In the countdown to her Australian tour, the grande dame of English comedy explains why the outrageous Patsy Stone is a creature of the past.
was a gift, says Dame Joanna Lumley. “Humour was always right at the bottom of everything - at school, in my family, I was the clown, the fool or the joker. Suddenly to be offered this part when I was 40 - it was paradise, it was just magic,” she says.
“Of course, Patsy wouldn’t be able to smoke, they were both drinking all the time, that would be ruled out. Not that you depended on those things, but their characters were defined by the way they lived and once you strip that away, it’s all gone.”made similar comments this week, observing that many of the jokes in his show wouldn’t fly in today’s climate.
“I’ve always understood how much we can communicate with each other, even if we don’t have a language, through our eyes, through our gestures, through our sympathetic acknowledgment of what they seem to be saying,” she says. “And I’ve never been afraid of dumb play, where you signal things and mime what you mean; people pick it up very, very quickly.
To her mind, one of the great malaises of the 21st century is technology, which has made us more insular. “Everybody carrying a mobile phone and looking down and in, rather than out and up,” she says, adding that in doing so we miss a lot of the true beauty of life.“Our springtime is just starting here but if you’re always looking at a screen, or TikTok, you’ll never see the bluebells coming up or the leaves budding and then notice the different trees coming out at different times.
“But I do have to say, in a rather sappy, girly way, that when I set eyes on him, I felt a strange sort of electric shock going through me. And I think in a prescient way, I thought, this person is going to be in my life. There didn’t seem any shadow of a doubt. Isn’t that odd? I couldn’t think how, because I was with somebody I loved very much.”At that second meeting, the timing was right.
“ you were independent and that was much, much more fun. You got much, much less money and so you would scrabble about and be on a Tube train lugging your stuff, walking the streets,” she says. “This is not a hardship, it’s just what the world is, it’s hard work.”Expectations were high and industry people could be “very savage”. It was nerve-wracking, she says. “If they didn’t think you looked right or if your hair was wrong or something, they could be quite cruel.
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