The Facts of Liff

Fact #1 – Everything is interesting. Everything.

To spend any time with John Lloyd — comedy producer extraordinaire, Douglas Adams confidante, QI midwife and compulsive neologist — is to be basted in facts.

Over the course of our 45-minute conversation, ostensibly to talk about his first Fringe show in 37 years, I learn that female kangaroos have three vaginas, that Chelmsford is home to Europe’s largest burns unit, and that the genome of a single grain of rice is twice as long as human’s.

“You see, nothing is dull,” he says after dropping his basmati bombshell. “This is the core, heart and soul of the show. Rule one, the core mantra, is that everything is interesting if looked at long enough, closely enough or from the right angle.”

You get the feeling that Lloyd could feel the tip and tilt of the cosmos while standing in a bus shelter and find poetry in a crumpled crisp packet.

Fact #2 – John Lloyd and the Fringe are the two most influential forces in British comedy in the past 30 years.

Granted, this might be conjecture dressed up as fact, but Lloyd’s track record is formidable. Ever since migrating from comedy performance to production in the 1970s he has been the force behind The News Quiz on Radio 4 (which morphed into Have I Got News For You on TV), co-wrote the first series of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxywith his flatmate Adams, and produced Not The Nine O’Clock News, Blackadder, Spitting Image and QI. Only Dame Judi Dench has won more Baftas.

When Danny Boyle wanted to display a distinctly British sense of humour to the world during last summer’s Olympic opening ceremony, he turned to Rowan Atkinson. Lloyd got there decades before. He came across the future Mr Bean at the Fringe in 1975. Atkinson was performing with Four Weddings And A Funeral scribe Richard Curtis as part of the Oxford Revue.

“And I just thought, I am in the presence of genius,” says Lloyd. As a BBC producer he went on to give Atkinson his big break in Blackadder.

But when presented with this proposal of his godfather-like influence, Lloyd waves it away. Opinion has no traction with a lover of facts.

“You can’t possibly put me in that corner — it’s ludicrous,” he says. “I’m flattered and humbled but there’s plenty of things I’ve done that have been unsuccessful.  I tried to start the world’s first 24-hour comedy radio station in the 1990s. I’ve been fired from four movies. I created the website Comedy Box in the mid-noughties [like a proto Funny or Die] but it was underfunded. When I look at my life backwards, all I can see is the huge failures in between glittering moments of Blackadder or the best bit of Spitting Image.”

Fact #3 – A potato has two more chromosomes than humans

Enough opinion. Back to Lloyd’s facts. His last appearance at the Fringe was in 1976 with his friend Douglas Adams and One Foot In the Grave creator David Renwick. It was a time and a place when a chromosome-rich potato would have been considered a delicacy.

“We liked the ropy nature of it,” he says. “There was a bit of pride in the fact that Edinburgh had the worst cuisine in western Europe. Lunch was a hot bridie that would squirt gravy down the shirt front.”

Aside from keeping the city’s laundrettes in business, Adams and Lloyd would go on to create something even more satisfying. In 1983 they published The Meaning of Liff, a collection of words to describe experiences in life that don’t have names. For example, abilene is the cool reverse side of the pillow. Lloyd still rates it as the best thing he has ever done.

It is also what has brought Lloyd back to Edinburgh with Liff of QI. Last year, to mark Adams’s 60^th birthday (he died in 2001), a party was held at the Hammersmith Apollo. In front of 3,000 people Lloyd took to the stage and for 15 minutes shared some new words he had coined to bring Liff into the 21^st century. For example, clavering is the action of pretending to text when alone and feeling vulnerable in public.

“It was fantastic ,” he says. “Thousands of people laughing their socks off. I came off stage thinking, I started off 40 years ago wanting to do this and went in the wrong direction, into production. I should have stood my ground and stayed in writing and performing.”

A producer friend in the audience approached him after the show and challenged him. If he could turn that 15-minute segment into an hour, she would take him to the Fringe. “I was so high from the performance I just said ‘yeah’,” he says. A new book, Afterliff, written with Jon Canter, is published in August.

Fact #4 – The sky is blue because of an effect known as the Rayleigh Scattering.

This was one of the first facts Lloyd learned from gorging himself on the Encyclopaedia Britannica back in the 1990s. He recommends the 1911 edition, “a mystical work of poetry”. The 1933 edition doesn’t sound bad either. “A fantastic adventure book for boys — every article is full of excitement and incident.”

As well as his new liffs and tales of working with British comedy royalty, his Edinburgh show will be rife with the same factoids that gave birth to QI.

“I don't want to sit there like a patrician blowhard going on about [adopts the croaky tones of an aged aristocrat] the old days of the 1970s, what a wonderful time they were,” he says. “It's not like a golf club speech. This is something I care about. It's about how the universe works, scientifically and practically.”

It should come as no surprise that facts are the basis of Lloyd’s favourite comedians. He feels “elevated” by the likes of Eddie Izzard and Billy Bailey, with their love of history and science writ large in their sets.

“Comedy is a mysterious thing,” he says, “but the best is truthful. Ultimately it speaks to the heart of what it means to be a human being. It doesn't sound funny, but it will be.”