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Spiteful, unfunny, ...why I find Toxic Toksvig such a bore

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Recently, the prize-winning novelist Hilary Mantel launched an extraordinary personal attack on the Duchess of Cambridge.

Seeing the bandwagon rolling, the radio presenter Sandi Toksvig has jumped on board with some rude remarks of her own. 'We used to admire women who got their place in life through marriage and having children,' says Toksvig, 'but I like to think we've grown up a bit. I can't think of a single opinion she holds - it's very Jane Austen'.

Apart from this being a very ignorant remark (since so many of the Jane Austen heroines such as Emma and Lizzie Bennet have very decided opinions about almost everything!), it is also extremely revealing.

Toksvig evidently thinks that the definition of an interesting person is someone with views who feels the need to spout them. It's my idea of a bore. Surely views have to be very wittily expressed to be funny or interesting?

Sandi Toksvig on the Duchess of Cambridge: 'I can't think of a single opinion she holds - it's very Jane Austen'

The fact that we do not necessarily know what the Duchess of Cambridge thinks about global warming, or the  crisis in the Eurozone is not necessarily a bad thing.

Think of all the trouble that Prince Charles gets into for wishing to let us know his views on everything from the quality of British cheese, to the viability of wind farms.

There are plenty of interesting people who either do not have 'views' on every issue of the day, or who keep such views to themselves. Toksvig, who chairs the News Quiz, Radio 4's comic take on the week's news, is not one of them.

  More... Kate has no opinions on anything: BBC presenter Sandi Toksvig hits out at Duchess of Cambridge for being 'very Jane Austen' The Queen a gay rights champion? I don't buy it Australian DJ who called the Duchess of Cambridge's hospital for a prank is ordered by her bosses NOT to send condolences to suicide nurse's family

Before she took over, it used to be an amusing show. The panellists were irreverent wits who refused to take public figures and politicians seriously.

Such figures as Alan Coren, former editor of Punch, or Richard Ingrams, former editor and co-founder of Private Eye, were not identifiable as obviously Left-wing or obviously Right-wing. They were simply witty - just as Paul Merton is witty today on the BBC's Have I Got News  For You.

Toksvig's News Quiz is a different matter. About a month ago, the contestants were asked to consider the Government's U-turn on the English Baccalaureate. The Education Secretary Michael Gove had been forced to retract the introduction of the Baccalaureate because of the intransigence of the teaching unions. 

Novelist Hilary Mantel launched an extraordinary personal attack on the Duchess of Cambridge

You might have expected the Cambridge-educated, wholly European, Danish-born Toksvig to see the value of the Baccalaureate - which is a much more challenging exam than our boring GCSEs and A-levels.

Children who take the Baccalaureate have a better chance of emerging from school able to think, able to express themselves, rather than simply mouthing the tame A-levelly 'set views' which turn up in paper after paper in our current exams. (I know - I've marked them!).

But she and the panellists on what was once a comic show are now little better than Leftist apparatchiks, mouthing insults against anything which they conceive to be at all Right-wing. If they did so wittily, it would be no bad thing, but this is what the panellists had to say about Michael Gove. He is 'a foetus in a jar . . . He obviously has no friends and he has a face that makes even the most pacifist of people reach for the shovel'. Toksvig joined in with gusto.

The Lefty audience in the BBC Radio Theatre all rocked with laughter as if a joke  had been made. But is it really very funny? If someone had said this about Lib Dem MP Sarah Teather or Labour MP Diane Abbott, I suspect that the BBC's telephone lines would have been jammed with people complaining about the 'unacceptable' language.

They would have been right to complain. Let's be as rude about our politicians as possible, if it is done with finesse, wit and bravura; but simply saying that you'd like to hit someone with a shovel because he is trying to raise educational standards  was toxic Toksvig at her cowardly worst.Toksvig does not even write her unfunny gags herself. The chairman's 'jokes' on the News Quiz are scripted beforehand by a panel, which is chaired by the show's  producer.

This was recently one Victoria Lloyd, under whose tutelage the show has become  little more than a Left- wing rant.

All the panellists seem to have the same opinions about the news, and they seem much more anxious to get these opinions out than to make jokes about them.

The show is recorded for 90 minutes and edited down to 28. The discarded hour must be dire indeed, if these 28 minutes are the 'funny' bits.

Just to say the word 'Conservative' or 'Tory' makes the panellists snigger among themselves. One of Toksvig's most offensive moments - and forgive me for repeating it, but it does make my point - was when she announced to her tittering panellists on the lunchtime show: 'It is the Tories who have put the “n” into cuts.'

The fact that we do not necessarily know what the Duchess of Cambridge thinks about global warming, or the crisis in the Eurozone is not necessarily bad

Don't get me wrong. I would be perfectly happy for them all to be unreconstructed Maoists, out and out Lib Dems, or any political persuasion if they were funny. But they aren't.

I once heard Toksvig doing the 'warm-up' routine, live, before the presentation of a big literary prize on a London stage. It was fascinating.

Outside the cosy world of Radio 4 and its comforting assumption that everyone shared her boring opinions, Toksvig bombed. The audience started talking among themselves, they found her so unfunny, so extremely dull. Not one of Toksvig's gags got a laugh.

The BBC has a tendency, when some pushy person has come to prominence, to wheel them out over and over again. Toksvig, with her strident, brassy voice, is brimming with over-confidence.

Doubtless, as a vertically challenged and openly lesbian mother with three children born by artificial insemination, she will strike some of the BBC  organisers as an ideal voice of our non-judgmental times.

The BBC is not content to make her just the (albeit scripted) Witty Woman of the News Quiz. She has also presented the travel show Excess Baggage, the TV show Antiques Master, and is habitually cropping up on chat shows.

As far as the jokes go on these non-political shows, she is a bit of a one-trick pony - with endless rather unfunny allusions to her much-vaunted lesbianism.

Only this weekend, in a newspaper interview, 54-year-old Sandi was praising Cheryl Cole for her outspoken opinions (in contrast to Kate), before adding that she does 'fancy her quite a bit'.Radio 4's commissioning editor Caroline Raphael reportedly acknowledges the problem of Left-wing bias in comedy shows.

'It's difficult to find comedians from the Right,' she says, though producers 'spend a lot of time in comedy clubs looking for people with a range of views', she says.

There we go again! Views! Can you imagine a theatre impresario in the past saying: 'We'll have that Max Miller, or that Frankie Howerd - we like their views.' Or, 'I like Morecambe, but Wise is unsound in his views'?

What are these humourless radio producers doing looking for views, when what we really want from comedy shows are gags, jokes, laughs?

Roger Bolton, the presenter of Radio 4's Feedback, has been bombarded with complaints about the absolutely dire programme Jeremy Hardy Speaks To The Nation.

Hardy is one of Toksvig's running dogs on the News Quiz - one of those people who thinks a Left-wing remark thrown to the audience is a good substitute for a joke.

Listening to his programme is like being stuck in a student union bar with the world's worst bore, and having to hear him droning on about private education, defence, the environment, etc etc.

Every view is a Lefty renta-view. There is nothing in the show which I would call a joke. At least Hardy comes over as an amiable fellow, albeit the world's worst bore.

But, as is shown by her spiteful attack on the Duchess of Cambridge, Toksvig is not merely a talentless Dane with a voice like a foghorn  - she can be nasty with it.

An earlier version of this article reported that Sandi Toksvig said on radio's The News Quiz that Michael Gove was 'a foetus in a jar' and 'has a face that makes even the most pacifist of people reach for the shovel'. We are happy to clarify that these comments were made by other comedians on the show, not Sandi Toksvig.



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