Tales from the trails JOANNA'S SPICE OF LIFE

The globetrotting actor can't imagine life without adventure, but there's a special place where she likes to unwind

When it comes to spicing up her life, Dame Joanna Lumley has always had the knack.

The beloved British actor has done it all – from living hand-to-mouth as a theatre actress in the sixties to becoming a celebrated sitcom star in the nineties.

For the past 16 years, she’s added the title of “travel documentary maker” to her CV and Kiwis are currently enjoying a taste of a recent expedition, in which she journeys to exotic lands like Zanzibar and Madagascar. It’s called Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure and the Absolutely Fabulous star laughs when it’s suggested no one will ever look at their packet of supermarketbought nutmeg quite the same again.

It was, she acknowledges, a true education learning how the spice trade established and destroyed empires, and even led to the discovery of new continents.

Each time she heads off on a new documentary mission, she gets a shiver of excitement, even though the conditions are far from glamorous. Sometimes, she confesses, she has to get ready for a piece to camera in the dark and laughs, “I tend to put on too much make-up. I lash it on, mainly because I can’t see what I’m doing! I just think, ‘Eyebrows go roughly here, put more mouth on.’ So, if I look a bit overdone, that’s why. Still, I can’t bear the thought of a year without a suitcase.”