John Lloyd has had a quite interesting career

So here is a question for John Lloyd, the creator of such television classics as Spitting Image, Blackadder and the hugely successful panel game quiz show QI.

“Who has won more Bafta Awards than anyone in the world except Dame Judi Dench?”

He knows the answer to this one, though he appears genuinely embarrassed to confirm that it is him. “I don’t know if it’s still me. But in any case it is a real anomaly.”

For it turns out despite his involvement in so much great comedy — he co-wrote the first series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, devised To the Manor Born for radio and Not the Nine O’Clock News for television — his great Bafta haul was for advertisements.

“Bafta held their first and only television awards for advertising in the early 1990s. I ended up picking up six awards on the same night,” he recalls.

But by the end of the night he was to share a similar fate to Bob Dylan in 1966. “The whole place was booing. It is not good being booed in the Royal Albert Hall, I can tell you. I ended up giving all the Baftas away.”

But you can understand why others might have felt a touch of envy. For when he began directing TV commercials, he was able to call on such pals as Rowan Atkinson (the Barclaycard ad led to the $160m grossing Johnny English film), Dawn French, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Harry Enfield, Alan Davies and John Cleese.

But his time directing ads came during the 14 years between Blackadder and QI, a period when he admits his struggle to replicate his early successes left him deeply depressed.

“I had enjoyed a flawless career and at the age of 38 I was picking up lifetime awards. I was married to the woman that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and had kids, money and a wonderful home. But I woke up one morning and I couldn’t see the point of anything. I just couldn’t understand what had happened.

“But success and money can become an addiction. It’s no different than heroin. It took me years to work that out.”

However, Mr Lloyd, who lives in the Wantage area, also used those years to read, filling gaps in his knowledge, which he found to be numerous despite having read law at Cambridge.

His fascination with “quite interesting” facts would lead to a very interesting lunch with Stephen Fry, in which Mr Lloyd bombarded the star with fact after fact. By the end, unable to take much more, Fry agreed to throw his weight behind the QI panel game.

Mr Lloyd’s new book 1,339 QI Facts was recently published, which includes such gems as the fact that the Statue of Liberty wears size 879 shoes, the first computer mouse was made of wood, Wagner always wore pink silk underwear and pigs suffer from anorexia.

Oxford seems to figure prominently too. For instance we learn the Dangerous Sports Club, founded in Oxford, was the group of people who invented modern bungee jumping.

Their members included Graham Chapman, of Monty Python fame, while we learn that David Cameron used to be president of the Oxfordshire Bee Keepers’ Association.

Somehow he has found time to pursue another project close to his heart, a new dictionary of things there should be words for but aren’t.

After Liff is the sequel to the earlier book The Meaning of Liff — and once again all the new definitions come from place names.

Place names near his Oxfordshire home were clearly inspirational. So the local Liffs include: ‘Didcot Parkway’, an extended period of struggle in which one fails to grasp something; ‘Hinton Waldrist’, one who persistently returns to a subject no one else is interested in; and Tinkerbush (as in Tinkerbush Lane in Wantage), one who is addicted to bikini waxes.

He had had enormous fun recycling names on signposts 30 years ago writing the Meaning of Liff, with his close friend Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, who died aged 49 in 2001.

The idea of a new edition, produced with his old university friend Jon Canter and dedicated to Adams, came after a Radio 4 broadcast The Meaning of Liff at 30. Listeners’ own submissions were invited, which produced a new, rich crop of Liffs.

Mr Lloyd revealed that one of his life’s great ambitions is to see just one of the hundreds of Liffs finding its way into the Oxford English Dictionary.

He already takes no little pleasure that Blackadder videos have found their way into history lessons at schools across the country. So he was unimpressed with Education Secretary Michael Gove’s recent assertion that “left-wing academics” were using Blackadder “to feed myths” about the First World War.

The row broke out ahead of centenary commemorations for the outbreak of the First World War as Mr Gove hit out at historians and TV programmes that denigrate patriotism and courage by depicting the war as a “misbegotten shambles”.

“Blackadder does not come from any political position,” he insists. “It comes from trying to empathise and understand what it was like to be in the trenches.

“Mr Gove’s comments did make me question whether he had actually seen the programme. Yes, the character Blackadder tries every trick to get out of being shot. But if you look at the last episode of Blackadder Goes Fourth they all do their duty at the end of the day, and die going over the top. The average person in the country does not see Blackadder as unpatriotic.”

Mr Lloyd recalled a letter sent to Rowan Atkinson from an elderly lady, who had lost her fiancee in the trenches, expressing her gratitude that someone had shown the extent of the sacrifice.

Another of his shows, QI, has also come under fire in recent weeks. When the BBC director of television Danny Cohne warned he was not going to tolerate any more panel shows with no women on them, QI was said to be one of the male-dominated offenders.

“There were 16 shows in the last series. Only one had an all-male panel. One episode had three women out of four panellists.

“But there have always been bloke shows. I think one difference is that most women do not like to be laughed at, while most guys do, especially after they have a drink in their hand. The preponderance of men in stand-up is enormous.”

And it emerges that Mr Lloyd is to soon further swell the ranks of male stand-ups. After decades of writing jokes and making boring things like politics and medieval history funny, he is looking forward to taking to the stage in Oxford himself as a funny man.

He had performed with the Cambridge Footlights sketch troupe but was sacked before they headed for Edinburgh, leaving him to put his efforts into writing and producing. But he undertook the first live comedy show of his career last year.

“My stand-up career began at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, when I did an hour-long one man show for the first time, aged 61.”

He is to follow this up on March 24 and 25 when he will be appearing at Childish Things, the annual Oxford charity concert that raises thousands of pounds for Helen and Douglas House.

Now, if only there were a word for a comedy great, finally emerging into the spotlight for a good cause.