Joanna Lumley dishes on Ghost Story for Christmas: "I'm not tremendous on gore but I do love frightening stories"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

The day Radio Times visited the set of the Ghost Story for Christmas, The Room in the Tower, Dame Joanna Lumley was filming a pivotal scene, unrecognisable under impressive prosthetics.

It is only between takes that her trademark plummy timbre confirmed that, yes, it was her under the make-up.

“I do like a scary story. I’m not tremendous on gore but I do love frightening stories,” she enthuses afterwards.

This is probably just as well, given her acquaintance with the genre. In the 1973 Hammer horror The Satanic Rites of Dracula, where Christopher Lee’s titular Transylvanian plotted to exterminate humanity, Lumley played Jessica Van Helsing, the often-screaming object of the count’s affections.

This year, she appeared in Netflix’s Addams Family reboot Wednesday as Morticia’s mother, Hester. And in between, there was also the slightly terrifying Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous. “She can’t be killed,” Lumley says, merrily. “She lives off air and alcohol and smoke and drugs.”

To that oeuvre, she now adds Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of the EF Benson story for what is the Sherlock writer’s eighth chilling tale for Yuletide. In it, Tobias Menzies plays a man haunted by a recurring dream of being invited to stay in a house that hides an unseen terror. Lumley plays its sinister mistress.

It is The New Avengers and Amandaland star as you’ve never seen her before. I ask the most obvious question: does she believe in ghosts? “I do believe that there are ghosts. We know what happens to our bodies – to bones, to dust, then gone – but I can’t believe that the rest of it, the soul or the mind or the spark, just goes too. It goes somewhere…”

She also believes in God – or something bigger than us at least. “I adore classical music and I’m so lucky to be married to a musician [conductor Stephen Barlow] because I learn from him all the time, and I do believe that there is such a thing as ‘the divine spark’.”

She carries on with enthusiasm, “Mozart wrote his manuscripts, practically without a single error. It’s as if he became a conduit from some extraordinary power. Papa [Joseph] Haydn was the same. When you hear their melodies, you can understand what that power is. All those great creators believed in gods. They had a sense of godliness. And I think if we skip out on that, we’re missing out on something.

“We’ve become unbearably vain and destructive and we can’t remember how to stop destroying. If history could be written by anything other than human beings, we would be seen as a plague, unable to stop breeding, to stop destroying, using up, never replacing.

“We’re a pretty wretched bunch. So, we’ve got to strive not to be completely bloody, to make amends for humans’ dreadfulness to each other and the planet.”

Which brings us neatly to Christmas. Lumley is a fan, with the exception of one aspect: “I hate the way Christmas now starts in October. When I rule the world, I would declare that Christmas cannot start until well into December!”

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

A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Room in the Tower will air on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer this Christmas.

If you’re looking for something else to watch in the meantime, check out our TV Guide and Streaming Guide, or visit our dedicated Fantasy hub. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.