Latest news with #PatsyStone
The Sun
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
BBC comedy legend, 79, reveals she doesn't have ‘much time left' as she makes candid confession about ageing
A BBC comedy legend has revealed that she doesn't have 'much time left' as she makes a candid confession about ageing. The star has been front and centre of major projects at the publicly funded corporation for six decades. 9 9 9 Dame Joanna Lumley, 79, has had a varied career in showbiz and is known for a variety of huge productions. She celebrated her birthday on May 1 and she made a candid confession about how she feels about her mortality. She told Vernon Kay on his Radio 2 show: "As you nearly the top of the hill, you suddenly think, "Gosh, there's not all that much time left." "My time must be coming quite soon, and I don't want to have wasted a minute of being on this beautiful planet. I used to panic when I was young, but as I've got older, I've started to live day to day. "With age, you work out what matters. I always knew that good stuff would come along when I was older. "When I was 18, I longed to be 30. When I was 30, I longed to be 50. We mustn't be led into thinking getting old is bad. Growing old is good." Dame Joanna rose to prominence when she played a Bond girl in the 1969 flick, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. In the 70's she was known for playing the role of a spy named Purdey in The New Avengers. Two decades later, she won critical acclaim and a global fanbase for her role as drunken fashion mogul Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous. Recent projects have included a high-profile cameo in the Wolf Of Wall Street and starring alongside Michelle Keegan in Harlan Coben's Fool Me Once. Watch as Amelia Dimoldenberg teaches Dame Joanna Lumley how to be 'down with the kids' The British national treasure is also set to appear in the highly-anticipated second installment of the hit Netflix smash-hit series, Wednesday. Dame Joanna also spoke to the former I'm A Celebrity finalist about her health struggles that she's faced over the years. She opened up about living with prosopagnosia, which is a disorder that makes her unable to recognise faces that she has seen before, even with family and close friends. The famous actress previously joked that she greets 'everybody' with kisses because she cannot tell exactly who she actually knows. My time must be coming quite soon, and I don't want to have wasted a minute of being on this beautiful planet Dame Joanna LumleyBBC Radio 2 Last week she said: "I've got this weird thing with faces, I've got a face blindness. It's called Prosopagnosia." "I have to know who people are, I have to know in advance. I always say 'please tell me who's going to be there' then I can match the name to the thing. She added: "I mean, lots of people say "oh but you meet so many people", but it's not to do with that, it's completely different." "It's followed me and I never knew what it was. I'd try a test. I'd look at somebody and then I would shut my eyes and see if I could see their face in my head. And I couldn't." And just like her character in Ab Fab, Joanna admits that she loves smoking and she will puff on anything between one cigarette and 40 every day. The star joked: "I am unbelievably fit. Despite, or probably because of smoking, I am never ill. I have these extraordinary procedures." 9 9 9 9 9 9
New European
15-03-2025
- Business
- New European
Brexit Britain is being outstripped by Slovenia and Malta
To call this year's UK Living Standards Review a sobering read is an understatement. The findings of this annual deep-dive are enough to make Patsy Stone, Father Jack Hackett and the Withnail acting family take up Dry January. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) has found that the poorest households in the UK are now worse off than the poorest in Slovenia and Malta. Living standards in the wealthiest bits of the UK are comparable to those in other wealthy countries like France and Germany, but if you were to rank each of 269 European regions in terms of income, the poorest German region would rank 82nd – well above the EU average – and the poorest UK region 193rd – well below the EU average. Want to sober up a bit more? Real incomes in the majority of European regions have grown at a faster rate than those in the UK. Since 2020, the year of the pandemic but also of our official departure from the EU, we have fallen behind the average real wage growth of developed countries. At the turn of the millennium, we had broadly similar wage levels to Norway and Canada, which has since outstripped us. We were well ahead of New Zealand (which overtook UK wages in 2020) and Slovenia (which is set to do so in the next few years). Meanwhile, had UK wages grown as they did in the US after the 2008 financial crisis, UK workers would be £4,300 better off today. The NIESR is getting some stick for not naming Brexit as a direct cause of some of the UK's problems in this report. In fairness, it does note how membership of the European Union's single market has helped growth in some eastern European countries. And the NIESR did publish a big report on Brexit's effects on the UK just 16 months ago which said that the damage to GDP was at 2-3% of GDP in 2023 and would rise to 5-6% of GDP by 2035. This new report makes some short-term recommendations about easing our standard of living crisis – including removing the two-child limit for child benefit – that make for interesting reading as Labour mull cuts to the welfare budget. But in the longer-term, it seems clear that a game-changer is needed to break the spiral of low pay and low growth. Most of us agree on what that game-changer should be, but not everybody. A recent column by the Brexiteer Telegraph journalist Allister Heath began with two sentences that made the NIESR report seem cheerful: 'Britain stands alone in a brutish world. Our small, impoverished yet special nation has spent too long lying to itself'. Heath then stated, correctly, that the US was now a write-off. But some people can't see the obvious when it is staring them in the face. 'Europe isn't the answer,' wrote Heath. 'The EU is an imperialist technocracy with an obsession with Hegelian dialectics and a hatred for traitor-nations that have thrown off the shackles of the acquis communautaire.' To which the only correct responses are a) 'Parklife!' and b) pass that bottle this way, I need a drink.
