ahead of them. And the cockswain said, That's an amazing cloud formation, sir. And my father said, That's not a cloud formation, coxswain, that's the white cliffs of Dover. And they ran these three boats at fifty knots up the beach, tore off the propellers, and my father got out, aged twenty two, in his sea boots, and thought, Not only have I ruined my life and career, but I've lost the war for Britain.

John Lloyd9:27

And he had called up the CNC and said, I've done this, sir, and I don't know what to say. And I obviously resign immediately or I've got to be court-martialed. And the guy said.

Speaker 19:27

And he hit

John Lloyd9:34

Don't worry, Harpy, that was his name. It's fine, everybody makes one mistake, but don't make another one. And my father used to say The thing is, John, at the time it was a disaster.

John Lloyd9:46

But if we had attacked those boats, every single man on that crew would be dead.

Presenter9:51

And what do you remember of him as a father?

John Lloyd9:54

Well, he was, you know, he was um terribly genial, you know, very decent, genial fellow. But he was kind of in a way.

John Lloyd10:01

Always at sea, do you know what I mean? In the nicest way. He had very, very blue eyes, and he'd be off even when he was at home, thinking of being at sea.'Cause he was the youngest captain in the navy, oddly, so I don't remember him as anything other than this commanding, cheerful figure and um

John Lloyd10:17

particularly when I first went to prep school aged nine or ten, and he would sweep in in the Royal Naval limo with the you know, the sailor driver and all that, and get out and the great big, you know, four bars of gold on red on his Hello, old horse Hullo Pop in the car

John Lloyd10:33

No, he was terrific.

Presenter10:34

So much more to come, John, but we've got to get the music in, too. We're on your third piece. Tell us about this.

John Lloyd10:39

Well, this is The Love and Spoonful and Do You Believe in Magic? And it reminds me of the innocent optimism of the early sixties.

Speaker 110:47

Believe in magic, in a young girl's heart, have a music and freedom whenever it starts and it's magic.

Speaker 110:56

If the music is groovy and makes you feel happy like an old-time movie, I'll tell you about the magic and I'll free your soul. But it's like trying to tell a stranger about a rock and roll. Believe in magic, don't bother to choose. If it's judged and music or rhythm and blues, just go and listen.

Presenter11:20

There was the love and spoonful, Andy Believe in Magic. Uh so John Lloyd, you were sent away to school. You went to prep school at what age?

John Lloyd11:27

I suppose it was about nine and a half, something like that. So it was a horrific first day when you see your parents driving off and you realize you you're stuck with it. You know, bullying, for example, there was just endemic. I mean, everybody beat each other up all the time, usually became best friends of the the little boy you just socked in the eye, and then you got the slipper the whole time, and that it was none none none not enough to eat, and we all suffered from scurvy. And as somebody said, anyone who's been through the English public school system never really feels ill at ease in prison.

Presenter11:57

You said that you were hungry. I mean, they must have fed you, obviously.

John Lloyd12:00

Yeah, there was never really enough food, and certainly not enough edible food. At my prep school, there was a grating that ran round the dining room called limbo, from the you know, Latin for purgatory. And if the food was particularly gross, the teacher at the end of the table said, Down, limbo, it was fine. If even the teacher couldn't eat the stuff, it went down the grating, God knows where it went after that. So, yeah, there was it was quite, you know, very thin blankets on the beds, and the trick was to s to is to smuggle food into the school. So, cress seeds, for example, were immensely prized. You could get some in your pencil box and disguise it you know, put it under the protractor, and then you grow cress on your flannel in your locker, which is the only private space you had.

Presenter12:45

Can I be clear you're not making this up?

John Lloyd12:46

No, certainly not. Um for example, a potato was like, you know, a gold ingot, and if we could if we could get a raw potato, we'd sneak into the woods at the weekends and somehow light a little fire and cook this potato and and share it out between four of us. We used to eat conkers, I'm not joking.

Presenter13:05

I'm absolutely astonished by this. Did you tell your parents you were hungry?

John Lloyd13:08

Well, um yeah. But you usually forget, you know, you've got a sort of short memory if you're nine or ten that the the awful thing that happened last Friday has been long been surpassed by the fact that you came first in the hurdles on Sports Day or that you you know, you went on a trip to the beach in the master's sports car.

Presenter13:26

Um you you've said you went on to King's School, Canterbury, and you've said of that time five years like a prison sentence, violent, nasty, extremely lonely, and difficult. Did did it mark you?

John Lloyd13:35

Actually, no, I don't really feel that. I mean, it's left me with a real resentment of authority wielded unfairly or wrongly. I really that's the thing that gets me really cross. Because of the days when you're fifteen and you're told, you know

Speaker 313:49

Go to your room, Lord, I'm going to beat the backside off you.

John Lloyd13:52

And one guy actually took a run-up. He stood on the sofa and jumped down onto the sofa and gave me six, you know, in my pajama bottoms. You know, you think that's not right. But at the time you're so used you're inured to it because of the years in prep school where, for example, all our letters were censored. You know, you'd write, Dear Mummy and Daddy, I'm terribly unhappy because, you know, Bolsova has stolen my uh set of dividers and and you know I came last in maths and you'd take it up to the teacher and he'd say, Well, you can't say this. It was like the you know, censorship during the war. Go write that you're you're having a lovely time and you've you've got in the cricket team. So you get used to that. You get used to the idea that there's nothing to be done. You've just got to sort of sit it out somehow and hope it will eventually come to an end. Which of course, you know, eventually it did. And I got to Cambridge and I honestly thought that I had died and gone to heaven. I mean you just thought this is this can't be right. Everyone you meet is nice. There's no physical punishment. You can stay out till one o'clock in the morning and it's fine.

Presenter14:51

Let's have some music, John. What's next?

John Lloyd14:54

Well, this is called Sister Goldenhair and it's by a band called America and it reminds me of being a young radio producer in the mid seventies and I used to play this song as often as I could on a show called Late Night Extra on Radio 2 where we normally had to do sing something simple and lots of sort of BBC ooh wop boo wop very old fashioned music and I was allowed occasionally to play the Beatles or songs like this.

Speaker 115:21

Well I keep on thinking about you, Sister Golden Hair Surprise.

Speaker 115:28

And I just can't live without you. Can't you see it in my eyes? I've been one for this fun. And I've been too, too hard to find. But it doesn't mean you ain't been on the mind.

Presenter15:50

That was America and Sister Golden here. So you said earlier, John Lloyd, that you thought in the beginning, when you started working professionally that you might be a performer. You might be in front of the mic and in front of the camera. That started, did it, at university, at Cambridge, were you performing there?

John Lloyd16:02

Yeah, I did a bit at school, too. I I acted in the first play that King's Canterbury ever put on since it was founded by Saint Augustine in five nine seven or so. The first play to have real girls. Oh, that was marvellous.

Presenter16:18

I'll let you enjoy the memory for just one more moment. But at Cambridge, then, who were you acting alongside?

John Lloyd16:23

College review was a very cool thing to be in and Trinity Review I got into in my first year. And then the second year we asked the sort of Dwayenne of Footlights, who was a a girl called Mary Allen, to come and do the closing number of the show that we'd put on. And I instantly fell completely in love with her, and so that was the the rest of my university career written off with a sort of big romance and she persuaded me to have a go at going into Footlights.

Presenter16:48

What were you supposed to be studying?

John Lloyd16:50

Law.

Presenter16:52

And were you at all?

John Lloyd16:53

I was no, I'm afraid not. I was very ill disciplined. And I found in the middle of my second year that what I really liked doing is writing jokes.

Presenter17:02

And so what happened was you started working at the BBC once you left the university, and one of the first people that you worked with there was Douglas Adams on the very first Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. How did it come about in the very beginning?

John Lloyd17:14

Well, Douglas and I actually shared a house together and we used to write in the evenings. I'd go off and, you know, produce radio shows like Just a Minute and so on during the day and come back and Douglas would be in the bath with a cup of tea, waiting for me to come back so we could write something together. And he got a bit stuck after the first four shows and he said, Oh, I've run out of jokes, can you give us a hand? And so we wrote the last two shows together, which was really good fun.

Presenter17:39

And then you didn't go on to the subsequent success that it had in television. What happened?

John Lloyd17:44

No, well, um well, Douglas ba basically wrote me a letter saying he thought it was much better when he was writing it on his own and thank you for all your help, but I think probably better if I did it on my own. I was I was very cross at the time and very hurt. You think Douglas, you could have just stuck your head round the door and said, uh by the way, your surplus requirements, but you didn't.

Presenter18:05

But you didn't say to him, Can we just sit down and talk about this for half an hour?

John Lloyd18:09

Well, I did. He stopped me in the corridor and he said, Johnny, are you all right? And I said, No, I'm really cross. I can't understand what's gone on. He said, Well, you got paid, didn't you?

John Lloyd18:19

He really didn't get it, so he said, Well, what you should do is go and get an agent. So I did. I went and got an agent, and my agent said, We can basically get this guy for half of ev everything with the name Hitchhiker on it forever. And I said, No, no, I don't I don't want that. I just want by that time we've been commissioned to write the first hitchhiker book. I'd like just I want my half of the advance. So that's what we did.

Presenter18:41

Mm-hmm.

John Lloyd18:41

I got it, yeah.

John Lloyd18:44

But anyway, you know, you're young, you get over it pretty quickly.

Presenter18:47

And did you did you become proper friends again, or was there always the sense in which you felt you you couldn't quite be the good friends you'd been before? No, it was never it

John Lloyd18:54

No, it never was quite the same, but it wasn't difficult because we went on, we'd both booked this place in Corfu to go and write the first book. That's how serious it was, and why it's so surprising. And that's where the meaning of Lyft came from, that this book that we wrote together, because when Dougs got tired of writing his novel, he used to come down to the bar, we'd play various kind of games, and that was one of them think of a funny what does this place name mean? You know, what's an epping? And so that eventually became a book. So, once again, you know, that would never have happened if we hadn't fallen out.

Speaker 119:05

The wife

Presenter19:27

We're gonna have some music. We've gotta fit it in, otherwise we'll never get to the end of this programme.

John Lloyd19:31

It's getting much more confessional than I intended, Kirsty. You've lured me.

John Lloyd19:36

This next song is The Crystals and Dadoo Ron Ron and it was I think the almost the first musical number we did at Splitting Image with Ronnie Reagan who was kind of the hero of the programme along with Mrs. T and Nancy on Nancy doing the singing and we changed all the words to make them funny but it always makes me think of that time.

Speaker 119:57

I met him on a Monday and my heart was filled. Then he run, run, run, let her run, run. Somebody told me that his name was Bill. Then he run, run, run, let her run, run.

Speaker 120:10

Yes, my heart stood still.

Speaker 120:14

Yes, his name was Bill

Speaker 120:18

Walk me home Did a run, run, run, diddle run, run

Presenter20:25

That was the crystals and a do-run run. Let's talk for a minute then, John Lloyd, about the wonderful spitting image. As you say, it became required viewing. How did it start out?

John Lloyd20:33

Well, it was actually very difficult to get a commission. I think we went to almost every single IT V company and everyone said no, it's a kids' stuff and and Central said we like twenty two and we couldn't we can't make twenty two, we haven't got enough time to do it. But when I came from radio, I knew lots of people who did funny voices, but I didn't know anyone who looked like the people who did they did the funny voices of. So in Not the Night O'Clock News we decided we wanted to have some puppets. And I went to see Roger Law and said, I understand you can do caricatures. And he said, yeah. And I said, can you make a puppet for us? And he said, well, I might be able to. How much have you got? And I said, well, about two hundred pounds. And he just laughed, you know, said, no thanks. So years later, I heard that a guy called Martin Lambin had put up some money to build the first puppet. And I rushed over to see Roger again. I literally begged him. I said, I've got to do this. I'm the only person probably in the world who has the production experience to do this particular thing. And then I remember spending most of the first year writing myself letters begging to be fired from this complete disaster. But, you know, it turned out to be this extraordinary iconic thing.

Presenter21:43

And not only was it a huge success in your career, but it I mean, it almost did for the careers of quite a few politicians. You know, there was of course always the the David Owen with little David by his side, you know, sort of picking up his bags and saying thank you.

John Lloyd21:55

Yes, David. When it comes to the name of the party leader, we're going to take half of your name and half of my name. From my name, we're going to take the word Owen, and from your name, we're going to take the word David. Oh, yes. Oh, thank you so much, David. I'm so pleased. Well, actually, I think David Steele's the only he's certainly the only politician on record who who said that it hurt his career.

Presenter22:18

Well, I can't think when it came to John Major that showing him with his pants over his suit really helped his career at all. Did any politicians ever sort of buttonhole you personally and say, you know, it's too harsh, it's too it's too offensive, it it's too cynical?

John Lloyd22:21

Suitably

John Lloyd22:23

Can the

John Lloyd22:30

Yeah, but they th they did occasionally, but nothing to do with you could say that somebody was totally corrupt, that they you know, they they'd they'd committed murder even, and they didn't mind at all. They'd chuckle in a sort of knowing way. If you said they'd have big nose.

John Lloyd22:43

Oh no, that's really below the belt.

Presenter22:45

And remind us of some of the people that that were doing the voices. I mean, they were people who went on to have very big comedy careers.

John Lloyd22:51

The alumni are amazing. Chris Barry, John Sessions, Harry Enfield. We gave Harry his first job, in fact. I met him.

John Lloyd23:00

Because a friend of mine called Anthony Wall, who produced Arena, said this very strange guy had come to see him, and he can do all the voices from the nineteen fifties, so I met Harry and I got on very well with him. And the first two or three editions of Splitting Image there was always some fifties voiceover in it, because we couldn't think what on earth to do with him. And then suddenly he cottoned on, he got David Steele, and he got Leon Britton, and Douglas Heard, and until somebody, you know, like Harori Bremner or Harry Enfield comes along, they don't seem to have a silly voice. And then you can never listen to Douglas Heard again without thinking of that extraordinary ice cream cone on his head, you know.

Presenter23:38

Let's have some more music then, John. What's next? We're on your sixth disc.

John Lloyd23:43

Well, my life suddenly took a turn for the better in nineteen eighty nine when I got married to my wonderful wife, Sarah. Hello, darling And it was, truly, Kirstie, the best wedding there has ever been in the history of the world, and this music is the music that my wife, To Be, came down the aisle to.

Presenter25:13

The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba by Handel, performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the fields, conducted by Neville Mariner. So, John Lloyd, that was a tribute to your wedding day.

John Lloyd25:22

I think anyone who was there will remember it. And at the end of the wedding, as we walked back down the aisle, Howard Goodall at the organ was playing Barks to Carter and Fugue, and it it ran into the Black Adder theme, and the whole church cheered. It was like a football crowd. It went Yes and I was so happy I picked Sarah up in her wedding dress and spun her round. And everyone was just this is so much fun.

Presenter25:45

So, John Lloyd, there came a point, and I don't really understand this. I read that in your early 40s you sort of hit a wall. You hit a wall of thinking, what's it all about? It sounds as though you.

Presenter25:55

You had a beautiful and happy life. What what happened?

John Lloyd25:58

We did, and that was the odd thing. After we'd been married for about three years, I just woke up one Christmas Eve and I thought, I can't see the point of anything at all. It was the most alarming thing, and particularly alarming because I had everything. I'm happily married at that point, I think, two children. We had a lovely flat in Fulham, and we had a little cottage in the country, and a couple of cars, and I, as you know, a ridiculous number of BAFTA awards. I couldn't fit all the awards into my study. We had so many. And then one day I thought, I don't know what I'm supposed to be aiming at. And I went right down to the bottom. I was.

Speaker 126:11

Um happily

John Lloyd26:35

Depressed doesn't you know, depressed is a word that people say, oh yeah, I get depressed. Well, you if you haven't you just can't see the point of anything. And I used to sit under my desk crying for no reason. It was quite extraordinary. And what was particularly annoying for somebody like me who always likes a reason for things, I'm logical, I like a if there's a good reason, fine, and there wasn't a reason. It put me into a fantastic tailspin and I'd had this kind of almost perfect career for 15 years.

Speaker 126:46

But

John Lloyd27:02

And I used to think as because of me, because I'm very determined, I work hard, I won't give up, and I used to take credit for it to some extent, and then I had ten years of complete disaster. Nothing that I did worked. I tried to set a radio station in 1992, that took a year. We raised four million pounds, we had a brilliant board, a hundred comedians signed up, radio authority wouldn't give us a licence. I got a job writing a film for Paramount, finished the first draft, and the head of Paramount threw it in the swimming pool because it was late and no movie. And it was just this went on, it got ridiculous, like one felt one was being shot at for something one hadn't done.

Presenter27:37

And so in the depths of this clinical depression, within that

Presenter27:41

The seeds of QI, the seeds of thinking I want to make a programme where I start to understand the world and help other people understand it. Is that fair?

John Lloyd27:49

Yes, and I uh it didn't start like that. I s it started out I want to know what the meaning of life is. There must be some better reason to go on than

Presenter27:52

Give it a

John Lloyd27:58

As it were, the split between science knows everything and the little baby Jesus. There must be somewhere that a normally intelligent person can sign up to that works. And I started reading actually physics to begin with. I want to know actually how is the universe constructed. And when you discover there are other ways to be, and other ways to think, and other ways to relate to people, and your children, and your friends, you start to build a sort of wobbly kind of at first philosophy. And QI is the by-product of that, because I read so much. I read so much science and history and biology and chemistry. And I knew I'd gone round the bend when I bought a big fat Dutch dictionary and started reading it from page one.

John Lloyd28:40

And so, QIs are sort of spin-off of a search for ultimate meaning.

Presenter28:44

And on that note, we have to fit in the discs, so we're going to go to some music.

Presenter28:49

Seems rather banal after what we've just been talking about. But anyway, it is dire straits. Tell me about the next piece of music.

John Lloyd28:54

Well, this is Walk of Life, probably not one of their most known songs, but the one that reminds me of driving in our Landro we we moved to the country and so often I'd be driving the kids Harry, Coco and Boosie in this Land Rover with this song playing an absolute full blast.

Speaker 129:11

John is singing old, he's golden. Blubbin in the baby, what I say.

Speaker 129:17

Come John and sing it, I got a moment Down in the tunnel tryna make it play He got the action, he got the motion Well yeah yeah, the boy can play

Speaker 129:28

Dedication

Speaker 129:30

Oh shit, turning all the night time into the day Shooters all about a sea of the world

Speaker 129:38

You can do the wall.

Speaker 129:41

Do the walk online

Presenter29:45

That was dire straits and walk of life. And in a sense, John Lloyd, you did sort of you walked away the weight of that depression. You were you were somebody who found that actually getting up and getting out every day and walking for what literally a couple of hours would help you begin to make sense.

John Lloyd30:01

Well, I'm definitely of the walk-it-off school of psychiatry. You know, my father would say, don't be so feeble, John, get on with it, or you know, look it up, he'd say, about books, you know. So I refused to admit that I was mad or mentally deranged in any way. It seemed to me that it was a perfectly logical situation. I'd been badly treated by a few people and I was, you know, depressed and angry because I was right. And discovering through physics and mathematics and thinking, hang on, there's a completely other way of looking at this. And I don't understand why we are not all taught, you know, proper global philosophy at school. And I think I'm one of the very few people who has a proper thought through philosophy.

Presenter30:43

And so QI has been the by product of this and a huge success on television, but your life and your phil philosophical journeying has led you to a point of of feeling that you can make sense of things and that you have a you have a personal philosophy that makes not just sense, but helps to give you a sense of optimism.

John Lloyd30:58

Yeah.

John Lloyd31:00

Well, I've the universe is a paradoxical beast. It's very complicated, but it's also very simple. There's one of the paradoxes. It's immensely complicated, and so simple it can be written down as E equals MC squared. So, yeah, no, I have a working philosophy that helps me deal with my kids if they get upset, or you know, how I relate to my wife, or to even to you. And it changed my views about, you know, I used to think that being intelligent was a really good thing to be, and being kind was a bit for weeds, you know. Well, what kind? That doesn't win any awards. Now you think that's an absurd position. Intelligence is something you're given. That's something you you don't can't take credit for something you have to start with. Kindness, that takes effort.

John Lloyd31:44

Cheerfulness that matters. Eat, drink, and be merry, for to morrow we die is in the Bible, you know. It doesn't have to be a theistic philosophy. I don't subscribe to any one religion. But the idea that there's a way of living which is better than the one that we read about in the newspapers it's a shame that that isn't taught at school.

Presenter32:03

The working life you've had then is not the working life you expected to have when you set out at the beginning. Do you look at it with a a sense of achievement, a sense of contentment at this point?

John Lloyd32:13

I do have a tremendous sense of contentment. It's been hard earned some of the time, but I can truthfully say I wake up every day and I say I'm so grateful to be alive, and I'm so grateful that I've still got things to say and to do, you know, and there's a lot more to do, I think.

Presenter32:29

Well, John, your final piece of music is something of a counterpoint to all of that optimism. Tell me what it is and why you've chosen it.

John Lloyd32:36

Well, this is given the foregoing rather sort of soupy uh blather. This is this is a a wonderful song by my friend Mark Frye, and this is from his second album, Shooting the Moon, and it's a song called Regrets.

Speaker 132:50

All the mountains I never climbed

Speaker 132:54

The bad feelings are left behind.

Speaker 132:58

All the girls I never kissed.

Speaker 133:03

No shooting stars are missing.

Speaker 133:09

Oh, I'm full of the breast.

Speaker 133:13

When I think of all the nights I never knew

Speaker 133:18

All the heavens and earth.

Presenter33:20

That was Mark Fry and Regrets. So, John, we come to the point where I'm going to give you the books, of course. You get the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take another book along.

John Lloyd33:29

Well, I've chosen a book called The Book on the Taboo Against Being Who You Are, and it's by a guy called Alan Watts, and it is the best book I've ever read on the nature of what actually is, what the world is about, and how you should behave.

Presenter33:44

Right, that's your book, then, and a luxury, too.

John Lloyd33:47

Well, my luxury is I hope it's allowed. It's one of those things you see in garden centers, which has got a it's a big whirligig and it's festooned with literally hundreds of packets of seeds. You know, radishes and geraniums, hollyhocks, you know, forget-me-nots. I just plant, you know, one a day and just see'cause I used to love gardening when I was kid and I haven't had any time for like about fifty years to do gardening.

Presenter34:11

Yes, we allow you that. Thank you. And if you had to pick just one track, which one would you pick?

John Lloyd34:12

Uh

John Lloyd34:15

Well, I think it would just have to be the Van Morrison, the first track, Bright Side of the Road, because it every time I hear that it's it lifts the heart, doesn't it? It makes you want to sing and dance, and that's what everybody's life should be like.

Presenter34:27

It does, and it's yours. John Lloyd, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

John Lloyd34:31

Thank you, Kirsty.

Presenter35:08

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.