Lucker
04-10-2010, 07:09 AM
Let's stand and raise our glasses to Joanna Lumley .
This woman has got under the skins of every sensitive man and woman in Team GB .
Initially we saw her as a deliciously attractive , if not gorgeous , young actress whose charm lay also in her undoubted intelligence allied to elegance and old fashioned good manners ---- al of which singled her out for special attention .
Since then she has shown us that she is tip top actress and a remarkably funny comic actress .
She also occasionally fronts documentary films which , without exception , are brilliant and the more so because of her acute perception and compassion .
Latterly she has championed the cause of a certain segment of soldiers who were being treated unfairly and when JL gets involved , Ministers of the Crown hide and our Prime Minister makes time to see her AND then implement appropriate follow -up action .
Here she is in general interview .
She is blessed with great talent and is the type of rare person who can shame a society into righting wrongs and reconsidering attitudes and priorities .
Three cheers for a National Treasure .
( Makes Sarah Palin look a pale fifth rate imitation )
'I think our politicians should be paid top dollar, and be absolutely scorchingly good,” says Joanna Lumley, in that unmistakably Lumley-ish way of hers, bursting with the zest of a Famous Five adventure.
“The fact that heads of TV stations get eight times more than the Prime Minister — I don’t know if that’s right. I think politicians should be the boiling people, because they represent us.”
Boiling is an adjective she uses in a lot of different senses – in recent interviews she has applied it to children who watch The X Factor, the young Martin Amis and the war in Darfur – but here she means she wants MPs who are robust, dynamic, furiously bright. Well, MPs will need to be all those things, if they are ever again confronted by a rampaging Lumley.
Meeting at the offices of ITV in central London, we are here to discuss the former Absolutely Fabulous star’s new travel series, Joanna Lumley’s Nile (which starts on Monday), but talk inevitably moves on to other subjects.
Shortly before our interview, Kevan Jones, the Defence Minister, criticised Lumley for what he called her “deathly silence” since the success of her campaign a year ago to give more Gurkha veterans the right to settle in Britain. “I don’t know what he was talking about,” says Lumley. “He was speaking with parliamentary privilege, which apparently means you can say whatever you like and nobody can get back at you.”
Mr Jones and Gordon Brown have both since apologised for the remarks.
Regrettably, even a “top dollar” salary would not be enough to tempt Lumley to become an MP. Last May, David Cameron was asked by Andrew Marr if he would like to see “your Joanna Lumleys” as Tory MPs. Cameron said: “Yes, we’ve got to open up the talent that is available and this is an opportunity to do that.” So did he take that opportunity?
No, she says, no party has asked her to stand as an MP. “They were all very civil to me — Liberal, Labour, Conservatives, all of them — during the Gurkha things but I think it’s safe to say none of them wooed me.”
She laughs her dark, breathy laugh. Even if she were “wooed”, she adds, she wouldn’t want to be an MP – she says she isn’t a “party person”.
Although she has donated £1,000 to Caroline Lucas, the leader of the Greens who is standing in Brighton, she politely declines to say which way she will vote on May 6, or whether she would rather have Brown or Cameron as PM. Nor does she fancy standing as an independent.
“God bless Esther Rantzen, but I don’t know the power of independents … If I’d wanted to be a politician, I’d have begun my life as one. It’s lovely just to be able to wander in and out of their sphere, and occasionally stand up and be counted.”
You can see why she makes MPs quake.
On the one hand she is attack-proof: warm, chummy, almost preposterously well-mannered (“Now Michael, I simply can’t let you leave without a lovely bun. Or what about one of these biscuits? They’re so lovely and I bet you didn’t have any lunch …”).
On the other hand, beneath the charm, she is tough. Her smile flashes like a blade. She has a forthright opinion on every topic you fling at her (shows such as Britain’s Got Talent breed a “playground mentality”; humans, due to overpopulation, are a “plague” on the planet). She is not someone you can interrupt easily. Let’s say she did run the country. What would she do?
First page of the Lumley manifesto: education. “I’d knock out this idea that everybody goes to university. That’s crazy. What was wrong with polytechnics, and people having apprenticeships? This country doesn’t run on brainboxes, it runs on people who make car tyres and jam and things like that.”
She wants pupils to be “taught, taught, taught, taught, taught” how to keep clean, bring up children, get on with their neighbours and how to read — “so that when you’ve left school you can go on learning. Not just on the web tapping in 'When did Napoleon die?’ That’s not really history. Learn how to learn, in a way. And then I think we will have such a lovely society because it will be full of energy again.”
Her second target would be the elderly. “We’re all being kept alive forever and ever, we’re all as fit as fleas, but we still haven’t worked out the endgame — how useful old people are, how wise, how much work they could be doing. They could be adoptive grannies, they could be the most wonderful care system for children when the school day is ended. Before their parents have come home from work, how lovely to have a million grannies making them apple pie and helping with their homework.”
Lumley, 63, is a grandmother herself, to Alice, six, and Emily, five. They are the daughters of James, the son she had in the 1960s with Michael Claydon, the photographer, who was her boyfriend. Since 1986 she has been married to Stephen Barlow, the conductor.
Alice and Emily were on her mind during her 4,000-mile journey down Africa for her new series on the Nile. In the poorest areas she was distressed to meet seven-year-old children who spent their days fetching water.
“I can’t imagine Alice and Emily struggling along on their own for 12 hours on the edge of precipices with 45 goats. One of the crew said, 'Some of the clothes the children are wearing, you wouldn’t wash your car with.’ It was poor beyond belief.”
But there is also a lot of joy and energy in the series. In one episode, Lumley celebrates St George’s Day with some exuberant Ethiopians (he is their patron saint, too) and she wonders why the English are so reluctant to take similar pride in their country. St George’s Day is less than a fortnight away and it will pass more or less ignored. Lumley offers a solution.
“I’d like to see Shakespeare celebrated. His birthday is the same day as St George’s Day. Something like 1,300 new words came from Shakespeare, and English is the master language of the planet now. That’s largely because of the Americans, but nevertheless English is something fantastic.
“Our country is, I hope, so diverse and welcoming to people who aren’t born of English blood but are British. So anything to make people proud to feel that they belong to this culture is good. It’s just to say, 'This is a fine place and don’t hang your head because these are some of the things we’ve got.’”
She is, as is surely plain by now, a persuasive and impassioned speechmaker to rival anyone we will hear at the hustings in the next four weeks. She would never say so herself, of course.
“There’s a danger with these platforms I get put on, where one’s quoted [in the press],” she says. “I haven’t really earned this position in society to be able to yap on.”
She flashes a wicked smile. “But yap on I do.”
This woman has got under the skins of every sensitive man and woman in Team GB .
Initially we saw her as a deliciously attractive , if not gorgeous , young actress whose charm lay also in her undoubted intelligence allied to elegance and old fashioned good manners ---- al of which singled her out for special attention .
Since then she has shown us that she is tip top actress and a remarkably funny comic actress .
She also occasionally fronts documentary films which , without exception , are brilliant and the more so because of her acute perception and compassion .
Latterly she has championed the cause of a certain segment of soldiers who were being treated unfairly and when JL gets involved , Ministers of the Crown hide and our Prime Minister makes time to see her AND then implement appropriate follow -up action .
Here she is in general interview .
She is blessed with great talent and is the type of rare person who can shame a society into righting wrongs and reconsidering attitudes and priorities .
Three cheers for a National Treasure .
( Makes Sarah Palin look a pale fifth rate imitation )
'I think our politicians should be paid top dollar, and be absolutely scorchingly good,” says Joanna Lumley, in that unmistakably Lumley-ish way of hers, bursting with the zest of a Famous Five adventure.
“The fact that heads of TV stations get eight times more than the Prime Minister — I don’t know if that’s right. I think politicians should be the boiling people, because they represent us.”
Boiling is an adjective she uses in a lot of different senses – in recent interviews she has applied it to children who watch The X Factor, the young Martin Amis and the war in Darfur – but here she means she wants MPs who are robust, dynamic, furiously bright. Well, MPs will need to be all those things, if they are ever again confronted by a rampaging Lumley.
Meeting at the offices of ITV in central London, we are here to discuss the former Absolutely Fabulous star’s new travel series, Joanna Lumley’s Nile (which starts on Monday), but talk inevitably moves on to other subjects.
Shortly before our interview, Kevan Jones, the Defence Minister, criticised Lumley for what he called her “deathly silence” since the success of her campaign a year ago to give more Gurkha veterans the right to settle in Britain. “I don’t know what he was talking about,” says Lumley. “He was speaking with parliamentary privilege, which apparently means you can say whatever you like and nobody can get back at you.”
Mr Jones and Gordon Brown have both since apologised for the remarks.
Regrettably, even a “top dollar” salary would not be enough to tempt Lumley to become an MP. Last May, David Cameron was asked by Andrew Marr if he would like to see “your Joanna Lumleys” as Tory MPs. Cameron said: “Yes, we’ve got to open up the talent that is available and this is an opportunity to do that.” So did he take that opportunity?
No, she says, no party has asked her to stand as an MP. “They were all very civil to me — Liberal, Labour, Conservatives, all of them — during the Gurkha things but I think it’s safe to say none of them wooed me.”
She laughs her dark, breathy laugh. Even if she were “wooed”, she adds, she wouldn’t want to be an MP – she says she isn’t a “party person”.
Although she has donated £1,000 to Caroline Lucas, the leader of the Greens who is standing in Brighton, she politely declines to say which way she will vote on May 6, or whether she would rather have Brown or Cameron as PM. Nor does she fancy standing as an independent.
“God bless Esther Rantzen, but I don’t know the power of independents … If I’d wanted to be a politician, I’d have begun my life as one. It’s lovely just to be able to wander in and out of their sphere, and occasionally stand up and be counted.”
You can see why she makes MPs quake.
On the one hand she is attack-proof: warm, chummy, almost preposterously well-mannered (“Now Michael, I simply can’t let you leave without a lovely bun. Or what about one of these biscuits? They’re so lovely and I bet you didn’t have any lunch …”).
On the other hand, beneath the charm, she is tough. Her smile flashes like a blade. She has a forthright opinion on every topic you fling at her (shows such as Britain’s Got Talent breed a “playground mentality”; humans, due to overpopulation, are a “plague” on the planet). She is not someone you can interrupt easily. Let’s say she did run the country. What would she do?
First page of the Lumley manifesto: education. “I’d knock out this idea that everybody goes to university. That’s crazy. What was wrong with polytechnics, and people having apprenticeships? This country doesn’t run on brainboxes, it runs on people who make car tyres and jam and things like that.”
She wants pupils to be “taught, taught, taught, taught, taught” how to keep clean, bring up children, get on with their neighbours and how to read — “so that when you’ve left school you can go on learning. Not just on the web tapping in 'When did Napoleon die?’ That’s not really history. Learn how to learn, in a way. And then I think we will have such a lovely society because it will be full of energy again.”
Her second target would be the elderly. “We’re all being kept alive forever and ever, we’re all as fit as fleas, but we still haven’t worked out the endgame — how useful old people are, how wise, how much work they could be doing. They could be adoptive grannies, they could be the most wonderful care system for children when the school day is ended. Before their parents have come home from work, how lovely to have a million grannies making them apple pie and helping with their homework.”
Lumley, 63, is a grandmother herself, to Alice, six, and Emily, five. They are the daughters of James, the son she had in the 1960s with Michael Claydon, the photographer, who was her boyfriend. Since 1986 she has been married to Stephen Barlow, the conductor.
Alice and Emily were on her mind during her 4,000-mile journey down Africa for her new series on the Nile. In the poorest areas she was distressed to meet seven-year-old children who spent their days fetching water.
“I can’t imagine Alice and Emily struggling along on their own for 12 hours on the edge of precipices with 45 goats. One of the crew said, 'Some of the clothes the children are wearing, you wouldn’t wash your car with.’ It was poor beyond belief.”
But there is also a lot of joy and energy in the series. In one episode, Lumley celebrates St George’s Day with some exuberant Ethiopians (he is their patron saint, too) and she wonders why the English are so reluctant to take similar pride in their country. St George’s Day is less than a fortnight away and it will pass more or less ignored. Lumley offers a solution.
“I’d like to see Shakespeare celebrated. His birthday is the same day as St George’s Day. Something like 1,300 new words came from Shakespeare, and English is the master language of the planet now. That’s largely because of the Americans, but nevertheless English is something fantastic.
“Our country is, I hope, so diverse and welcoming to people who aren’t born of English blood but are British. So anything to make people proud to feel that they belong to this culture is good. It’s just to say, 'This is a fine place and don’t hang your head because these are some of the things we’ve got.’”
She is, as is surely plain by now, a persuasive and impassioned speechmaker to rival anyone we will hear at the hustings in the next four weeks. She would never say so herself, of course.
“There’s a danger with these platforms I get put on, where one’s quoted [in the press],” she says. “I haven’t really earned this position in society to be able to yap on.”
She flashes a wicked smile. “But yap on I do.”