Joanna Lumley is in the middle of nowhere, on an ancient trade route through Central Asia. There’s a dusty wind blowing, 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 and 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 the breathless excitement that 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.”
And 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),
