My New Idol: Joanna Lumley

Before I read this article, I only knew Joanna Lumley as the wonderful drunk Patsy on Ab Fab. However, there is apparently more to her than that including being a former Bond girl. That's not what has me wishing she was in charge over there. She's actually quite bright, articulate, and full of wonderful ideas to fix society. Here are some excerpts from the article that I think makes her a cut above the usual celebrity:

"The young ones don't do anything nowadays." Her big blue eyes light up with bewilderment.

"Girls can't sew on a button or take the sleeves out of something or shorten a skirt. Obviously, it's not the done thing to sew any more, but I do. You must learn to sew. It is pretty shaming if you can't sew."

"And they [Norwegians] are very good at looking after themselves. Children don't go to school until they are six, but by the age of 11 they can speak three languages. They learn practical skills. They all sit around a fire with their teacher with vast knives and learn how to whittle sticks.

And I thought, 'Why can't we do this? Why can't English school children sit around fires learning how to use knives to cut firewood as opposed to killing each other with them?'"

She pauses briefly for breath, stirs her cup of tea, and continues. "We don't really require anybody to do anything. We have all these diversional luxuries, like iPods. Nobody gets out a guitar and sings while their friend plays the penny whistle.

You just stick something in your ear and don't speak to anybody else. I don't understand why you would put an iPod in your ear when you could be walking down the street saying good morning to someone, or listening to birdsong. Why do people have to have stuff going on in their heads all the time? How do you do your own thinking?"

She is not much more enthusiastic about society. "I just think that we ought to be doing more. It sounds very hearty and Girl Guidey but I think, particularly in our inner city schools, we expect people to do nothing, we expect people to carry knives, we expect people to be afraid.

We've gone down the wrong alley. I love the idea of having some sort of national service. Oh, God. I sound like a woman of demented horror."

Joanna could not be more different from Patsy if she tried. She was born in India 62 years ago; her father was a Gurkha and her mother was a passionate mountain walker.

In her thirties, Lumley became a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society after a trek of the Hunza mountains in northern Pakistan, and a decade ago made a documentary about Bhutan, where her grandparents lived.

Her grandfather was a diplomat in Tibet and was friends with the 13th Dalai Lama, who once gave him a selection of holy scriptures. Lumley later returned them to the current Dalai Lama, who gave her some treaties on emptiness as thanks. "He was fantastic. I support Tibet absolutely."

She was very vocal at the time of the Olympic torch protests before the start of the Bejing Games and is a spokesman for the Free Tibet campaign. If she were prime minister, she says, she would halve the prison population - "I think prisons are bad; I would have them cleaning the streets, doing useful things" - and reopen every single railway line that Dr Beeching closed.

She would ban celebrity magazines, too. "I'd burn the lot and sack all the staff." It is not really a surprise to learn that she has never had plastic surgery. "Everyone knows I am 62. It's not a secret.