Absolutely not: Joanna Lumley on why Ab Fab could never be made today

Having always played “nice-looking girlfriends or heroine-y type people”, being offered Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous 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.

“To have the freedom and the wildness to invent those two extraordinary women, I think Jennifer [Saunders, who wrote the show and played Eddie] is just a genius. And then, of course, as we settled into the saddle, it got madder and wilder, and we would just cry with laughter when we were rehearsing. We would just weep with laughter.”

The 78-year-old says there’s no chance the show, which ran for six seasons over 20 years from 1992, with a follow-up movie released in 2016, could be made today. “Because everything has now become unacceptable … a lot of the language would have been suspicious, particularly Eddie, who was forever saying the most appalling things about people, which was hysterically funny because she was such a ghastly character.

“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.”

Jerry Seinfeld made similar comments this week, observing that many of the jokes in his show wouldn’t fly in today’s climate.

We’re speaking ahead of Lumley’s tour of Australia in October for a series of shows in which she will talk about her roles (“I won’t be able to miss Patsy, I mean, I couldn’t leave her out of anything”), and her life, including her many travels and some of the things that have gone hideously wrong. The show is devised specifically for Australian audiences, although she has done a similar “life and times”-style tour of Britain.

Lumley will be interviewed on stage by producer Clive Tulloh, an old friend whom she met more than 30 years ago on the set of Ruby Wax’s The Full Wax; the audience will be able to submit questions. “I just want to make an entertaining show,” Lumley says. “It’s got to be good … [not] some half-hearted old woman scrabbling around.”

Anyone who’s seen her travel shows knows there’s no risk of that. A natural on screen, Lumley’s warmth and enthusiasm for people and places are palpable, as is a certain cheekiness which makes the shows a joy to watch. She is the same when we chat – generous and charming, the smile coming through in that distinctive voice. Her father said that even as a baby she had a grin from ear to ear, and she’s often said she has a naturally optimistic disposition.

Born in Kashmir the year before Indian independence, Lumley was travelling even as an infant. Her father’s work in the British Army meant the family moved around Asia, including Hong Kong and Malaysia, sailing to and from the UK regularly. “It was proper travel. And I think one was so used to suitcases, and packing up and moving on, that it got into my blood and I then began to feel rather restless if I wasn’t moving, rather panic-stricken if I could see a year stretching ahead with no foreign travel.”

In 1991, she made her first travel doco, In Search of the White Rajahs, which took her back to Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo, where the family spent time. She has gone on to make half-a-dozen such series, with destinations ranging from Greece, Japan and the Silk Road to the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Viewers often say, “I didn’t know you spoke Malay”, or whatever the language is in question, which she sees as the ultimate compliment. Interpreters are used and footage is edited to splice in her questions and interviewee responses, as well as her commentary.

“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.”

Her background has influenced her advocacy work, including being the public face of the campaign to secure the right to settle in Britain for the Gurkhas who fought with the British Army and the exiled Tibetan government and people. Over the years, she has also campaigned for the human rights group Survival International and various other charities; she is a patron of the Born Free Foundation and the Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust.

Last year, she revealed she has prosopagnosia, a rare condition also known as face blindness; sufferers are unable to recognise faces they’ve seen before, including friends and family. “This is why I kiss everybody,” she quipped on BBC Radio.

Lumley’s fascination with people shines through in the travel shows, as does her quest for knowledge. The poorer people are, the more generous they are, the more open-hearted, she observes. “There seems to be part of the human spirit which somehow makes the best of what you’ve got,” she says. “Quite often, people who have got more seem to be more disgruntled and more unhappy.

‘If you’re always looking at a screen, or TikTok, you’ll never see the bluebells coming up ...’

“I also think you ask for much less, which is why quite a lot of these people in much less developed countries – as some would call them, but in many ways more developed – people are so happy to sit in the shade of a tree, laughing and talking and gossiping,” Lumley says. “And we’re scurrying about with scowls on our faces wondering if our stocks and shares have lost money. We’ve got it slightly out of balance. We can redeem it but we’ve got to fight hard for it, I think, we can’t just hope it will wash over us. Because there’s a lot of bad in the world, as we’re seeing with all the conflict and the greed. The old, horrid enemies are rising up again: greed, religion, land grabbing, hostilities.

“Man is by nature a fairly warlike animal. No other animal is quite as hell-bent on horribleness as mankind. And so we must be aware of it and watch out for it like a hawk to stop it. Anything that brings more grievance and fury into the world should be stamped upon.”

Describing herself as a country girl, Lumley says her mother taught her and her sister about seasons and birdsong and trees and insects. “So I had a head start,” she says.

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. You never see those things ... So suddenly, all the glory – the whole purpose of being alive – is stripped away from you. And then you can’t understand why you feel morose and unhappy and unfulfilled all the time.”

She and her husband, acclaimed pianist, composer and conductor Stephen Barlow, live in London and have a “remote and quiet” house in the hills of Dumfriesshire, Scotland. It’s her second marriage; she wed Jeremy Lloyd (co-creator of Are You Being Served? and Allo! Allo!) in 1970 but they separated after just a few months. Her son, Jamie, whom she had at 21 and raised as a single mother, is a photographer, having followed in the footsteps of his father, Michael Claydon; she has two granddaughters.

Lumley tells a lovely story about when she and Barlow first met. “It wasn’t a kind of love match or anything – we were both with other people at the time. We clocked each other and then went off on our separate ways – and it wasn’t until at least eight years later that we came back in touch with each other. It was extraordinary.

“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. “That’s why I believe in angels and archangels, all sitting up there using us like puppets and going, ‘oh, let’s put her there and we’ll put him there’.”

They’ve now been together 37 years and are “extremely good friends”. “A lot of married couples will tell you this: they’re good friends, good companions. You like being with that person ... I’m sure that makes a huge difference.”

In the podcast, Joanna and The Maestro, released last year, she asks Barlow about classical music, a passion they share. The conversation ranges from their early interest in different genres – the Bee Gees, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin for him and for her, the Everly Brothers, Simon & Garfunkel and anyone who had a lovely voice, especially Elvis. It’s intimate and funny and a lovely insight into their relationship.

In one episode, she describes music as unknowable – a bit like life, really. “I think life is endlessly fascinating. It just throws out great tapestries every day and says, ‘Pick your way through that one, babe’, and so you do,” she says. “I think you’re learning until the end of your days.”

Having been a model in the 1960s, Lumley had first-hand experience in the fashion industry. She couldn’t have been more unlike the louche, work-averse Patsy – who didn’t even know her way to the office. Modelling allowed her to travel the continent, including Russia. In those days, it was a very different scene: models did their own hair and make-up, brought their own accessories, made their own way everywhere. “Now it’s a bit, ‘sweetie, darling’,” she says.

“[Back then] 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.

“All that stayed with me, so I’m pathologically prompt, I’m always on time because we used to have our pay docked if we were even two minutes late for a photoshoot. They were ruthless. So you learnt like a ballet dancer, you learnt exactly how to be – you never slouched around and said you didn’t feel like it today.

“What I love about the people in my world are the professionals. I love that, no matter what they’re doing – whether they’re cleaning a drain, cutting a lawn, putting on make-up or sewing clothes, or directing a film – I just want professionals. I’m fed up with people who just scam around and can’t be bothered.”

She might be describing Patsy, the chain-smoking, Bolly-swilling shopaholic who was the character she most loved playing. Highlights of her extensive theatre work include Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard and Hedda Gabler.

Recent TV roles include the hilariously rude mother in the TV series, Motherland, on Prime and a grieving matriarch in Fool Me Once on Netflix.

As well as being a Bond girl and once being touted as the first female Dr Who, in her breakout role she played a feisty, high-kicking secret agent named Purdey in The New Avengers; she describes her as “a little cross-faced, tough girl who was furious about men and just wanted to make her way in the world”.

“They wanted me to do it quite differently and to be a soppy girl with long hair skipping about in stockings, and I wished to play her as a proper little tomboy, so we had a bit of a tussle,” she says. “I did manage to get my hair cut, so she couldn’t have long, floppy hair. I did love it.

“But I think there’s also nothing nicer than hearing a place literally crying with laughter, audiences doubled up. There’s no happier sound in the world than laughter.”

Joanna Lumley’s Me & My Travels is in Brisbane on October 9; Melbourne on October 11; Adelaide on October 16; Perth on October 19; and Sydney on October 22.

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