Welcome to another off-air Christmas special.

Earlier this year, I had the chance to sit down with Dame Joanna Lumley, actor, author, campaigner, best known to many as Patsy and absolutely fabulous,

to talk about her new book called

My Book of Treasures, which is a personal anthology of writing, poetry, and a few hard-won

words of wisdom. I began by asking the question, we were all thinking, how does she achieve

that unmistakable husky voice? Well, I'm 112 now and I think my voice has come down.

I mean, I did make an effort because I think I know from recordings, when I was younger,

it was higher and it was a bit further back. And I knew that that probably wouldn't last.

And so I thought that it had to be sort of trimmed down a bit, trim, so now I'm like an old smoker,

I'm not this fair. Yeah, well, tell me about the fay eggs, they laugh. There is a lovely piece that you've included in the book, and we'll come on to the choices of the book in a moment, but it's an essay that David Hockney wrote in defence of smoking. He's so funny and so candid. What I love about Hockney is he's rather like

his paintings. It's literally there's no artifice to any of it. It's just blazing and open and

funny and humane really. He's just saying really all this panicking about smoking, about the people

who die from smoking. He said, what about the people who die from not smoking? And he makes a very good point that he's had three doctors who've told him not to smoke and they're all dead. You and smoking, though, I mean, I think if we conjuring up an image of some of your recent work, you're a fagg out of your mouth all the time. But is it true that once on set you fainted

because you'd had to smoke so much doing the tapes?

No, what I had to do is I had to run downstairs on the set.

This is in front of an audience

because we recorded all absolutely fabulous live in front of an audience.

I had to run downstairs saying,

swearing about a taxi driver because he wouldn't have smoking in the cab.

And I had four cigarettes in sticking out there. And Jennifer, Edina, lit them. And perhaps he was

sucking like this, inhaling. So I lit four cigarettes simultaneously. And that was funny and everything.

But one of the cameras was in the wrong place. And they said, could you do it again, please, Joanna?

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