John Lloyd

London-based director and producer John Lloyd is head of QI Commercials, a production company which aims to find new ways of producing branded content.

I've just given up smoking. After 40 years. I had got to the point where I was sick of being prey to something I couldn't control. I looked on the internet under "hypnosis and smoking" and emailed the first site I found.

To my astonishment, I'm 55. I've been married to Sarah for 17 years, and we have three children Harry (16), Coco (14) and Caitlin (11), known to those who love her as Booty. We live in a crumbling manor house on the edge of the Downs in Oxfordshire and we also have a flat on the river in Hammersmith.

I am not mistaken for John Lloyd the tennis player, but I have frequently been confused with John Lloyd, the British journalist. Just recently, a woman at a QI party insisted that it was he who had started QI. It was extraordinary. She wouldn't be swayed.

"The worst occasion was when I was on the Edinburgh Festival committee. They'd booked me a particularly nice room at the George Hotel, but when I got up there from the train station the receptionist told me I'd checked in half an hour earlier. I ended up in a cubbyhole in the basement filled with brooms and vacuum cleaners. I'd just lain down on the tiny single bed when the phone rang and a breathless woman said: "Hello Johnny, I'm waiting for you, what are you wearing?" I thought that was really a bit much.

My full name is John Hardress Wilfred Lloyd. They're incredibly old Lloyd names, going back to the 16th century, and they're given to the first-born in each generation.

When our son Harry was born, my wife and I couldn't agree on what to name him. I'd go to the maternity ward and her friends would be there drinking champagne, and whenever I came up with a suggestion they'd shriek with laughter and say it was a name fit only for a tortoise or a monkey. We finally settled on Hardress - Harry for short. When I rang my father to say we'd named our son after him, he said: "So pleased, what an honour, but you're a bloody fool, he'll be awfully teased at school." But these days there's such a huge range of names and cultures.

My childhood was peripatetic. My dad was the son of a harbour master in a tiny village in County Wexford, Ireland. He joined the Royal Navy at 13, and the sea was his life. As a career naval officer he (and we) moved continually from port to port around the world. I was nine and a half before I had really regular schooling.

I was a happy child but a miserable teenager. The worst thing that ever happened to me was winning a scholarship to the King's School, Canterbury. One was shut up, and dressed like a Victorian clerk. It was like a ghastly prison with violent teachers.

Nowadays, new headmasters ring or write periodically to say the school has changed a lot and will I come back and visit. But I don't think I could get past the gate. We were basically force-fed, with nothing more than the information necessary to get through a scholarship or exhibition for Oxbridge. We got there, but with no idea about how to learn without being supervised or beaten.

Most education hasn't really moved on since the Victorians. In essence, it consists of the system agreeing on what 'facts' are 'important' and getting the children to repeat back to the teachers what they have just heard. A truly good education would allow the child's natural curiosity to flourish and expand naturally, following non-linear paths of exploration in which the teacher would learn almost as much as the child. This is what great teachers already do - get the children to teach themselves. At QI, we say that interesting questions are much more illuminating than supposedly 'correct' answers.

There is only one thing to be said on the subject of bringing up children: be kind. All children need is love. Hitting a child for any reason should be a criminal offence. A lot of crap is talked about 'boundaries'. Love should be boundless, and if children are loved unreservedly, boundaries are unnecessary, and punishment certainly so.

I started doing advertising because someone asked me to. I was fed up with being an overworked, underpaid public servant [at the BBC]. It had got to the point where my girlfriend had given me the sack because I was so tired and angry all the time, and I thought: "Fuck this, I'm sick of working for the public good." I was hooked on directing after the first two hours of standing on a set. I also found that the intellectual challenge of finding an honest but original way to sell the product was fascinating.

A lot of directors in TV think they are Alfred Hitchcock, and very few of them are. They're just jumped-up floor managers who think they're frightfully handsome and important, so they turn up on a set ill-prepared and then have to work everything out on the spot. That makes the rest of the crew very angry.

The ads I am most proud of are Barclaycard, with Rowan Atkinson; Boddingtons; Red Rock and Worthington. I don't have a Barclaycard, as it happens, due to an argument over a decimal point on a bill for lunch at Zilli's about 15 years ago.

It's very important for me to believe in the product. I certainly wouldn't do an ad for something that I disliked, or believed to be unpleasant or untrue in some way. I'm not going to name the products that I've turned down because I wouldn't put the stuff in my mouth. Living as ethically as you can is important to me.

That said, it's true that advertising sails very close to the wind a lot of the time because it bends things out of shape. People look at TV and wonder why they're not living like that. But it's part of a generally materialistic culture. We're not responsible for it.

As standard advertising goes down the plug hole because of new technology, we have to find other ways of developing synergies between things like the internet, TV, podcasting and radio. Take mobile phones. Viewers should be able to connect with the QI database, so that they've got information right there; if you're a best man, you instantly have 40 quotes.

One of our ideas at QI is to think of a big brand that might be interested in sponsoring something, and then we create the best programme for them - rather than the other way around. At the moment, sponsors attach themselves to programmes parasitically, and you often wonder what on earth the connection is.

Like very large numbers of people, I hardly ever watch TV. However, I would say it is patronising, opportunist, dispiriting and generally led by people without an ounce of vision.

The hallmark of British comedy used to be that it was a) jolly and b) imaginative and slightly mad. It has now become painfully realistic and rather uncomfortable.

I'm always taken aback by how well Blackadder has stood the test of time. Of course, the not-so-good bits stand out like sore thumbs to me, but the good bits are really damn good - sometimes for as much as 10 minutes at a stretch. Not The Nine O'Clock News was much more erratic, but there are some sketches that are still joyously funny today.

Is there a certain sort of person who likes Mr Bean? I try not to stereotype people. Especially not Norwegians or nine-year-old children.

Spitting Image was the most difficult programme to produce. It was unmitigated hell for four years of my life and nearly killed me. I'm still not sure whether it was worth it.

No British government has been hated with such venom as Mrs Thatcher's administration. In the early 1980s, in my opinion, this country came as close to revolution as at any time since the 1830s. I've come to believe that while Spitting Image had no effect one way or another on the government's popularity, it had a considerable effect on its longevity. The programme acted as a safety valve, allowing people's fury to be sublimated in laughter. This was entirely unintentional.

I think Tony Blair's okay. He's the first prime minister in my lifetime that I recognise as being in any way of the same species. Churchill, Eden, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major - I can't imagine having a normal conversation with any of them. On the other hand, the war in Iraq is a catastrophic blunder and shows an extraordinary lack of judgement. I say this as someone who believed that the Falklands war, though equally insane tactically, was actually right, as was the first Gulf war.

No political party fits my own philosophy, though the Liberals come closest, being relatively green and easily the most original thinkers. I'm left-of-centre on things like crime and social issues, but I don't fall anywhere within the scale on economics. All modern societies, from Marxist to Reaganite, hold that money is the main cement of human affairs. I'm with the Pygmies, who have no hierarchies, no personal possessions to speak of and solve their rare disputes by means of discussion and the use of laughter.

I read mainly dictionaries and encyclopaedias, and especially the footnotes. I want to know how the universe works and why we are here. Reading novels doesn't cut to the chase fast enough for me.

My favourite internet sites are Google. Amazon. Wikipedia.

People in advertising tend to make more of a meal about how tough their job is than, say, sewage workers or bus drivers - or television people, for that matter. There are a handful of exceptionally talented people in advertising whom I take very seriously indeed. They make at least as much difference to the way we think and act as any politician, for example, and probably give a great deal more pleasure into the bargain.

I worked out about 20 years ago that the important thing is to do what you know to be right. And if you can work out what that is, you have to live with the consequences of most people doing the opposite.

The fact that marriage is extremely taxing is insufficient grounds for running away from one. Marriage, like life, is a test. You get what you need, not what you think you want.

I am astonished and baffled by the amount of money spent and earned in the advertising industry. The great majority of the money is wasted. Am I ashamed? Not personally. The ads I make are generally very effective. In a more religious age, I would have been burned as a heretic. According to orthodox science, the laws of physics are immaterial, immutable, universal and eternal. I believe in them. I also believe that the universe is benevolent, even if it doesn't always look that way from this angle.

Judging people is a mistake because you don't have all the information.

Regret is futile. I fart in its general direction.

What gives me real pleasure is... lunch in Italy topped off with an espresso and a grappa.

In a perfect world I would... do what I want, not what I feel I should - and be free of fear.

If I could relive my life I would… realise that things are much, much more possible than one is led to believe. People become trapped - unnecessarily so.

In the end, what really matters is to live with integrity. To love without hope of reward.

Where do I want to be buried?