John Lloyd is a comedy producer who has collaborated on many of the most era-defining and amusing shows of the past 40 years. Having started his career on radio, he then worked on TV programmes including Not the Nine O’Clock News, Blackadder and Spitting Image. He worked extensively with his late friend Douglas Adams, including on their alternative dictionary The Meaning of Liff. More recently he has refreshed TV comedy at the helm of QI, showing that programmes can be intelligent yet retain a huge sense of fun. He began a solo stand-up career in 2013, gaining acclaim for his sharp anecdotal style. This year he is performing Emperor of the Prawns.
4.30pm, Assembly Checkpoint (0131 623 3030), until Aug 30
Pitch your show in 140 characters
Very, very, very, very, very, very, very good: mathematically speaking 23.33333 x 6 (Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello).
Gosh. That’s an erudite joke. What will people learn from the show?
The opposite of what they expect. This year I didn’t want to be a genial bloke in a suit doing showbiz anecdotes. The spirit of the Fringe is to be dangerous, to do things that are experimental and you couldn’t see anywhere else. So this show is about everything: it’s about the meaning of life, earth science, cosmology, religion and who we are, where we come from. It’s a big subject, I know. I’m really trying to spook people out a bit here, to make them think how completely ignorant we are about everything. And particularly about our own behaviour and that there are ways we could behave which would be better for us and better for people in general and a lot more fun.
How many Edinburghs is this for you?
About 30 — as a guerrilla Tarzan (when I gatecrashed a friend’s show), BBC radio producer, documentary presenter, TV talent spotter, Edinburgh International TV Festival committee member, Perrier Awards judge, dad with teenagers — but only four as a performer: 1976, 2013, 2014 and this year. The Fringe has been like a drug to me. The first time I went was ’73 at the age of 21, when I was fired from Cambridge Footlights. They had to take up a serious play along with the Revue and the director didn’t want to take the risk that I would “destroy the Chekhov”. It was devastating. I had invested the previous two years in comedy, in the Trinity Revue and Footlights, and as a result I hadn’t done any studying. I got a very, very bad third. And so it was a disaster because I was never going to be a lawyer and now I was not going to be in comedy. As it turned out it was actually one of the best things that ever happened to me because the director could see I was about to burst into tears. And he said: “The BBC has offered us a little radio show, maybe you could do that.” I then performed in a revue in 1976; there were five of us including David Renwick who went on to write One Foot in the Grave, and Douglas Adams who is my best friend.
How did it feel returning as a performer with your debut stand-up show in 2013?
The business of being sacked in 1973 and then turning up exactly 40 years later was closure for me. That’s what I had set out to do, to be a writer-performer. I discovered my vocation at 20 or so and then I spent 40 years going in completely the wrong direction. It felt like: “all the other stuff, all the producing and the writing and all that, that’s just biding time, and this is what I was born to do.” I’ve had that experience on several occasions. I was a very lazy school boy and a slacker at university. At 22 I became a radio producer; I discovered that was what I was born to do. And then when I went to television in ’79, I thought: “No, no, no, this is really me now.” And then in ’87 I became a commercials director and within two hours on the set as a director, I thought: “No, this is the right stuff, this is where I’m going to end up”, and then finally, 2013: “No, this is actually it.” I couldn’t remember in the previous 40 years, or really ever, feeling so much in my skin.
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Most memorable Edinburgh experience
The Oxford Revue in 1976 or ’77. I used to produce the wonderful Brian Matthew late night on Radio Two. At the Fringe we would go round all the shows and record bits and have interviews and so on, really exciting. I went to see the Oxford Revue and there were supposed to have been six or so people in the cast, but there were only two of them. One was Rowan Atkinson and the other was Richard Curtis who had very few lines. I stood at the back with my sound recordist and stared at Rowan Atkinson completely open-mouthed. I thought: “I am in the presence of a genius.” Richard was very funny as well but you didn’t notice him because you were all staring at this guy thinking, this is the funniest guy that the world has ever seen. Afterwards I went round and knocked on his dressing room door and said: “Oh, hello, I’m John Lloyd, I work for the BBC.” And he sort of stared at me like I’d crawled out from under a paving slab, because Rowan, the perfectionist, thought that he hadn’t done it well and he was very low. When I came to do Not The Nine O’clock News in 1979 I thought, “I have to have that guy.”
Best-kept Edinburgh secret (no longer!)
David Bann’s brilliant vegetarian restaurant in St Mary’s Street — and I’m not even vegetarian.
What will you be seeing this year?
No idea. Never make plans. For me, that’s the spirit of the Fringe.
What Edinburgh needs is . . .
More Balvenie Doublewood or Caribbean Cask. There can never be enough.
What Edinburgh doesn’t need is . . .
Ebola B. Isis. A better skyline.
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Edinburgh in three words
Best. City. Anywhere.
Who is the greatest Scot?
James. Clerk. Maxwell.
Circus is a big theme at this year’s festival. If you ran away to the circus, what would you be?
A member of the audience or a lion; I’d eat people. I like people.