My wife works in mental health with the queer community and the figures are shocking for a young LGBT person committing suicide, or attempting suicide, not because they feel bad about who they are, but because of the way society stigmatises them. It centres around five elderly ladies and a young carer in a retirement home which is about to be flooded by a storm. The biggest spaces inside the building are in the solid basement, whose walls are almost 2m (6ft 7in) thick. This was never a house meant for enjoyment," says Mr Fumero, standing inside the turret-like construction that dominates the upper level of Casa Winter, equipped with an unusually large fuse box. Toksvig began her comedy career at Girton, [14] where she wrote and performed in the first all-woman show at the Footlights.

Dr Diaz Benitez says that besides the frequent use of local ports by tanker ships that would rendezvous with U-boats at distant, secret locations, German submarines docked at Las Palmas six times between May and July of 1941, prompting an official complaint by an exasperated British consul on the island of Gran Canaria.It was no secret he was looking to build something on the island so it’s not surprising that, considering his links to the Nazi party, these rumours started to emerge,” he said. In 1993, Toksvig wrote a musical, Big Night Out at the Little Sands Picture Palace, for Nottingham Playhouse, co-starring with Anita Dobson and Una Stubbs. Dr Diaz Benitez believes that Winter used connections with the Nazi authorities in the 1930s to secure investment for the building of the harbour at Morro Jable and a plan to electrify the island of Fuerteventura and build a cement factory.

In her late 50s, she lost a significant amount of weight on medical advice and credits this with giving her the confidence to go back to television. On 16 March 2017, she was announced as the new co-presenter of The Great British Bake Off on Channel 4, alongside Noel Fielding. She was defeated in the first round of voting, achieving 1,179 first-place votes out of about 8,000 cast. Hitler's Canary, ultimately, is about the courage and heroism of ordinary citizens in a time of danger and strife.

In the chaos of World War II, Ruth, Edek and Bronia are separated from their parents, and left alone to fend for themselves, hiding from the Nazis in the ruins of their city. This book is apparently based on Sandi Toksvig’s father and how he remembered growing up in Denmark during the Nazi occupation. Partly autobiographical, this is first of the internationally acclaimed trilogy by Judith Kerr telling the unforgettable story of a Jewish family fleeing from Germany at the start of the World War II. Under Franco, Spain declared itself to be strictly neutral at the outbreak of WW2, but supplied minerals, volunteer soldiers and, in places such as the Canary Islands, logistical support to Nazi forces.

Hitler had planned to build a new Reich in South America after his hopes for Nazi domination of Europe were thwarted by the Allies. Notably, Toksvig states "Wikipedia is a marvelous idea and the idea is that it is a crowd sourced encyclopedia of knowledge, what a fantastic notion.

Casa Winter, which sits on volcanic rock on Fuerteventura’s rugged southern tip, is also rumoured to have been used to help co-ordinate deadly U-boat attacks on allied ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Toksvig was warned she might never work again, and the family faced death threats and had to go into hiding. But Lopesan, the company that now owns Casa Winter, told the BBC that it did not intend to develop the site as a resort, but rather "turn it into an interpretation centre".