Joanna: I’m dyeing my hair so they don’t lock me up Not ready to stay in age 74
JOANNA Lumley has told how she is pulling a Patsy and clinging desperately to her youth in a bid to beat the coronavirus lockdown.
The 74-year-old Ab Fab star says she is dyeing her hair and running up and down stairs so she looks young enough to still sneak outside.
But she is also begging fans to take a lesson from the pandemic for the sake of humanity.
She said: “This plague is ghastly beyond words. But what is more important is the state of the world.
“We have to look at that, and how the ice caps are melting. As I sit here in London you see a blazing blue sky. It’s only blazing blue because there are no aeroplanes up there.
Respect
“There are no cars. We have to treat this thing with the greatest respect. We’ve been smacked on the knuckles really hard – and really tragically, for so many people.”
Describing herself as “one of the oldies” she added: “I’m terrified they’re going to lock me in. So I keep dyeing my hair yellow. I’m running up and down the stairs to show that although I’m old, I’m still OK.”
While she admits to being an avid globe trotter, presenting regular travel shows on ITV, she says it is time to realise the damage to the planet from travel and consumerism.
Speaking in an online interview for Oxford University, she said: “I like meeting people but maybe should think more about the world.
We’re all being taught to do without now, and it’s a good lesson for us all.
“It’s like the headmaster has banged the desk and said, ‘Everybody, you have to do better or you’ll all be kept in forever.’,”
Joanna, who won two Baftas as party girl Patsy in Jennifer Saunders’s Absolutely Fabulous, is isolating at home with her husband of 34 years, opera conductor Stephen Barlow.
But she is confident she will beat the bug because she is old enough to have gone through it all before, as a youngster at a convent school in
East Sussex.
She said: “I remember the Asian flu. It was
1957, we had to be confined to dormitories.
Even the nuns got ill. I don’t think I did.
I’m not often ill.
“Nobody in the world seems to know what to do about this pandemic. We just live, pray, hope, wash and smile.
“But we have to learn we can’t have these ghastly wet markets where wild creatures are sold live, in squalid cruelty, to be eaten. “We have to stop these hateful practices and learn
what nature is telling us.”