Episode 42 - John Lloyd

Hello and welcome to Sick Combeats, I'm Dave Coen. And I'm Dave Coen. We've reached episode 42, which as I'm sure you all know, is the answer to life, the universe and everything. And we're delighted to say that our special guest today is a producer, writer, presenter, show creator, all titles that barely begin to do justice to his contribution to some of the greatest British comedy shows of the last four decades.

Please welcome John Lloyd. Hello, Dave James. Thank you for coming. Lovely to have you here.

So, yes, amazingly, I thought I'd start by talking about the fact that this year, 2017, is the 40th anniversary of the start of News Quiz on Radio 4. And quite a lot of change in comedy in that time, but News Quiz is pretty much the same. And the original producer, creator, John, who you were that person, can you tell us about how you came up with the idea, really? Well, OK, so there's two things there.

First of all, that my entire life has been a series of disasters that I've managed to escape by the skin of my teeth to survive for another disaster yet to come. So the News Quiz started with a disaster, really. Nicholas Parsons, who I knew well and still know well, came to me because I was the producer of just a minute at the time. And so I got these two guys from a school in Hampstead, who are very bright, and they got an idea for a paltcher.

I said, OK, what is it? Well, it's about the news. It's sort of all about the silly stories behind the news, the little things. It must be true, I read it in the papers, kind of things.

And it's called Keep Taking the Tableways. And I thought, well, that's kind of funny. So we did the pilots with these two chaps. And Charles Brandreth was one of the panelists I remember.

And it didn't work for some reason. I think because the stories were sort of already funny, but it's hard to do a funny thing, a bit like current politics. Yes. Well, it's hard to be, isn't it?

Interesting because right now, there's a show at News Jack, which is, I guess, the latest show that the BBC is making for new writers and is actually a new presenter now. They've got Angela Barnes, who's starting this week. But that's one of the pieces of advice they give to the new writers is don't choose stories that are already funny, because it's hard to funny. Yeah, well, so it didn't work.

And I was slightly, you know, it was all right. But I took it to my boss and he said, well, it didn't really work, John. But I tell you what, the basic core idea of a quiz about the news is a very good one. And I don't think they'd ever done it on radio before.

It was because of the week on television, which I've never actually heard of, and they're sharing produced in the kind of 60s, I think. But they were so starting to get. And that's the way the broadcasting used to work. A pilot was there not necessarily to show how brilliant it was, but to see where the floor was wearing them very often, you could use that to change the course bit.

So I sat down, started from first principle, and I said, quiz about the news. So the news is about facts. So let's not have a silly title. Let's have a straight title.

The news quiz says that that's the first step. And I thought, well, you'll have people who know what they're talking about. So let's have journalists. And so I thought, what can journalists do?

I know. So I thought, Richard Ingram is a pro-die. I mean, it's a kind of journalist. It's my dear journalist, Alan Corin, who's editor of Punch, so I started then, Clive James, who's then television critic.

And so I thought, well, that sounds like a great thing. And the client was famous on television, Richard and Alan had done very little broadcasting. And certainly not on the panel game contest. So that was the shape of it.

So there's three guys. And then the fourth journalist was Barry Norman. Again, from a sports journalist background, they had film critic. And then there was one open slot.

So we have Tom Petrie, the picture of the son that we have. That person didn't have to be a journalist. So it could be, you know, she like, cock or home service. So we have this very strong, basic panel with a little special flavor all the time.

And so I put this thing, Danny Greenstone, who was then on attachment from his very southern diaphragm, he's a very bright young guy from the BBC Music Library, on attachment. And so we had some music running. Danny used to do that. And I wrote the whole script myself, because that's what you did.

It was a bit of a break of money in radio. And so I used to get up at five every day and read all the papers. And then on the day of transmission, I'd not get up at five every day, but I'd read all the papers every day and cut out the funny bits. You know, it was much funnier, much bigger than newspapers were in those days.

So all the day of transmission is Wednesday. I used to get up at five, go to the news page and get the papers, read, see if there's any reason to stop your write the script in the morning. Get it, you know, I worked on a news quiz for a few years. And that's a big script.

That's a lot of writing. There were 16 topics. I don't know if that was the case. So you have to have half a dozen jokes, as well as a paragraph explaining the story.

And then that's the right. A load of jokes. Well, we do. The main writing effort was trying to think of cryptic questions.

It wasn't a dolly drop, the news quiz often is. It's like, here's the thing. It's obvious what the story is. And then the person's got their set piece on that thing.

And the other thing we gave them, no notice. So you'd think of a complex question. Part of it was trying to work out of all the questions about it. And then when they got it, they started answering.

But the script very normally has an intro. Just hello. And then it was peppered with these very good news cuttings. And there were many more of them, because the grony ad is these two set, the one who's misprints.

And we eventually got popular. The listenership sent in stuff. So that was very strong. But we didn't again.

We didn't ask the presenter to be funny per saying that he were a rose out of the conversation. Very similar to QI. In fact, we often think of it again one idea in my life, which is to take an apparently boring subject and make it funny and interesting. And it's the best pilot, actually.

I've ever made a part from QI, coincidentally. It was obvious, right from the start. It was a really good show. It was the first six shows.

It's got brilliant ratings. And some of you with QI, once we made the part, it was obvious to everybody. Something fresh had happened. It was rated straight away.

This was quite an amazing time, really. And obviously, radio. And a lot of the people, I guess, who were producers at the time, people like Chris Brie, Joseph? It just started.

It was a very odd, the whole thing's very inexperienced because I went to university to be a lawyer and didn't get on with the law at all. And it was a matter of horrible mistakes. I spent three years working very hard. But I think it's two with the law, so university politics, university journalism, straight acting, and eventually comedy.

And so when I left the worst law degree in the history of the Cambridge Law Faculty, I got passed by one mark. I thought I'd give myself a year and see whether I can, you know, yes, anywhere. And so I was in the footlights and they did a, we see radio did a one off from that, and then a second one off, and then they go to Syria. So I was actually a writer before that, on the radio, before I was a producer.

Because I was a writer, I'm not writing the script for that with John Cantor and Griefree Jones, and a couple of other people in the city won't know. John's just had series on the radio for, I think. He had a famous historical diaries. I've heard of it as well.

And people have heard of it. It's not about the expectation when you were producing words, they were producing the right links. And people know about words. Well, I don't have much more of a comedy attitude.

The funny thing is about a lot of work that I've done is I don't really know how other people work, because I've only ever really been a producer. Right. Except for the right at the beginning. So I don't know how other people do it.

And simply when I started directing, I never watched directors of that. And really know how the people operate. And I often think I must go the course to learn how to do this. Because anyway, so I was in the show called Ono Antisom, which actually ran after I became a producer in the beginning of 1974.

But I come from a writing background. That's when I spent the last two years of Cambridge doing his staying up to three-day writing sketches. I was hooked on it. And so that thing of, you know, once a sort of, there's two categories, they're organized producers and there are ideas producers.

Essentially, and some people have both. And I'm definitely in the latter category. So when we started the new Squiz, it was just easier to do it so far on the higher level. I think it's an un-writing job, really.

I consider it kind of a new, that these guys are going to be great talkers, all they have to do is give them somebody to talk about. Again, very similar to QI. So it's a research job. It sounds like I've heard you another week talking about getting out of the way.

Yeah. And it feels like very early on. Very early on, it sounds like you've already subconsciously spotted that. So that you were writing a script not necessarily to be funny, funny in its own right.

But to allow these great people just to do what they do. That's definitely unconscious, James. I mean, now I've got the philosophy and the theory of it done pat. And I think they ought to be a religion event.

In my unwritten novel, and we all got one, there's a religion called absenteeism, of which there's only one command which is get out of the way. And I believe this absolutely to my core, which is as a parent, for example, which is hard to job them being a producer, but quite a long way. Let's get out of the way, which is allow the children to become. Don't mold them, don't push them, don't criticize them.

Just love them and let them be. And that's the way to do it. Similarly in production, I often say the job of the director will produce a dissapear. When you watch a movie, anyone who says, well, that was very well produced, doesn't it?

They obviously have to be a majority of the story. It's likely to be allowed. It's only directing that. It's very well directed.

After you see a film, all you should be talking about is the characters and the ideas and the story, because if you can tell it's well directed, it's not well directed, because the director's showing off, as a director, I often used to cut the best shot in the film, because it's the one that goes, oh, I can't look at that shot. You often hear that said about writing in general. It's kill your darkness. It looks like writing.

It's not good writing. Something we try and tell the, I think, with some success at QI is we have what's called a stylist art. Actually, all great writing is the same. Somebody once said, all the great efforts sounds as if they knew each other very well.

And a great one like that, whether it's George Carlin or Chip Murray or David Mitchell, it's like, it's so perfect. It's perfect. It's so pure. So exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that a question? Is that just the one? Yes, yes.

Or Monte. Yes. Socrates. So that's why I'm after all the time.

And I believe another principle of things is that creativity is a form of archaeology, not a form of creation. It's more like gardening. And it is like manufacturing. So it's like, again, something, how do you be a good gardener?

Pay attention, love for plants, and let them be. You don't go into a tree. You're nearly three. And you're behaving like a ridiculous one-year-old tree.

The things parents say are completely absurd. But in terms of writing, though, there is a balance between, on the one hand, and I remember this thing that Dennis Norton's mentioned it on here before about writing. With a writing partner, you've got the reason you do it. It's one to type and one to look out the window.

And that's the... Very good. Dennis, what a great guy. Brute.

Brute. That's a top line, isn't it? I mean, I think it's been... I'm just going back to the archaeology thing.

It's my... I'm a plate on this in this way, which is it's like the theory of forms. Is it you're looking for something that's already there? Mm-hmm.

So it's very easily described in QI, which is we go into the deserts of Bollis, and we dig and we dig and we dig and we dig and we find a nugget. Yeah, Sapphire, Ruby or a... You know, that's what we do. And somebody's writing is you're looking for...

It's like metal detecting. You're looking for the line that already exists in some way because all three of us have had that feeling. You know, you hit the spot. When you're in the slot, you go, that is correct.

It's not a question of a matter of opinion. Yeah. How great comedy is incorrect, and I believe has correct as mathematics, we just haven't learned how to not not rotate it yet. There's a famous story about two old Jewish comedians sitting in a car in New York and your writer goes past and one's saying, No, no, it's not many words.

I've got a chocolate liver. It's like... That's a meter in your soul, isn't the way you say it. Oh, that's it.

That wonderful sense of... And it is a sense, isn't it, of discovery? Yeah. And it is one of modesty, of humility.

I always find that when you've done work really well. There's a sense that I didn't really do that. I sort of channeled it in some way. You hear this a lot of musicians.

My son is a songwriter. Gives them songs. You know, he writes very good songs. But some of them are like, Oh, that's coming from the truth.

Can you call me Cat Me Cat? Yes, yes. Yeah, I think you're here. Not Gal.

Where did this one come from? That's you. No, there's no way this is something. You know, it's a big man in the sky.

And you've just dropping tunes and all you have to do is pick a lot. Elton John says that if he hasn't got the song in ten minutes, he's a mother. So there's something going on and it's something that's more interesting. What interests me about comedy these days is not...

Comedy per se, but how comedy is an outcrop of a bigger connected truth. Comedy is a provisional wing of art. It's one of the great mysteries. How many things are funny?

So do you feel, therefore, that because comedy has become more of an industry in that sense, that we're sort of slightly... Batterly farming comedy. And actually producing something that's really not very pleasant or, you know, it isn't as nourishing in some way. Or do you think, so it feels like you have to be ground up for you of comedy.

But literally start with it's underneath the ground and you're... Are you sensing that for that this is one of the reasons why some comedy doesn't work. Because it feels too contrived or too... I don't know what you're gronsming at because I often think there's two kinds of...

There's two kinds of programs in general, not rather than specifically comedy, but there are two kinds of programs. Those don't matter and those don't matter. Okay, very hard to say what that means. Because meaning itself, when you say does life have meaning, what's the meaning of meaning?

It's very hard to grasp. I think if you ever understood what we meant by meaning, we don't sound what the meaning of life was. So what does it mean to say that something matters? I don't know, but you damn well know it.

You do. You do. That's one of those. And that one isn't.

Look, it's fine. So there are plenty of programs that don't matter, that are really good. Some of them rate a lot, some of them win prizes, some of them are very watchable. And there are programs that do matter, which are flawed and sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes not perfect every week.

But nonetheless, what we're getting at there, I've no idea. I want to make programs that matter, even though I don't know what that means. I haven't got time. I find work so difficult.

I haven't got time to do something that's mediocre. I have done, I did mediocre things. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do something that's the real deal.

I think we're all grasping at that. For me, comedy and writing in general is not a means of making a living. It's an accident that I make a living. I do it because I really care about it and believe in it.

I want to make a difference. I want to bring joy to people. I want to bring an accident that I'm becoming. I meant to be a crusading defence barrister.

I could have easily been a journalist, I think. But what I like to do is find great ideas and give them to people. I was wondering, hearing that is what you were saying, those were very big questions and what's the meaning of life and meaning. I was wondering if those sort of conversations that Ms.

Adams were having in the early 70s. I'm curious to know how something like Hitchhiker's Guide came out of the past. We knew each other briefly at Cambridge not at all well, but we got to know each other. I can't even remember how afterwards when he came down he was a year younger.

Or six months younger he was a year behind in the academic year. We started talking and we never stopped talking. We used to have a hamburger or we would step all night and go to the pub. We would talk continually about everything.

Many because we're both science fiction and that. The good science fiction is concerned with questions of meaning and truth and existence. We talked about everything and it was a very undidactic and open conversation of queering things. We'd have lots of them having a VSR, whether it would be possible to build a lift, an elevator that went to a satellite.

Why do we have to have this escape velocity thing? When do you have a massive engine to escape the pull of the earth? But the lift into it would be slower. Why can't you just chunter after?

Don't know that would be completely impossible because they haven't. They have a very, very possible view. You just need a wire which we haven't quite got the metal which is light and strong enough. But it is definitely theoretically possible.

Those kind of things. Although Douglas wasn't then, but became a militant atheist. He was a very committed atheist in the talking smart. Very good friend of Richard's because Nala, Richard's wife, was the dot who girl assistant.

No, no. They were subscripted. So he got to know her. Actually married Richard and so they were all very close.

So he was carrying atheists and you see that quite touchy. But in those days he wasn't. When you look at his work, you see, well, yeah, I don't technically he's an atheist. But it's full of stuff about Gons and you know, alien beings and so on.

In his creative life he wasn't really an atheist. And certainly there's a lot of that kind of stuff. You know, the Norse gods crashing around and so forth. There's also feeling like the probability that those sorts of ideas, there's a feeling for a lot of it of fate and destiny and some kind of orders throughout the universe.

Which is, there's lots of stuff happening and being blown up and funny ideas around it. But it just feels like there's this philosophical truth that I've highlighted. Definitely. Because we were young and you know, had all our faculties and were having fun and drank a lot and locked around.

That just asked all the big questions in the track. If you look for them, much as Plato asked all the big questions in a way. But we didn't have any of the answers. So we'd have an extraordinary clever and interesting idea and we'd end with a joke.

No, nobody likes a smart answer. And the thing is, what I feel about atheism for what it's worth is, when most people say the atheists, what they mean is they're against organized religion because it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny as expressed by, you know, across all the various sects and faiths. But all I ask of people after 15 years of Qites, not too much to ask is to agree that there is much more to everything meets the eye. That's my position.

It's not another religious person, certainly like a conventional one. But that is unquestionable Socrates used to say that there is a difference between right opinion and knowledge is something that I would particularly assert that I know. And I can say that I am certain that you're not only else that things are much more complicated than there are hidden patterns and things that we know nothing of. There's no gravity, and so part of this unwritten novel that I've been struggling with for 20 years, or it's actually serious nonsense.

Part of the ambition is to write the book that Douglas and I would have written if he was alive. Right. Having come to conclusion, I thought about it a lot. You can still have the jokes but it can end up in insights and take away ideas that people can live by.

Because H.A.K. is very funny and the fact that it's got such traction, James, that people treated as holy writ in some cultures means that it must be getting at something else. And that people can be wrong because it's funny. Yes, and it's not, yes, and there's more, because they're all so ugly.

It's just a very funny name. But there's so much going on underneath. It was only particular, because from a comedy point of view, when I first came across it, I then just thought to myself, I mean, I'm sort of talking to my answer, I'm slightly behind on that. But I did sort of think this doesn't sound like it was like anything that came before it.

I guess it was a science fiction genre that was never struck me as particularly humorous in the past, up until, you know, it's not an obvious, I was not an obvious one. But it was a time machine, which was pretty, pretty pervasive. But it feels like it was influenced by bits and pieces like that maybe. Well, I think lots of, it was Vonnegut.

Right, absolutely. It was first draft of H.A.K. was very, I said it's too like Vonnegut. You have to find your own voice.

There were a few moments I think, and I was just discovering Vonnegut. I guess it's not the time that the show was happening, and I remember that. I was a big radio fan and I liked, I felt like we came to New Jersey and things. And then this thing came on the radio and it was just, it was the first time I heard something that actually, I, this is for me, radio is, we came to all these things, they're all funny and they're all for grown ups and things.

This is absolutely not like anything I've ever heard in my life. I mean, it's for me. There's a feeling also of cash 22 about it. It's not really much to do with war, but with cash 22 there's this infused self of wistful self defeatingness.

And I just love that it comes through in hitchhikers that there's not a lot of, in a good way of shrugging. Here is an intractable problem, and here is how we live with that problem. And people are asking questions and the answer is, stop being smart answers or something. I love about that.

It's extraordinary. And I guess looking back at it now, because it has been so influential in so many things, for example, Red Wolf could simply not have existed. Red Wolf was on when I was sort of consuming comedy age 12. He then realised that, oh, it's not so much like it's next.

It's all, and we can't. So, it's like now, Paul McCartney, Paul's out, is now measured by the standard of the Beatles. He sort of hung himself by his own, and he's like, well, I still not just going to be, what the hell is this? What the hell is this?

It's a big one. So it's all become this extraordinary thing, which is infused in so many things. It's a nice extraordinary thing. So you're involved with it for the first series?

Yeah, well, as you may have read enough of the Magic Secret of it, but some dogs are not best friends. We had shed, I don't think of the time, but we were still living together. We were flat in West Hamster together, and then my girlfriend, who was a bit too small for the three of us, so we moved to a retinacine row out. And the three of us hung out together, fantastic fun.

And Douglas was really struggling to make a living. He made a pilot with a great chat that wasn't picked up, and he had bit parts in body python, and he was trying to write for things like week ending. He wasn't very good at adapting to other people's style. He needed to do his own thing.

And then out of a blue sky, he was actually at the point of giving up, going to become a shipwreck, or a Hong Kong, which Jeffrey Birkin said before he became a radiologist. He tried out shipwrecking, and Douglas was a bit late, it was good fun. He was literally going to go and go out, and then he got this pilot for hitchhiker. And then he was away, but Douglas was a, you read the famous thing, but he loved deadlines, and I was wishing by him, which was a very funny joke, but he wasn't funny when he had them.

He suffered terribly from it, and was good, got into terrible panning and depressions. So he just went the first, after they got the series, ten months writing the first four episodes, and then got stuck and realized he wasn't going to be able to finish. And then literally he would be sitting in the back room in the Paris studios typing the next scene as they were recording it up front. So he got stuck and asked me to help, and then he said, you know, consider another series of people that I'm sure that won't be.

Because we had no idea what we're doing, and what was very interesting, and then any idea was going to be so huge. He said the second series, let's do it together, and that was obvious because we'd written loads of things together. Very little success, apart from Dr Snug, obviously very interesting cartoon series of videos, and we did a couple of those, but I don't know if you want to lie, there's a mood lighting in the evenings in 16 lungo street. So we knocked off the last two episodes literally in three weeks, and it was fantastic fun, we laughed a lot.

And when the series went out, it was immediate to get success, although that was came in. You know, because of wonderful naivety came into the office in, you know, any reviews on the papers? And everyone said, Douglas, this is radio. Once a bunch, Gillian Reynolds doesn't round up.

You're lucky if you get mentioned every three or four years. And blimey down, there were reviews in the National Papers, sometimes things, saying an amazing thing. As we were saying earlier, when something's genuinely fresh and original, people usually recognize it straight away. You know, for example, Darwin's origin of species was not held down by a lot of religious fundamentals.

Nearly everyone thought, this is amazing. This is so neat. I wish I thought that before. And even quite religious people didn't see that you couldn't go to church anymore.

And Hincherak has a residency, the young ones, it's not anything else. People in their 50s shouldn't have liked it, but they did. They were immersed. It's being truthful.

So anyway, we were immediately faced by publishers. We were four publishers, I think, took us out to lunch. And then I got this terrible letter from Douglas, who said the next office to me, saying, I think we better end it on my own. Thanks, who helped?

I was very, very upset indeed. I think we saw the great justification. I was very, very hurt and very angry and he convinced me why. But anyway, so there it is.

And actually many years since I've thought, of course, we've been fantasticly grateful for that. Because otherwise, that's all I'd have done. I've been known as the other one. I think Douglas is a bitch, the guy who you know, even ever went out of the typing.

That kind of relationship is the very imaginative, wildly, crazy one and disorganized. I've gone and cleaned Lady, tied up the bits and blew an end on me. And I've done so many different things in my working life. Nearly all of them have been a direct result of a disaster.

I've decided they had enough of me or it and I've had to move on. And it's great. So that's what he did. It was a lifetime.

It's one massive idea. Which didn't happen to anyone. Because everything else, like that, it felt like it's part of almost the same universe. And I think that people, there's a lot of respect for don't gently, particularly if you write some very good ideas in there.

But it didn't take. And it's a little bit like Ellen Fielding, who's a great friend of both of ours. Bridget Jones is a massive contribution to the couch in which we'll never get away. Those films are just absolutely classic and they're adored worldwide.

They made her rich and famous and she had to go to another character. It was a good version of it, didn't really take. I don't know why. Maybe if you've got something that's that enormous.

It's either Beatles. How can you be better than the Beatles? If you've written Bridget Jones as one of the all-time iconic female characters, right up there in the pantheon, why would you want to write another one? If you're Eddie's art and you're the greatest stand-up in the world, why would you want to be a minor film actor?

Because there's so many people who are really good at that. And nobody's like Eddie's art on stage. Except the grass is always greener isn't it? That's the thing is there's always a temptation for, once you start to realise you're going to start to despise it and wish you would do it again.

I think that's because people aren't thinking straight. Because there is only one truth and many ways to it. And if you are lucky enough to have bumped into the truth, then the great whatever it is, the thing that under life all thing, then why would you want to go anywhere else? And I think what it is is that if you thought about life in a philosophical way and I hadn't when I was working hard in the 80s, I was just trying to get through the week.

So when you have a success you think it's something to do with me. I did that. I used to say that I'm not genius or I think I do work in front of it hard. So I deserve the back to you.

You get older, you think no no that's not right. Because it's nothing to do with you actually. It's about accessing something bigger than you. And if you're lucky enough to get there, you're only responsible to be gratitude.

I'm very lucky that happened to me. That is what I think. And so I don't go around saying I've done other things than Black Allie. I did some commercials and everything.

It's rather pathetic when people get to my age and older. They deny their greatness because they thought my last year was very good. No, it was shit. I haven't done anything since I haven't mentioned names.

That would be cruel. I've actually done anything really worth it since 1989. And so I think it's not getting any who's something I really respect. I'm like as a person.

I think he's an absolute genius. Why wouldn't you just be grateful for what he had? He's just extraordinary. I've always had a fine theatre player.

That's the thing that he did. It was very very, very, very, very starting out in the stand-up world. And I was like, this is how I'm going to do it. And he would put on shows and then I stand and stuff before he was well known.

But other comedians to come and play there. And they were all disasters. He blew loads of money. But he was so busy.

This is how I'm going to become. He was absolutely right in terms of how he was. Sometimes people rather have taken aback when the plan works. I think that's the other thing.

I've had a friend who became a Test Master Special commentator within about five years of getting into sport and cricket. And he's now left. He's now a teacher in Pentecal. Because he assumed it was taken 30 years to be sitting next to the other world.

And it took him five. And he was rather long-footed by getting there so quickly. Going back to what you're saying about just any kind of rejection that you receive from anyone within the industry. And he's what our listeners will experience all the time.

I'm doing okay. And my normal experience is rejection. And also here are the notes. Here's why your script is deficient.

At what point when you start receiving rejections do you think you realise that this was almost a good thing or something that would get you onto the next thing? Or how did it take you to basically get rid of rejection still staying as much as it ever has? Well, I think if you've read anything I've ever been quoted as saying in the paper, I don't know that I think the broadcasting commissioning system is a complete disaster. It's a train wreck and it doesn't work.

It's all in. It should be fixed. I don't know how to do that. Because what you have is a system whereby non-grative people are in charge of the destinies of grated people.

And management, you know, commissioners, controllers, people like that don't speak the same language as we do. Because what grated people are trying to do is do something that's never been done with the Sichaika. Everything has resonance. Everything has antecedents and influences.

But ultimately when you do something really fresh, it's that's what Douglas was trying to do. That's what I'm trying to do. All my life, I do something. The future is the blank space.

I go into this as an adventure, trying to find something which has never been seen before. So you're an explorer, not just an archaeologist, trying to find the mythical source of the Zambezi. It's not predictable. Creativity never is.

Nobody knows where the next technological breakthrough is going to come from or what's going to be in fashion in two years or what people will be eating in ten years. It cannot be predicted. And that's what creative people, that's the burden they have and the joy of it. And managers want predictability.

And the only way they're looking at the past all the time, they're looking at the spreadsheets and the ratings and saying, well, people like this and we should do more of that. And there's a sort of feeble pretense that this is slightly different because the Great British Bake Off, obviously, work with genius. So what about the Great British Pottery Throwdown? Because it's completely original.

Except for the title. Except for the fact that although you can't eat it, it's working something in your hands and we should then film any other competition about it. So they don't know what they're talking about. That's my experience.

Almost universally with people who are doing exactly the same, they have no idea what they're doing. And most of the notes they give are nonsense. And they are because it's full of fear and ambition rather than what people, the greatest people are doing. Well, they're in the zone where they no longer take credit for what they do.

The fingers are automatically rising. You're in flow. The idea is coming, thinking faster. And you give it to somebody.

Oh, look. Yeah. I want to shame because we're at sitcom. We did one of those last year and they didn't work.

People don't like sitcom anymore. No, no. What you mean is the sitcom that you got was quite good to start with and you made worse. And then you fiddled about with it and you edited badly as a flop because it was rubbish program.

That doesn't mean another sitcom is no good. I mean, I mean, I need to look at it from the Commissioner's viewpoint. No, I will not do that. I have no sympathy with these people at all.

It is absolutely. I'm not saying they're a lot disparaging with people. But I have experiences a lot of advertising. The guys are great in the pub and you can have a fantastic lunch with them.

And they're good people and nice and all that. They've got to work. They put on a different hat. You hear people very senior levels in from what I'm saying.

But to me, I'm just the controller. I mean, I'll go and ask a lot of people what they say. But what do you think? I'm just the head of department.

What I think, doesn't matter. What matters is what real people think. But you are a real person. You look like a robot.

That's the worst kind of note I always find is when people say, I don't think people get this joke. I get it. But other people, more stupid, ordinary people, the decent ordinary people that we all respect so much are, wouldn't understand this. And there isn't a shit.

It's just one of the few things that makes me really, really angry because it's such an important thing. Broadcasting is not a game. Broadcasting is where most people get their ideas, their culture, their belief system, their ethics from. If that is broken, then the whole country is broken.

And it needs to be fixed. And particularly comedy, which is at its best, a spreader of joy and fresh thinking. And so on, if that isn't any good, it's no good. We've lost the art.

We don't know how to make a comment. Of course, they're honorable exceptions. Always. They're always honorable exceptions with commissioners who are really good and helpful.

The guy we've just had on QI, Sahil Shah, terrific guy, supportive, quick, quick, never says stupid things. Of course, they're up there with those people. But the generality of it is that the system is, everyone is broken right to the top because the people at the top overworked because they're being asked to make decisions that should be none of their concern. You know, controllers of major channels being asked to opine on the shoelaces of an actress because they, you know, it's micromanaged from the top.

So nobody's happy. We have a system where basically everyone is not quite getting what they want, including the audience. Again, I'm talking broadly about comedy rather than drama. I know drama is very good.

Just before we move on to second, I mean, what I was thinking about more was in terms of the amount of, the final item out there that Commissioner has at their disposal to offer to new or different ideas. The thing is, the commissioner spends the whole time, though, is they say, well, I've got to see five shows. You don't need to be there. What's the point of having a producer, especially a show that's well-run as QI has been going for 14 years?

Very nice to see you, but consider it a hobby. If you want to come, drop in by all means. But we don't need you. You know, a good one.

It's a pleasure to see you have some banter and a drink afterwards. And a bad one isn't active irritant. We've made that one slightly on eggshells, never quite banging on towels. And so, again, meetings, one in an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, and then you've got to do things on the weekend.

People are exhausting themselves for no purpose. And it's completely different to the way I work. The only reason I've done these five or six good programs is because people left me alone to make my own mistakes and correct them in my own time. Very light-bolicing in those days.

And there's no such people as commissioners. Executive, I've known executive producer until I produced QI. It was a very old joke, though. They were some at the BBC in the old days, but not so many, perhaps on very big series.

There was an old check. If they were a murderer at the BBC, he would have done it. And the answer is the executive producer. Why?

Well, you must have done something. Well, that's the end of podcast of book two. And there will be more from John Lloyd in the next podcast. In the meantime, check out our Facebook page, Leave Us a Review on iTunes, or send an email to sicopicsatgmail.com.

Until next time, cheerio.