“On a typical day I eat lettuce, followed by some lettuce, with lettuce. I don’t exercise at all. I don’t go to gyms, but I do rush about. I don’t like exercising. I find it offensive.”
Joanna and Jennifer had been talking about a film for years, but Jennifer was so reluctant to write a script that Dawn French even bet her £100 000 that she wouldn’t do it. Ironically, Jennifer ’s hesitation was because had been so successful. ‘Once you’ve had a bit of success, the last thing you want to do is make a flop. So the biggest fear in me is that it won’t be good enough. I’m really nervous about it,’ she told chat show host Jonathan Ross.
Fortunately, Jennifer overcame her fears. Not just for us, for Joanna, too. It’s hard to believe, because of her extraordinary looks, but she turned 70 on 1 May this year, and the role of Patsy would be increasingly difficult for her to reprise, not least because (despite all the drinking) it’s very physical. with lettuce. I don’t exercise at all. I don’t go to gyms, but I do rush about. I don’t like exercising. I find it offensive. People pay money to go and walk on the spot. It disgusts me, actually. Go and pick up litter instead. Go and paint an old woman’s house. I find gyms oppressive and frightening.
‘People are too fat because they eat all the stuff in front of them,’ she says. ‘They think, “I want a bit of choccie,” and you think, “No, don’t have it, you fool!”’
When Graham Norton remarked on how good she looks, she responded: ‘I think I probably don’t eat as much as other people because I quite often don’t have breakfast and I never have lunch. It’s when you wake your stomach up. As soon as I eat something I’ll go straight to sleep. So I eat hugely in the evening and go straight to sleep. I’m fun.’
What’s keeping Joanna awake at the moment is a garden bridge she’s campaigning to have built across the Thames, from Temple to the South Bank, with design guru Thomas Heatherwick. They’re meeting a lot of resistance from those who deem it unnecessary and a complete waste of public funds. Does this daunt her even slightly? Not at all. ‘I believe in it so strongly that they’re going to have to beat me with shovels to make me stop,’ she told ‘And that wouldn’t stop me; one finger would still be moving.’
Based on her track record, we think we could guess which finger that would be.