Forget the fizz, just buckets of caviar for a date with Dame Joan

The Queen’s stirring address to the nation has stiffened our resolve, but now it’s the turn of another royal to take centre stage in this time of crisis — home-grown hollywood royalty, that is.

For the inimitable Dame Joan Collins, forever revered as Alexis in the eighties super-soap Dynasty, is putting herself up for auction as part of an appeal to raise £100 million to support the health and wellbeing of those in the NhS frontline.

The auction — being conducted online and by phone — continues until April 29, when auctioneers Bonhams will alert the lucky winning bidder.

he, or perhaps she, will not, however, be able to take Dame Joan home with him for ever, but will instead enjoy the irresistible treat of having lunch with her at Claridge’s, her favourite London hotel, where she married her fifth husband, Percy Gibson, in 2002. Percy will join them at lunch, as will panto dame Christopher Biggins.

It promises to be a feast of the finest dining and dazzling anecdotage. Dame Joan and Percy spend four months each year at St Tropez, where, in less inhibited days, lions and tigers would be brought to parties and where, as Dame Joan has put it, ‘naked girls would jump into swimming pools wearing just sequins’.

But Dame Joan assures me that she derives greatest pleasure from more intimate occasions. She recalls, in particular, a lunch with the late Sir David Tang.

‘My best lunch was with Percy and David Tang in his cottage in the middle of hyde Park,’ she tells me. ‘All we had to eat was a massive one kilo tin of beluga caviar — with blinis.

‘The worst one was a lunch with our best friends the Bricusses at La Colombe d’Or during France’s hottest heatwave. As the lunch came to a sweaty end, [songwriter] Leslie Bricusse said, “We could have stayed at home by the pool”. We could have used that suggestion at the beginning!

‘There was also a picnic in the South of France when we were attacked by a swarm of wasps and had to lock ourselves in our house and leave the lunch to the wasps!’

The winning bidder would do well to make a note of two dietary details — an acute allergy to shellfish and, contrary to the impression given by her role as Alexis Carrington, a profound distaste for champagne.

Caviar and sauvignon blanc will, by contrast, do very nicely. Bon appetit!