38 Saturday June 11 2022 | the times
News
Sandi Toksvig invites her audience to join in, including by conducting Ode to JoyIt’s not exactly stand-up, it’s more
than a comedy slide show, and calling
it a humorous lecture or twinkly-eyed
rally wouldn’t quite capture the faux-
freewheeling sense of fun that
Toksvig emits on stage. No, aged 64,
the Danish-born comic and writer
and broadcaster and activist with an
ultra-English energy worthy of Basil
Brush has carved out a space in
showbusiness that is all her own.
She is a political activist, the co-
founder of the Women’s Equality
Party, but not averse to a silly joke
about Plopp, the Swedish chocolate
brand. She dishes out a lot of “what I
did on my lockdown” slides and chat
about herself and her wife, Debbie,
yet remains charmingly commanding
whatever rabbit hole she goes down.
She is not without ego, detailing her
(impressive) lockdown achievements
even as she berates herself for not
being able to relax. Yet she invites
contributions from the crowd in a
way that turns this into a kind of
community event too.
The show is a magpie-minded mix
of erudition and feminism, daftness
and earnestness. Wearing an outsized
red shirt, Toksvig starts with aA marvellous magpie mix
of feminism and daftness
reminder of what we’ve just left
behind — do we really want to be
reminded of that? Yet she gets cheers
for observing that cycling and walking
around the City of London at night
during the pandemic was the first
time she had felt entirely safe on the
streets after dark. Cheers too for digs
at Zoom and laughs for seeing the
silly costumes she dressed her dog,
Mildred, in to stave off boredom.
A lifelong bibliophile, she shows us
slides of silly books she has bought
while also arguing that every one has
something to teach us — even if it
sometimes takes a while to find what
that something is. She marvels at
what goes into making a pencil and
hands out pencils to volunteers from
the crowd, and hosts a quiz to find the
smartest person in the room in order
to make them our new leader.
It is convivial, snarky, satirical,
disposable, warming, sometimes self-
effacing, sometimes self-
congratulatory, but informed always
by a sense of inquiry that chimes
entirely with her QI constituency,
even if she’s the first to admit the facts
she learns hosting that show don’t
always have real-world application.
Don’t try making a show like this
yourself, whatever it is. She ends it by
encouraging her audience to join her
conducting a snatch of Beethoven’s
Ode to Joy, and we follow her cue,
united in a momentary sense that you
can make anything work if you do it
with this sort of vim.
Touring to June 30,
sanditoksvig.comComedy Dominic Maxwell
Sandi Toksvig: Next
Slide Please
Royal Festival Hall, SE1
HHHHIRumours of the demise of Fernandina
Island’s giant tortoises have, it seems,
been greatly exaggerated.
More than a century after the last
one lumbered into view and long after
it was assumed its species had died out,
scientists have announced the discov-
ery of Fernanda the giant tortoise: poss-
ibly the world’s loneliest tortoise.
Genetic testing has confirmed that
the 50-year-old creature is the only
known living member of the species
Chelonoidis phantasticus, or “fantastic
giant tortoise”. The research, published
in the journal Communications Biology,
STEVE ULLATHORNEShell shock as world’s loneliest tortoise discovered
also resolved a longstand-
ing mystery.
The last known
member of the spe-
cies was found in- As it was the
only one of its
kind, it was as-
sumed that it
could have been
transplanted
from elsewhere
and so was not na-
tive to the island,
one of the Galapagos
islands. The new genet-
ics work confirms not only
that that is probably not
the case, but that the
1906 tortoise cannot
have been alone.
Fernanda, who
was found in 2019,
is estimated to be
well over 50
years old, mean-
ing either that
there must have
been a breeding
population on theisland, or that she was herself alive at
the time of the earlier discovery.
Stephen Gaughran, of the depart-
ment of ecology and evolutionary biol-
ogy at Princeton University, said: “We
saw — to my surprise — that Fernanda
was very similar to the one they found
on that island more than 100 years ago,
and both of those were very different
from all of the other islands’ tortoises.”
There are 13 other species of tortoise
on the Galapagos.
The question is whether there are
other members of her species on the
island, whose interior contains large
areas of unexplored wilderness. Heli-
copter surveys have found evidence oftortoises, including scat, that suggests
Fernanda may not be alone.
Adalgisa Caccone, of the department
of ecology and evolutionary biology at
Yale University, said: “The finding of
one alive specimen gives hope and also
opens up new questions, as many mys-
teries still remain.” She said they
wanted to work out the evolutionary
relationship to the other Galapagos
species, and perhaps find clues as to
how these ones colonised the island.
Most of all, they want to find others:
“Are there more tortoises on Fernandi-
na that can be brought back into captiv-
ity to start a breeding programme?”
Fernanda could yet get her Fernando.Tom Whipple Science Editor
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