Sandi Toksvig is opening up about her recovery from a serious bout of pneumonia.
In December 2022, the former Great British Bake Off host was admitted to hospital in Australia, where she’d been on tour, after contracting bronchial pneumonia.
Once she was well enough to return to the UK, Sandi and her wife Debbie bought a patch of neglected woodland and helped restore it, which was documented in her new Channel 4 show Sandi’s Great British Woodland Restoration, airing on Thursday night.
Speaking to the PA news agency, Sandi said there was “no question” in her mind that her time spent in the woods “acted as a nurse to my improvement” during her period of ill health.
“When I first returned to the UK, I could hardly walk and needed two sticks to get about,” she recalled.
“I went out into the woods every day. First just for five minutes but gradually for longer and longer until one day I found I couldn’t remember where my sticks were and I was using a chainsaw.”
Bronchial pneumonia is a type of pneumonia featuring acute inflammation of the bronchi, the two large tubes that carry air from the windpipe to the lungs, and is often accompanied by inflamed patches in the nearby lobules.
Sandi’s illness meant the New Zealand leg of her Sandi Toksvig Live! tour – billed as “an evening of comedy and curiosities” with the QI presenter, featuring “little known facts”, “tall tales” and “really silly jokes” – had to be cancelled, so she could return home to focus on her recovery.
Sandi’s Great British Woodland Restoration airs tonight on Channel 4.
