Joanna Lumley Quotes

Buy an atlas and keep it by the bed—remember you can go anywhere.

Hi,” he said awkwardly. She nodded. “Hello.” She sounded like Joanna fucking Lumley. Posh, but like she’d just finished screaming someone’s name.

A well-rounded education is what a child needs, not paper qualifications.

London, a distant Camelot, flickered and beckoned: it seemed impossibly alluring and terrifying and therefore attractive beyond measure.

If I sounded like Joanna Lumley, I'd never shut up!

mysteries. Similarly, Bobby Charlton, the third guest on the same show, occupies a special place in our hearts. Not only was he one of the greatest footballers of all time, and certainly assured of his place in any England team of any era, but his gentle, modest way and the dignity of his bearing make him a role model for any sportsman. That many of the modern players choose to ignore his example (although, it’s possible most of them don’t know who he is) is both their loss, and their shame. With the lovely Joanna Lumley I fronted the sixtieth anniversary of BAFTA at the New London Theatre. There was the usual crowd of autograph-hunters outside. Nowadays, they constitute two different categories – those who do it for love and those who do it for money. The latter is the largest category – by far. These

. You start school as a baby aged five and leave aged seventeen going on sixty. Then you start again in the wide, wide world as a green and innocent beginner, behaving like a child, with new boyfriends and hair in bunches and immature thoughts about how the world should be run (‘Let’s share everything! Let’s stay up all night and not pay taxes! Let’s go round the world like gypsies and never settle down in boring jobs!’) and slowly the world turns and suddenly you are struggling with forms to fill in and bills to pay. Your own children grow, and eat like wolves; and life seems like hard work with none of the rewards you thought would come your way simply by being a grown-up. Then comes the time to retire, and back you go again, holding hands on the beach and laughing as you eat apples with your dentures firmly attached by glue to your gums; sometimes television shows geared for the very young are more appealing than the alien humour and scary news programmes that make up the menu in the listings. Then, as Shakespeare noted, we are back to being big babies again, balding and in need of care and changing and feeding, and one day, so soon that you may be able to see the beginning of your life at the same time, the end comes, and That’s All There Was. There has to be a way of looking at it to make a story, to make sense of it. How we longed to be like the film stars of those days! We dipped our nylon petticoats in sugar-water and dried them on radiators to make them stiff so our skirts would stick out like Brigitte Bardot’s pink gingham dress. Bardot! But her baby-ish pout and bed-time hair said Young Creature, not svelte siren of forty. Even then, women were beginning to try to look young, rather than mature. True, Sophie Loren looked utterly femme fatale but she was not our icon, nor was Marilyn Monroe with her curves and thick lipstick. It was Bardot then and still is now, fifty years later. And just as my school days were drawing to a close, the Beatles arrived with Love Me Do (Oh! How thrilling! I do love you, mop-top charmers from Liverpool even though I have never really been anywhere in Britain except school and the south. I love you, and I love the thought of London, waiting huge and wicked like a distant stalker with sweets). The pantheon of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, Cliff and even Elvis had to be reshuffled so that the new world order of pop music could accommodate the