Jonathan Ross welcomes Joanna Lumley to this week’s Friday Night With Jonathan Ross on BBC One.

The Queen of the Gurkhas Joanna Lumley talks about meeting the Prime Minister Gordon Brown: “… the Lumley self-pleading offensive… I begged him to take it into his own hands… the Government was being fed scare stories.”

She says she won’t stand for Parliament: “Glimpsing what they have to do, it’s such hard work, pretty punishing.”

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Joanna Lumley attempts to realise her life’s ambition in a one-off special film for BBC One.

Travelling north across the Arctic Circle up through Norway and finally to Svalbard, Joanna takes viewers on a very personal journey as she hopes to see the spell-binding Northern Lights in Joanna Lumley: Land Of The Northern Lights (working title).

Joanna grew up in tropical Malaysia, yet dreamed of the winter wonderland she read about in books.

She says: “I had never seen snow and never felt cold. In the Far East, cold was a luxury and snow was only in pictures in fairy stories.” Read more & comment »