More than the sum of her parts

Neither of them lasted very long and they are separated by 20 years. The first, in the 1970s, was Purdey in The New Avengers — pageboy-haircutted sidekick of John Steed and Gambit. The second was in the 1990s — Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous — topplingly beehived, drunk, chain-smoking, sex-crazed, shopping-mad sidekick of Edina.

Of course, she’s done lots of other things — from playing Ken Barlow’s girlfriend in Coronation Street to standing in for Terry Wogan — but, basically, it’s the twin poles of Purdey and Patsy — good blonde, wrecked blonde — that locate and preserve her in the national consciousness. She seems to fill some niche, but what is it?

Well, whatever it is, we can’t get enough of it. In 1989 she wrote her memoirs, Stare Back and Smile. And now, with No Room for Secrets, she’s done it again.

“The first one,” she explains, “was my life up to the age of 40, which was how old I was when I wrote it. But then Penguin came along and asked if I’d like to have another crack at it. People say Dirk Bogarde wrote his life story four times — but I’m not as clever as Dirk Bogarde. I decided doing it again would mean I’d have to structure it differently and, if I had that excuse, it meant I didn’t have to go through the whole thing again.”

The structure is certainly different. She interviews herself in the guise of an anonymous questioner who is being shown round her house. Each chapter is a room and each brings out different memories. We also get a good deal of detail on interior decor. It is, I say, a very feminine book. She seems startled by the suggestion.

“How interesting! I never thought that I wrote like a woman. But of course I do!”

The structure also indicates her obsession with her house — understandable because it is a very odd and dramatic house. It is one of a group of grand, five-storey Victorian mansions that form a square in a bad area of south London. Sixties council blocks stare menacingly down on all sides. But the square looks in on itself, exuding an air of imperturbable gentility.

This is what estate agents call “a family home”, but it is only actually inhabited by JoLu and her husband, the composer Stephen Barlow. Her one child, Jamie, lives with his wife and daughter, Alice — “she’s faaaaaaabulous” — in Shepherd’s Bush. Another JoLu grandchild is on the way. Outside her front door sits the Smart car in which she buzzes around town.

She answers the door looking astonishingly like Joanna Lumley. Once people pass a certain level of fame, they don’t usually look the same in the flesh as they do on the screen. In addition, of course, Purdey and Patsy were both highly made-up creatures. But there she is, relatively unmade-up, slim and blonde as ever, big lips, huge eyes, definitely JoLu, in jeans and pink cardigan.

The house, however, is not like the one in the book. Behind her the hallway and stairs have been stripped by decorators. The little personal paradise she described is definitely not available for viewing. And so we take coffee out to Barlow’s big music room, formed from part of an old factory, at the foot of the extremely damp but evidently cherished garden. She brings a Perspex box of cigarettes and we sit at what was once a school table and dive straight into one of the more startling themes of the book — ghosts.

“If there is anything that seems remotely unanswerable in life or not decided, then people just think you’re stupid or imagining things or you’re a drama queen or whatever it might be.”

She has, in fact, had multiple supernatural encounters, most vividly with a man who told her to leave their old house in Kent just as they were moving in. She doesn’t have much to say about this, just that it seems to happen and to confirm her general conviction that the world is stranger and deeper than it seems.

She even had a premonition that Barlow was to be her husband when he was only 13 and she was 21. She didn’t even meet him, she just heard his name and learnt that he was a musical prodigy. Hidden forces were at work. She is aware, however, that it is as well not to appear obsessed.

“I kept thinking when I was writing that I must get off this subject because the book would become unbalanced by paranormal things. That house is now happily occupied by other people — whatever was there seems to have been taken away. Perhaps it’s come with me. I do have the feeling of being haunted sometimes.”

Like Diana Rigg and Felicity Kendal, she is a product of empire, having been born in Kashmir and having wandered with her parents — her father was a soldier — through the Middle and Far East. At school in England, she was a bright girl, but she seemed to fade, leaving with only one A-level. “It wasn’t a complete disaster. I didn’t want to go on being at school. I wanted to be the kind of grown-up who was in films like Brigitte Bardot, driving round in cars with the top down.”

She had been a school drama star, but she failed to get into Rada and concluded at once that she was not destined to act.

“That scarred me. I didn’t dare try anywhere else in case I was turned down again. Being turned down was like burning your arm: I didn’t want to go on burning it until there was just a stump left.”

She became, instead, a successful 1960s model. It was a role she later parodied in Ab Fab when Patsy, asked to model as an older woman, can’t help but slip into Sixties little girl poses.

“I was that kind of model — hair in rollers, particular poses, particular make-up. I thought it was great — it was this girlie part of me. It was an excuse for travelling to Portugal or catching a plane down to Italy for two days’ work. That was the lure of it. I couldn’t be a model nowadays, I’d be bored stiff. There’s so much more pressure.”

She fell into films, as pretty models did in those days, with a one-line part in Some Girls Do. And then, suddenly, she was everybody’s walk-on girlfriend on television — in, among many others, Coronation Street, On the Buses and Steptoe and Son.

Finally, along came Purdey and she was officially adopted by the nation. The haircut alone became television’s most influential style until Jennifer Aniston’s on Friends. She insisted on the cut. The producers insisted she would have to pay for a wig if it all went wrong — a sign of how deeply unstarry she was when that series began.

Subsequently, her career sort of jogged happily along until Ab Fab. There is an obvious theme here. In both her two most celebrated roles, she played a sidekick — to Steed and then to Edina and, furthermore, she never seemed to take on huge starring roles in anything else.

“I have no ambitions. I still almost have no ambitions . . . I’ve never wanted to give my Cleopatra. I’ve never felt confident. The shock may have been doing so well in school plays and then being rejected by Rada. I’ve always wanted to be very good. I didn’t want to be the top.”

This might be purely defensive, a fear of failure. Certainly when she won a Bafta for Ab Fab, the intensity with which she grabbed the award suggests she did, in fact, want to be centre stage all along. She’s fully aware of this, talking of “the unbalanced disproportionate pleasure winning that Bafta gave me . . . I thought they can’t take this way from me, whatever happens now”.

There’s an identity crisis going on here. For the truth is that she’s never been just an actress. After Ab Fab she became, for a while, a comedienne, even travelling on behalf of Comic Relief. Also she writes at length of all the ideas for inventions she’s had and of the campaign to get a garden bridge built across the Thames as the Diana memorial. She wants to be an actress, but she also wants to be more.

And there’s something about her look and her manner, both glamorous and homely, that makes her familiar to us in ways that actors never normally are. It’s as if she’s part Nicole Kidman and part Richard and Judy. Yet she hates the idea of mere celebrity and loves the idea of being an actor.

“A celebrity just means anybody you’ve ever heard of or who has been on television,” she says. “People say I’m a celebrity now and I just reply in a thin voice, ‘I’m an actress.’ All of us just tried to be better at what we did and we became famous because we were good in a show.”

She’s distressed by the decline in acting parts now that musicals have taken over the West End and the television drama has gone to be replaced by “reality”. She also despairs when she sees the BBC attempting to attract new talent. “The BBC now advertises for people who aren’t even directors to be directors. The BBC has queues of directors it’s not even using. Now it’s asking for new directors who haven’t got any past, maybe not even any skill.”

Of course acting is, in every sense, a mask. She hides behind it partly because she loves it and partly because it says she is not merely famous. Being merely famous means you always have to give more and more of yourself and she definitely doesn’t want to do that.

She doesn’t kiss and tell and all personal details are carefully monitored. She looks uncomfortable when I mention her son’s father was the photographer Michael Claydon because that seems to be in the realm of the preferably forgotten. The book’s title — No Room for Secrets — is cleverly ambiguous. It could mean that she has no secrets or that she has plenty but has no room to tell us what they are.

The niche she fills is, I think, that of the beautiful woman who is also nice. The beauty is obvious, the niceness more subtle. It’s to do with vulnerability, a humility we want to console, an awareness of a longing in her for recognition, for signs from the other side, for help. She hungrily notes down the books she asks me to recommend. I suggest late Philip Roth and immediately regret it. She’s too nice for that stuff. Finally, she drifts into a strange, wistful soliloquy.

“It’s a funny, funny world. I’ve always believed in being very flexible and, if a door slammed, it’s not a problem. I don’t have much of a vision of the future. I’m 58 and I can’t imagine what it will be like being 68 or 78.

“Things change, one’s ideas change. I’ve never wanted a bungalow on the cliffs looking out over the sea. I hate thinking about the future in that kind of planning way. I’m aware of how huge and important and exciting the world is and, if I started now, I could never learn a fraction of the things I wanted to learn . . .”