ROLAND WHITE: Why Joanie's greatest role is as the fabulous Dame Joan Collins

Piers Morgan’s Life Stories: Joan Collins

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The Handmaid’s Tale 

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Dame Joan Collins celebrated her 70 years in showbusiness by appearing on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories (ITV) and modestly apologising for blowing her own trumpet.

Not that you’d have noticed because she was in the presence of a master trumpeter.

When it comes to self-promotion, Piers is the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band. Yet his great talent as an interviewer is the way he also blows other people’s trumpets.

He batters his guests with compliments and flatters them into submission.

‘When I think of all the people I know, you are by far the most entertaining,’ he told Joan. He bellowed with laughter at her jokes, and pressed her to admit that, as a young actress, she was ‘a right cracker’.

It’s a technique that gets results. She was moved to tears talking about the deaths of her mother and her sister, the novelist Jackie Collins.

She dismissed one of her five husbands as a ‘womaniser’ and another as ‘a jerk’. She described John Forsythe, her Dynasty co-star, as ‘a misogynist p***k’.

Dame Joan Collins celebrated her 70 years in showbusiness by appearing on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories (ITV) and modestly apologising for blowing her own trumpet

Unlike some younger stars, Collins doesn’t want to tell us about her commitment to the latest fashionable cause, or moan about life. Whether talking about triumphs or setbacks, she is pretty much the same

Unlike some younger stars, she doesn’t want to tell us about her commitment to the latest fashionable cause, or moan about life. Whether talking about triumphs or setbacks, she is pretty much the same.

‘I haven’t had any great roles,’ she said wistfully of her career. ‘I reached my peak with Dynasty.’

Perhaps her greatest triumph has been as Dame Joan, which she always plays with great flamboyance. She was dressed up to the nines — possibly the tens even — and under close questioning from Morgan revealed that she doesn’t know how to use a hoover, and hasn’t done any ironing since 1957.

She apparently does the dishes, but then so does the Queen.

Showing no mercy when lockdown Britain needs a bit of cheering up, Channel 4 gave us The Handmaid’s Tale, which couldn’t have been more grim and depressing if the screenplay had been sung by Morrissey in a particularly bad mood.

At the end of the third series in 2019, June (Elisabeth Moss) managed to smuggle 86 children from the dystopian religious hellhole that is Gilead, which is the United States turned into a cult. She was also shot and badly wounded.

The good news in the new series is that she and her fellow handmaids — the baby-making machines of Gilead — are safe on a friendly farm. The bad news is that the farmer’s wife is deranged and violent, having been sexually abused by her husband and his friends.

Showing no mercy when lockdown Britain needs a bit of cheering up, Channel 4 gave us The Handmaid’s Tale, which couldn’t have been more grim and depressing if the screenplay had been sung by Morrissey in a particularly bad mood. Pictured: Elizabeth Moss as June in The Handmaid’s Tale

You know the form by now. The men are largely dead-eyed and creepy, and say bigoted hateful things in a polite monotone.

The women behave more or less heroically, although Gilead’s Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) makes Rosa Klebb look like Julie Andrews.

It is not for the squeamish. The handmaids capture a man, who is strung up in a barn and then stabbed to death by the farmer’s wife (who then, in the final scene, cuddles up to June while still drenched in her victim’s blood).

You watch every scene thinking something terrible is about to happen, and usually you’re right. Though not always. At one point, I assumed one of the men was going to have his throat cut. Actually, he’d asked for a shave. Not something to be recommended in Gilead.