Joanna Lumley forced to pay 'bribe money' in 'lawless and terrifying' encounter

She’s probably tired of hearing it, but Dame Joanna Lumley is someone who truly deserves the title of “national treasure”. A comedy icon for the ages in Absolutely Fabulous and an acclaimed actress in gritty dramas such as Fool Me Once and Finding Alice , Joanna is also a respected travel presenter who has introduced viewers to most corners of the globe via her heartwarming, witty TV travelogues (you can catch her on ITV travelling along the River Danube next March, as she brews beer with nuns and stays at King Charles’ retreat in Transylvania).

Currently on her first tour of Australia with the show Me & My Travels , the delightful Joanna, 78, has plenty of life experiences to open up about — as she proved to a spellbound audience when she spoke at The Capitol Theatre in Horsham last month. She enthralled fans with tales of Ab Fab, travel adventures (including drying her knickers in the car), and much more besides.

One of Joanna’s most iconic roles remains the chain-smoking boozehound Patsy Stone. And Joanna says, of reuniting with the cast for a special BBC Radio 4 show this Christmas, ”We’re doing one of those Kirsty Wark reunion shows on Radio 4. Instead of Desert Island Discs they used to have something called The Reunion . It will probably be called Ab Fab: The Reunion .”

Sadly for fans, the star maintains that pal Jennifer Saunders decided there would be no more on-screen Ab Fab, especially following the death of Dame June Whitfield, who played Edina’s mother — but the radio reunion was special. Joanna reflects, “I must say, being back in the same room as Julia Sawalha, Jane [Horrocks] and Jennifer [Saunders] was… We have all gone down different paths but the second we get back together again you can see that weird electricity — and we know exactly who we were. We know how Bubble would react and how Saffy would disapprove or what Edina would suggest or what Patsy would say.”

Sharing how she got her career-changing role in Ab Fab , Joanna puts it down to comedian Ruby Wax. “Ruby came to see me in a play in London and said, ‘I think you are very funny. I would like you in my show.’ Ab Fab was, amazingly, a huge success. Who thought awful women in Harvey Nicks would be a success? Who really cares about that?!” Care they most certainly did, and the series was even made into a film in 2016. Of her first slightly frosty meeting with Jennifer Saunders at the BBC, Joanna remembers the star being “very shy”, joking that she has “warmed her up a bit” in the intervening years.

“There she was sitting on this chair. I said, ‘Can I call you Jen?’ and she said, ‘No.’ It was quite a bad beginning. When I was offered the part, I turned to my agent and said, ‘Can you get me out of this, because Jennifer is too polite or too shy to say that it’s going to be a complete nightmare.’” Thankfully, Joanna says the first thing she did was to make Jennifer laugh — and the rest is history.

Describing how she envisaged her now much-loved character, she explains, “I thought Patsy might have had a lot of organs removed… I didn’t think she had eaten much, and she had a deep voice from hanging out with the Rolling Stones. Patsy claims she was once in a cupboard with Paul McCartney, but I don’t think Paul would have agreed to that.”

As for Joanna’s equally successful career in travel presenting, she admits she has some specific requests when it comes to her rider — but she’s no diva. “When you are a huge star, you have riders… Some have a basket of kittens they can pat during the interval. Somebody else had a case of champagne put into the boot of her car before she’d do anything at all. My rider? I always said I just need enough to eat and drink.”

She adds, “When you go to faraway lands where they are not expecting a film crew, people make the most wonderful things for you. They might be living in a hut and as poor as you can imagine, but they will make you a dish of yoghurt which you have to eat.”

Joanna also asks the crew to avoid boats. “Sometimes lakes in places like Kashmir are used as lavatories. We were filming there once and the next day I was doubled over, saying, ‘I don’t think I can film,’ and nobody can stand in for me. That night I had been up every half an hour rushing to the loo.” Offering up another hilarious insight, Joanna also explains how she improvises when she doesn’t have time to change or wash her clothes properly. “You can’t wash your undies, so sometimes when we’re driving, you will see a pair of pants flying out of the window to dry.”

The adventurous actress goes to some unusual places on her travels (her favourite is the Sistine Chapel in Rome) and she’s had hairy moments, such as the time she was filming in Haiti and was ambushed but, thankfully, had a beefy bodyguard with her. “We felt unsafe in Haiti. We’d been advised not to go there to make the film we were doing. It is utterly lawless and frightening. We got to the airport and had to pay bribe money just to get off the plane.”

She continues, “I had an immense bodyguard. He was 6ft 10in and he could hardly get into our car, but when he got out and unfolded himself to these skinny boys hoping to get money off us, he said, ‘Clear all this up.’ They’d put burning tree branches across the road to make us stop.”

She admits that her travel shows aren’t as glamorous as they sometimes seem, but she says that she’s “a rufty tufty person”, so it doesn’t bother her. “Some of the loos I have been to defy description,” she laughs. “They are just holes in the ground, or long drops with a seat, on a mountaintop.” She laughs, ”I have seen cockroaches the size of terriers crawling across the floor, rain dripping through roofs and lights you cannot turn off. I have slept on a deck of a ship on a bit of cloth. You just have to get over it and do it!”

Her next adventure, coming to ITV in March 2025, will see Joanna stay at King Charles’ surprisingly modest guesthouse in Transylvania. “It is the most extraordinary old farmhouse with small cottages, which he rescued. Because he loves the wildness, everything is butterflies, bees and birds. You can book it! We had no idea, and booked it for a night. It was interesting as it was quite normal — nothing smart about it. It had old bits of furniture and home-cooked, humble food. It was really quite lovely.”

Many celebrities with Joanna’s level of success would be putting their feet up at this stage of life, but it seems the star, who is married to conductor Stephen Barlow, has no intention of doing anything of the sort. Opening up to the theatre audience about how she feels when people ask how long she thinks she can go on, she reflects, “The funny thing is, we thought about this in Ab Fab. ‘How long can Eddy and Patsy go on?’ We thought they might go into a care home and Saffy might look after them. “I remember we once dressed up as old people. We knocked on doors in the BBC and said ‘hello’ — the staff didn’t recognise us and said, ‘Can you just shut the door please?’ The more people didn’t recognise us, the more hysterical we became!”

Reflecting on her early days as a model, where she describes herself as “bottom of the pile” in the entertainment world as she tried to crack the acting game, Joanna explains simply, “I just wanted to do good work, as much as I could do, with good people, if that was possible.” She may have come a long way since then, but the absolutely fabulous Joanna Lumley’s philosophy doesn’t seem to have changed that much at all…