CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Joanna Lumley – the ab fab Corrie star, Bond girl and bride of Dracula

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Joanna Lumley – the ab fab Corrie star, Bond girl and bride of Dracula

Joanna Lumley’s Home Sweet Home – Travels In My Own Land

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Mel Giedroyc: Unforgivable

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So that’s Joanna Lumley’s birthday sorted. The Ab Fab actress has a landmark this year, her 75th, and in a Gothic fashion shop in Whitby on the North Sea coast, she told us exactly what she wants.

‘Possibly the best present you could give anyone,’ she breathed, gazing into a display cabinet, ‘is a skeleton hand necklace that glows in the dark.’ Say no more, Joanna. Consider it done.

Although, she might already have treated herself. Our last glimpse of her, in Joanna Lumley’s Home Sweet Home — Travels In My Own Land (ITV), was on a clifftop, swathed in a black cape and wig, dripping with skull rings and purple roses, with ultraviolet lipstick. Ozzy Osbourne would be besotted.

Joanna Lumley travels from from Tilbury Docks to the Lake District in her show Home Sweet Home - Travels In My Own Land

Joanna Lumley travels from from Tilbury Docks to the Lake District in her show Home Sweet Home – Travels In My Own Land

Her visit to Whitby, where Bram Stoker was inspired to write Dracula, proved no accident. ‘I was in a Dracula film,’ she said. ‘It was 1973, The Satanic Rites Of Dracula — I was Jessica Van Helsing, Peter Cushing’s granddaughter, and Christopher Lee as Dracula chose me as his bride for eternity, to walk by his side through darkness.’

That might have been more impressive if half the places she visited, on her journey from Tilbury Docks to the Lake District, didn’t seem to remind her of some role. At Silverstone, taking an Aston Martin DB5 round the test track, she relived her adventures as a Bond girl opposite George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. (That’s the one where 007 actually marries Diana Rigg, a detail that slipped Joanna’s mind.)

Then she journeyed to the fictional town of Weatherfield and Coronation Street, for a half of Newton & Ridley’s in the Rovers Return with Ken Barlow — alias veteran actor Bill Roache. In the early 1970s, Joanna was keen to remind us, she co-starred in the soap for a few weeks as Elaine, a teacher’s daughter.

Top teacher of the week:

What puzzles me about music tutor Jodie (Jill Halfpenny) in The Drowning (C5) is that she doesn’t play an instrument. She takes her pupils from first notes to recording studio in days, but never so much as hums a tune. How does she do it — telepathy?

Ken, who’s had more lovers than Don Juan, begged her to marry him. What a pity she didn’t — she would have looked fetching in Deirdre Barlow’s outsize glasses.

Though she was clearly yearning for more exotic travels, Joanna was happy to muster enthusiasm for whatever the film crew suggested.

She rode on a train on the Ribblehead Viaduct, watched a hill shepherd working his flock, ate Kendal mint cake on the ferry across Windermere, marched over the Dales and even kept smiling in the pouring rain on an allotment in Bradford.

Why those places were chosen, she didn’t ask. Wherever she was sent, Joanna managed to appear thrilled. She is a diligent, dogged professional. The show lived up to its name — only once — when she visited Lumley Castle near Durham and lounged on a four-poster bed. ‘Technically,’ she admitted, ‘it’s not my castle . . . yet.’

At least her work ethic keeps her from stooping to dross like Unforgivable (Dave), a celebrity panel game presented by Mel Giedroyc. Mel didn’t actually say how bitterly she regrets quitting Bake Off, but she made it pretty clear with an unprovoked swipe at Prue Leith — imagining what the 80-year-old would write for her profile on the dating app, Tinder. It was crude and unfunny . . . like the rest of the show.

The game is a competition for celebs to tell the most humiliating anecdotes. Almost all were scatalogical or sexual. Why Graham Norton was demeaning himself is a mystery. Perhaps he owed someone a favour — he certainly didn’t do himself any.

Mel’s format is blatantly based on BBC1’s Would I Lie To You? —– but that series works because the stories are often genuinely hilarious. These were just sickening.