Book review: Absolutely

There is a Joanna Lumley for everyone: there’s beautiful Joanna, kick-ass “Purdey” Joanna, single mum Joanna and crusading Gurkha-saver Joanna. And thanks to her habit of insanely hoarding everything from bales of cloth to old wrapping paper, she has pictures of every incarnation, which are lushly reproduced in her immensely fun scrapbook-memoir, Absolutely.

Lumley is canny enough to know that while a straight memoir would be just fine and capital, what we really want is to pore over a lot of pictures of her looking marvellous. The pictures of a Sixties Lumley togged out in Biba are so like the flashbacks in Absolutely Fabulous it’s like she’s posing as young Patsy and it’s unintentionally all very funny.

Or maybe intentionally funny. Lumley’s greatest gift is perhaps not her legs or that amazing voice, but her terrific sense of the absurd. From living crammed in with other models in a flat with a rented gas stove to struggling as a single working mother to having to dress up as the Pink Panther for a publicity shoot, Lumley tells it all. And she delights in telling us just how badly certain projects of hers have fared. Things are “not received with cries of joy” and the “restless eyes of the television stations are always looking for the new kid on the block”.

Joanna Lumley is beautiful as a swan but she’s also tenacious as a terrier. Being a single mother is famously morale-zapping, Jennifer Saunders sounds terrifying, and hammering the state about its shoddy treatment of the armed services is like screaming into a void. Yet she made it all happen with barely any fuss.

She would have made a good Gurkha.