BBC's Pilgrimage star Patsy Kensit: "The treatment I had over the years from the media was pretty awful"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

On a clifftop outside Whitby, six people gather in the hope of finding spiritual connections and even enlightenment. For now, they have little in common other than a public profile.

Ashley Banjo is founder of the dance group Diversity, Hermione Norris is an actor known for Cold Feet and Spooks, Tasha Ghouri is a former Strictly contestant and public advocate for deaf people. Hasan Al-Habib and Ashley Blaker are stand-up comedians and Jayne Middlemiss is a radio presenter.

Together they’ll walk a winding route around England’s top right-hand corner, travelling through North Yorkshire, County Durham and Northumberland before arriving at Holy Island, long known as Lindisfarne, where the seventh-century St Cuthbert was bishop.

Eventually a figure in a beanie hat with wind-blown blonde hair comes into view. This, unmistakably, despite her clumpy boots and backpack, is the actor Patsy Kensit, the seventh pilgrim. She approaches tentatively but as Kensit greets the others, she seems to summon up resolve.

“I’m a control freak,” she says later, when we gather after a screening of the opening episode. “I like to know exactly what I’m doing and at exactly what time I do it. But you have to surrender to these experiences and that’s what I did. I found that first day hard, but I kept saying to myself, ‘Keep walking.’ And the landscape is just so beautiful.”

For some, like Al-Habib, a British Iraqi from Birmingham, the open moorland, deep wooded valleys and cliffs were a revelation. “I was struck by this incredible place. You have an amazing vista in front of you and the thought that the creator that you pray to has created it.”

This is the eighth series of Pilgrimage, an achievement which will be marked when Pilgrimage is given a special Trustees’ Award at the Sandford Saint Martin Awards at Lambeth Palace in June. As the freshly installed Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent journey on foot to her new cathedral illustrated, many of us desire a different, more contemplative, way of travelling.

The paths Kensit and her fellow walkers tread combine the pilgrimage routes for three saints: Cuthbert, Hild and Oswald. Perhaps it lacks the glamour of the Camino de Santiago, the famous route across Spain the series has previously travelled, but this is also a land with a centuries-old heritage of religious belief.

Every step taken is through what was once the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Whitby Abbey, the romantic gothic ruin where the party make their first stop, was home in the seventh century to a monastic community under the rule of St Hild. She established Whitby as a seat of Christian learning, and is said to have turned snakes to stone, which is why local ammonite fossils are called snake stones. “I find Hild and those times fascinating,” says Norris. “And you can still feel it in that part of the world; the power is there.”

The BBC pilgrims set off in different states of belief. Kensit says she is an “à la carte Catholic”; picking the parts of her childhood faith that bring her most comfort. Norris, brought up in the Church of England, finds the divine in the things around her. Al-Habib is an observant Muslim and Banjo a committed Christian. Ghouri describes herself as atheist, Middlemiss has sought prayer retreats in Indian ashrams, and Blaker performs funny sketches about his fixation with becoming the perfect Orthodox Jew.

Several pilgrims carry baggage other than backpacks. Kensit has endured intrusive interest in her private life since the 1980s; her four husbands included Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr and Liam Gallagher from Oasis.

“The treatment I had over the years from the media was pretty awful. My life was plucked out and this character was invented that was meant to be me. Actually, it was nothing like me and never was.” Kensit has learnt certain truths the hard way. “You don’t have to marry all your boyfriends,” she says. It’s advice she also offers to Ghouri in the show.

Norris travels with her own burden. In the first episode it’s revealed she experienced a tragedy early in life. “Somebody very close to me took their own life when I was younger. It had a profound effect on me.” Did it affect her faith? “Everyone says when somebody dies, ‘Time is a great healer’ or ‘They’re at peace now.’ Culturally, I was raised a Christian, but back then suicide was taboo. If you’d taken your own life, Christianity’s response was, ‘You’re going down there.’”

Norris drifted away from Anglicanism but retained her spiritual curiosity. Kensit stayed with her church, and believes it got her through the years in the spotlight. “I would go to mass regularly and it really did help me,” she explains, though she retains the right to define her own faith.

“There is so much in the Catholic Church that I believe in but also aspects I didn’t agree with. So, I opened up to other things like meditation. You hear that word and think, ‘Ohm, ohm,’ and that you have to do yoga and be able to put your legs behind your head. But prayer can be mediation.”

In that way, Kensit is like Cuthbert, who was noted for his meditative prayer on Lindisfarne and is buried in Durham’s Unesco-listed Norman cathedral. When they enter the building, the walkers will be discovering new things about this region’s past but also about each other including, in Al-Habib’s case, that he prays five times a day.

“It was a blessing to be with these people that are so open-minded and eager to learn,” he says, and in turn, he learnt about his fellow pilgrims. One morning in the Durham hills he took a picture of the Jewish Blaker quietly considering a religious text. “Ashley was reading it but he was also, I thought, centring himself; saying this is who I am, this is what I believe in.”

Al-Habib is still near the start of his career, while Kensit and Norris are veterans, but, for all of them, the appeal of the series has not only been discovering this other England of holy kings and venerated saints but each other. “I do put walls up around to protect myself,” says Kensit. “I tend to isolate and I lost a lot of that. For the first time in a long time, I really became part of the group. That’s huge for me.” Norris agrees. “Being with these people was a unique experience. They are my pilgrimage. I will treasure that.”

The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here.

Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.