Joanna Lumley is on an ancient trade route through Central Asia. A dusty wind blows, and the cameras are rolling on a holding shot of Joanna gazing across miles of camel-coloured mountains and wide desert skies. Then suddenly she turns, looks mischievously down the barrel of the camera and huskily says, huskily: “Whenever I wear stripes, it’s a tribute to Elvis Presley. The King is always with me.”
Cut! You can imagine the crew rolling about laughing. She’s a maestro of the one-liner, the unexpected (and unscripted) aside. And there will be plenty of those when she brings her one-woman show, Me & My Travels, Down Under in October.
One of the great comic actors of our age — perhaps best known as the iconic Patsy Stone in Jennifer Saunders’ Absolutely Fabulous, and as Purdey, the French-boxing spy with a bob-cut, in The New Avengers — Joanna is also an inveterate globetrotter and has now hosted upwards of 13 TV travel series.
“I’ve seen extraordinary things,” she says with breathless excitement, which makes her programs so engrossing. “I’ve met extraordinary people — kings and queens, great warlords, and great men. I’ve met oligarchs in Russia with gold flakes flickering through their vodka. But the people who really stand out are practically always those who’ve literally got nothing at all. Their kindness and generosity make me feel hopeful for the world.”
She goes on to describe a meeting with an elderly woman in Greece, the last remaining resident of her village, with whom she picked wild asparagus and shared a meal.
This type of immersive, empathic travel is in Joanna’s blood. Her maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Weir, was a British diplomat who voyaged through Persia (as Iran was known then), Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet, and became a great friend of the 13th Dalai Lama.
“He spoke 13 languages, including Tibetan,” she says. “He admired and adored” the cultures and countries he visited, “and he was much loved.”
Joanna’s mother, Thyra, spent at least part of her childhood on those diplomatic missions. Her father, James Lumley, was a second-generation army officer with the Nepalese Gurkha Rifles. Joanna was born in Kashmir, in northern India — land of lakes dotted with lotus flowers and houseboats, and snowcapped Himalayan peaks — in 1946, the final year of the British Raj.
Neither she nor her elder sister Aelene knew anything of the independence movement or partition, however. For a British child growing up in Asia, life was full of wonder and adventure.
“I was born with a kind of glass, not even half full, but brim full,” she tells The Weekly. “There were four of us in the family: mother, father, and my older sister. We all adored each other, and we were always travelling. So that seemed to be completely normal — to be packing up and going on because it was an army family.
“We travelled on troop ships because you never flew. You left your home and your friends you’d made at school and whatever you were used to, and you started travelling again. So you had to be self-sufficient.”
Joanna’s most precious childhood memories are of Malaysia.
“I adore storms,” she says, “and I think it’s because most of my childhood was in the Far East. In Malaysia, it rained every day, but when it was the monsoon season, God — the massive thunderbolts and electric skies and the thundering rain. I find that thrilling. And the drumming of rain on a tin roof — you will know this in Australia — there’s something thrilling about that sound.”
There was also a great deal of making one’s own fun. “Which depended hugely on reading books,” she says. “My sister and I read all the time — she more than me — and played games. We had little lead farmyard figures, and toys which all had characters and different dilemmas … We were happy as lambs. We were always dressing up and dreaming and telling stories.” The other constant was music. Her parents had an old, wind-up gramophone on which they played classical music. And once Joanna returned to England, when she was eight, she was fascinated by popular music as well. This brings us to the fact that she really does rather fancy Elvis Presley and still admires his classic Jailhouse Rock uniform of black jeans with a stripy black and white T-shirt.
“I completely adored him,” she says with a sparkle in her eyes. “Blue Suede Shoes was pretty much the first record I bought. I was about 10, and one of the greatest thrills of my life was to save up enough money — in those days, it was four shillings and sixpence — to buy a record … I’ve always utterly adored music. I feel music in my heart.”
Fresh out of convent school, Joanna found work as a model in London in the Swinging ’60s.
“The Swinging Sixties,” she muses, “were rather like the Roaring ’20s. I’m sure people were roaring some of the time, and some of us were swinging some of the time. I was a model from 1964 to 1967, and that was when it was Mary Quant, miniskirts, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and photographers like David Bailey. So it was all of that … But quite often you were also a bit scared.
“I’d been brought up in a boarding school in the country. I was a new girl in London, didn’t really know how to be. So you’re anxious about things — anxious to get there, anxious to be thin enough to be a model in those days. I mean, in those days, if you cut out a meal you could lose half a stone because we were just so small and thin.
“The scary bits were … I don’t know, just there was a sort of racing feeling about it then. There were drugs, though we didn’t do them. We couldn’t afford them … But if there was a reefer, a joint being passed around, they’d go, ‘oh fantastic’ [she takes an exaggerated Patsyesque toke], and you all pretended you were stoned out of your mind. You weren’t really.
“But there was a sort of odd undercurrent that the world was tumbling, and [you were] stumbling around. You were a young person, so you were doing all those new, young person things. Leaving school is the most frightening thing in the world. And also to be turned down. I started off as an actress in 1968 and to be turned down for everything. Trying your hardest, doing your best and being turned down and turned down. You have to get quite resilient.
“So you’ve got to remember the ’60s weren’t all shining and all of us with three sets of false eyelashes … although a lot of it was.” And she winks and breaks into a wonderful husky laugh.
With the struggles, there also came hard-won wisdom. In 1971, Joanna was a single mother caring for her four-year-old son, James, and working more than full-time in poorly paying live theatre, when she had what she’s variously described as “a complete nervous breakdown”, “a bit of a wobbler” and “burnout”. In any case, there were six months of crippling panic attacks.
“I had far too much on my plate,” she says now. “I was very poor. I had a little boy to look after. I had a cousin nearly dying in hospital. I was trying to rely on an unreliable au pair girl and having to go out and work in a play, which I was paid no money for, but it was eight shows a week. Everything had heaped upon me, and one morning, it just snapped. That’s how it happens with people. They just go, ‘Bang! I’m not going to do this anymore’. It was about six months before I got myself back together.”
And how did she do that? With careful planning, positive thinking and an iron will. “I thought this must never happen again,” she says simply, “so I must invent a way of detecting when overload is coming and a way of dealing with things when it all seems too much. I invented my own program, which I now realise is what a lot of counsellors give out.”
She realised she had to seek help when the pressure began to build and to have faith that there would always be someone there to lend a hand.
“I taught myself to ask for help, and I’ve tried to keep to that. When things are slithering out of control, if you’re a bit of a control freak, like I am — I have to be, because I’ve got so many things that I have to keep orderly — ask for help. And make a list. Even with quite huge problems, just putting them gently in order helps. And don’t be afraid sometimes to say, I’m sorry, I can’t manage that.”
She hasn’t suffered from anxiety since.
It’s nine in the morning in London, and Joanna is on a video call with The Weekly from a room that’s all books on tables and paintings on every surface of every wall. She laughs that she’s just given a little lecture on orderliness and her room perhaps errs on the side of dishevelment. It doesn’t really, but no one could accuse her of a minimalist aesthetic.
She’s a warm, giving conversationalist. She is also sharp. Thoughts follow one another in rapid-fire succession, every now and then punctuated by little parables or lessons she’s learned over 78 years of richly lived life.
As she’s grown older, she says, she’s learned a little about courage, and particularly about having the courage of her convictions. She’d certainly become more outspoken with age.
“Maybe you feel more responsible or more that it is your job to add your voice to things. To say, ‘Listen, do you know how wrong this is?’
“All my life I’ve never wanted to be one of the people who’s walked past. I’ve always wanted to get in and see if I can help. And of course, now one’s old, you can’t physically do hugely much. So maybe you stick to your convictions more … I try to do something that makes things better every day.”
One of the subjects on which she’s spoken out quite forthrightly is Tibet. The Chinese army marched into the Himalayan kingdom that her grandfather so loved in October 1950. They met with fierce resistance in the east, and the young 14th Dalai Lama tried to negotiate a settlement from the capital, Lhasa. But when negotiations failed, he escaped to India. Since then, the Chinese administration has controlled every aspect of life in Tibet.
Over the years, Joanna has spoken for a free Tibet at public rallies and conferences to the point where, she says, “I think I’m on China’s blacklist now.” She applied for permission to film a segment of her Silk Road Adventure series in China but was refused a visa and hasn’t tried to return since.
She speaks with such affection about her family’s travels in Tibet. Her great aunt “was very good at drawing, and wrote charming and brilliant observational diaries about the phenomenal medieval splendour and the generosity and the welcomes and the courtesies and the formalities of the great Tibetan court as it was then — just extraordinary and majestic.”
And then she looks me in the eye, so persuasively that one can see why the Chinese government might consider this near-octogenarian blonde bombshell a threat, and says: “Tell me this, Sam, if you have a language which is called Tibetan, if you have a different kind of religion if you have different artefacts, different culture, different everything, and your land is called Tibet, how are you suddenly Chinese?”
Joanna has met the Dalai Lama many times and says that “without getting too sort of gooey about it, he has an extraordinary quality about him. He is compassionate and humble and terribly funny.”
This brings her to another of the life lessons she’s learned, both from the Dalai Lama and from her father: kindness. “Putting other people first has never failed me. It makes me happy,” she says. “I say, don’t be too gloomy, don’t think about yourself too much. Look out and see if you can help.”
Joanna’s father also taught her to “never, never give up”, which is a lesson imbibed – along with the Bolly – by her most famous character, Patsy Stone. Audiences the world over related to her, not just as a hedonistic caricature, but for her depth and vulnerability, and the steely strength she’d honed through adversity.
Joanna remembers working with Jennifer Saunders over months and years on their characters. “You know that shot in Lawrence of Arabia when, from across the desert, Peter O’Toole sees a figure approaching. First of all, you can see it’s a dot, then you can see it’s clearly a man on a camel, and then as it gets closer, you begin to see which man it is and so on. It was a little like that … Oh, look, she’s coming into shape now, she’s coming into view. And Jennifer is always so close, so generous.
“We invented their backstories. Patsy had the most miserable upbringing, abandoned by her mother at birth practically, brought up as Eurotrash, lived like an alley cat, and was clearly quite smart but nobody paid her any attention, so she lived off her wits and her body. She was kindly taken in by Mrs Monsoon [June Whitfield] who was completely unfazed by Patsy — didn’t mind her even when she turned into a man.
“I swear to God, Jennifer and I could tell you the entire lives of Patsy and Edina from their birth right up to when they’re tottering and old. They’ll never die. But when they’re very, very old and bald and dribbling in wheelchairs, they’ll still be as happy as larks.”
And is there even a hint of Joanna in Patsy or Jennifer in Edina? “You can only be really funny if there’s some sort of basis in truth,” she says cryptically, “and there was a sort of symbiosis that was magic.”
There’ll be an AbFab TV reunion this year for Christmas, featuring Patsy and Edina, Bubble (Jane Horrocks) and Saffy (Julia Sawalha). But she doesn’t expect there’ll ever be another full-blown iteration of the show.
“I think Jennifer would have said if she was ever going to do another.”
Unlike Patsy — eternally, grittily single — Joanna’s love story with musician Stephen Barlow is the stuff of grand romance. They almost met at a friend’s place when Joanna was in her 20s, but Stephen was waylaid, and their paths diverged for a decade. They met briefly at a wedding when she was 31, he 23 and playing the organ. Both were involved with other people then, but she has described that first encounter as “like being hit by lightning”. Eight years later, both finally single, Stephen called one day out of the blue and invited himself for tea. They’ve been married for 38 years.
Does she believe fate brought them together? “I do,” she says. “You know, it wasn’t utterly predestined, but I felt there was something. I felt we were drawn. I felt the strings — you know, the chances of us not being together — were shortening … I mean, I’m a great believer in practically everything.”
Today they go their separate ways much of the time for work, as they will in October, when Joanna tours Australia, where she spent an unforgettable three weeks in her 30s on Ningaloo Reef. “I have Antipodean links,” she chuckles. Her Dutch grandmother lived for a time in New Zealand and she has spent time there as well.
Seeing the world fires her spirit, but she treasures her time at home. She and Stephen share a house in London, but they’re never more content than when they can ramble about for weeks at a time in their cottage in Scotland.
“I’m happiest,” she says, “on those summer mornings, getting up terribly early — it’s light at four o’clock — and going outside at about six o’clock in bare feet with a cup of coffee and just staring down these vast valleys with birds singing and dew on all the flowers and big meadows. We don’t have a smart garden or anything there. It’s just like being in the wilderness. I feel safe and completely happy there. Being three-quarters Scottish, maybe it’s in my bones somewhere. It’s magic. I just adore it.”
The other thing that brings her joy is “being with family — with Jamie, my son, Tessa, his wife, and the two grand-girls, Alice and Emily. I mean, they are just adorable. We’re almost never really all together, but whenever they come to see us, it’s magic, it’s golden days.”
Now, looking back on 78 extraordinary years, she says, “I think you’ve got to make magic every day”.
