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The speaker discusses various topics including religion, money, sex, politics, and their personal experiences growing up in South Africa during apartheid. They also talk about their political engagement, their views on adultery and marriage, and the importance of money. They express their belief in the innate kindness of human beings and their concerns about not having enough time to live. They do not mind getting older but do not want to live in sickness. Religion, money, sex and politics, well what could be more interesting than that? Those are all the things that I was not allowed to talk about as a child. You weren't allowed to talk about those things. And you weren't allowed to talk about food either. They were considered rather vulgar. And they are the most interesting things. It would be good to start with politics because I know that your mum was very politically active, is that right? No, my mama was not politically active in the sense that she belonged to a political party or campaigned or anything. But what she did do was a group of other women, white women, because of course there would be no black members allowed because the whole thing about apartheid is black and white people were not allowed to mix. But she and another bunch of liberal minded women set up a thing called the black sash and they would wear a black sash on their clothes and they would go and stand on the town hall steps and protest about apartheid and have eggs thrown at them. I remember her coming home with egg yolk all over her black jacket. And her main area of objection was that being an actress and an impresario and producer she was really frustrated that she wasn't allowed to have mixed audiences. And the apartheid rules allowed black people to attend a play but they would have to be an all black audience. Well, since black people were not educated by and large over the age of ten because the regime wanted a class of workers, not intelligentsia they would not have been the audience that would be likely to want to go to Shaw or Shakespeare or all the great British playwrights who of course were what my mother was concerned with. So she would never have got more than ten black people in a black audience which would have been uneconomic for everybody. So she wanted black people to be allowed to come to the theatre. And also she couldn't cast a cellist with a black man. She had to have a white man blacked up. And there were some fantastically good black actors who either left South Africa and went off and came here or they had to wait until the ANC got into power and they were allowed. And apartheid was abolished. And was the cause something then that you were infused with yourself? Not really. No, I was a typical South African young woman. I knew my parents were very liberal. We had black servants and I was absolutely devoted to my nanny. And we had really good friendly relations. But they were still employer-servant relations. I never went to their houses. They had rooms at the back of our house in a sort of little compound for servants. And they were respectable living horses. And I suppose by the impoverished standards of most black people, they were luxurious. But they were certainly nothing like as nice as ours. And that never seemed to me odd. I never questioned, when I was young, when I was a child, I never questioned the fact my nanny had to sit at the back of the bus and I walked at the front of the bus. Or that, you know, if I walked along the pavings with a lot of giggling school servants, a venerable black man would get off the pavings, walk in the utter, and let us pass. All these things only hit me when I had been abroad and went back and realised what kind of a society I'd lived in perfectly happily. You have become, I believe, very politically engaged. You've thrown yourself actively into the debate about education, food in schools, assisted dying. You're very engaged politically, is that fair to say? Yes, I am, but not party politically, interestingly. I mean, I voted for all spectrums of the political rainbow in my time. Mostly I've voted in my long life for the woolly middle and woolly liberal middle, you know, SDP and liberals and so on, all of whom have achieved absolutely nothing and are disappearing so fast they might as well not exist. I've never been party political very much. Of course, I have a Tory MP son, so people always assume that I'm Tory, and I have this posh voice, and I live in the Cotswolds, and a lot of my friends definitely are Tory. So I can see why I'm just assumed to be Tory. A Tory bitch is what Twitter call me quite often. And the reason I think you think of me as political is because it's not so much political as that I'm a kind of interfering, one of those interfering women who always wants fixing. When I would be walking down the streets with my children when they were little, if I saw a plastic bag blowing on the pavement, you know, I'd go and pick it up. I once heard the wife of the chairman of British Rail being asked what she felt when she went into a train laboratory and it was dirty and there was blue paper all over the floor. What do you feel, David Parker? What do you do? And she said, well, I clean it up, of course. And I recognise myself in them. I mean, I'm forever tidying up train laboratory. It's that thing of seeing a gap and thinking, that could be fixed. I know how to fix that. Well, if I know how to fix that, I would fix it. Or at least try. And so I think I was, you know, at one point in my life I was chairman of the Royal Society of Arts, the RSA. And I don't know if you know much about the RSA, but it is my model organisation because it's a sort of think and do tank. Yes, it's a think tank. It has lots of clever people writing clever reports. But the idea is never to write a report which will gather dust on the shelf. It's to write a report that can start a little revolution, that can fix a problem. And so in its time, the RSA has done all sorts of things. It's been the genesis, I think, of that word, that the founder, one of the founders of all sorts of organisations like the London School of Economics, the National Trust, the Lifeboat Association. And all of these things would have been because members of the RSA thought there's a problem. People are drowning the tree. We need to do something about it. There's a problem here. We are destroying our heritage. We'd better set up a National Trust. And I have much of that spirit in me, that if you think something's wrong, you should try and help us fix it. And I loved being chairman of the RSA, simply because of that we did lots of things We started, for example, a scheme to teach children to cook at school and we got it funded by Waitrose. And it ended up a really successful charity, driving buses all round London, which turned into, and all round the country, which turned into teaching kitchens. And we taught not just the children, but the teachers. Most teachers didn't put time in school. And that was called Focus on Food, and I was fairly proud of that. And that just came out of asking our members, what's wrong? I gave a lecture about food, and then a whole lot of people came round and said, well, let's do something about it. It's wonderful, your proactive spirit. Not everybody has it. Well, I think I'm very energetic. I think a lot of people don't do stuff, although they'd like to, but they just don't have the energy. And I have too much energy, which is very tiring for everybody around me. And my children sometimes say, Mum, you are so tiring. So I can see that's not all a good thing. But, yeah, I do have a lot of energy, and of course I enjoy it. And I'm a tremendous egotist anyway, so I like to be the one that gets in the spot. I cried reading the letter that your dad wrote to your mum before his operation for a cancer that eventually killed him. But I did wonder what your view of sex and relationships was growing up, if you were the child of a love story, which you obviously were. I obviously was. And I do remember my father saying to me that, it was very interesting, because he said that he was of that generation that believed that if women had sex before marriage, they were trapped, and nobody would ever have any respect for them ever again. And if you slept with a man, he would leave you the next morning, and he would have no respect for you. And I truly believed it, and so that made me feel incredibly guilty, as of course I obey any of their rules, but I always felt that I was a tramp. And I knew that they, I mean it really was, I never ever heard my parents quarrel. Presumably they must have. But I never heard them quarrel. And so I did grow up with this, you know. And it was interesting, because I always knew that their relationship, that they were more important to each other than we were. We were a little band, my two brothers and me, and we were definitely the bitch-fart players in this family. I mean, we all had fooled my parents. But their love for each other was definitely... We didn't feel neglected, ever. We felt very loved. We knew that that was the central thing for both of them. Without them there may be fame. It was really good. And what was quite funny is when I read my mother's diaries, thinking of my father giving me this lecture about women who made love because they were married to tramps, I read my mother's diaries and she had had an affair before she met mine. And that really shocked me. I couldn't believe it. Because my mother had never said this to me, but my father had said it. You were quite sexually enthusiastic from quite a young age. I was, I was. I mean, as soon as I got over horses, I was into boys, you know. About fifteen I was. I remember thinking, if I have ten lovers before I'm married, that is absolutely the limit. If you have more than ten, you're just as full of it. But ten was okay. Ten was okay. I think I had eleven. I know you've spoken about it before, but you had a long adulterous relationship with the man you ended up marrying. How do you view your adultery now? Well, the interesting thing is I still don't think it's the right thing to do. I don't approve of adultery. I feel really upset when my girlfriend's husband cheats on me. Or I hear of somebody who's having an affair with somebody else, and I just think, oh, it's so unfair. But the fact is, and it's such an old-age excuse, and it sounds like such a well-worn cliché, but I could no more have not fallen in love with Jane. I mean, I would never have had the willpower to resist such an overpowering love. And it was extraordinary. You know, I'd have done anything for him. And I was right. You know, both of us. It was the most important thing of our lives. And yes, it was particularly painful, because Jane's wife was my mother's best friend. She was, I suppose, 18 or 20 years older than him. And he was the same age, older than me. But most of them painfully, she was like a mum to me. When I came to work in England, I stayed with them, with Jane and his wife Nan. And Nan was absolutely wonderful. She could not have been kinder. And so I was like a... I mean, the betrayal and the deceit. It seems to be amazing that I could do it. But I so loved Jane, and I so actually loved Nan, and the one thing we were both totally agreed on was that we weren't going to get married, and that he would not leave Nan. And I didn't want him to leave Nan. I didn't want to upset that family. My best friend was his daughter. You know, it's all a bit too incestuous and difficult to explain, but I never once asked him to leave Nan. And in fact, in the end, I left him, because when I turned 34, the desire to have a baby hit me like a tidal wave. I mean, I had always been saying to myself, I don't want children, I'm very happy, and I've got Jane, and it's perfect. I'm building up my business. It's actually fine that we're not together all the time, because, you know, I'm working really hard, and it means that he can, you know, he's not hurting Nan. Fortunately, the war came unravelled, because I then, when I was 34, I suddenly realised that I wanted to have a baby more than anything. So I left Jane. It didn't work. I ran away with somebody I thought the easiest way to get away from Jane would be to get on top of somebody else. And so I did. Anyhow, it didn't work, because he'd run away from his wife, I'd run away from Jane, and neither of us were happy, and we both wanted to go back to where we were. But of course it was still a hugely hurtful phenomenon, absolutely awful phenomenon. But both of them were wonderful people, and they just decided that they were not going to let this catastrophe, from their point of view, absolute wonder to mine, of him leaving Nan and marrying me, they were not going to let it ruin everything. And so Nan just said to her children, we're all going to behave properly, nobody's going to fall out, rain is to rain, proof is proof. By then we had our house in the country. After a while we had our house in the country, and Nan used to come down many weekends and stay with us, and have Christmas with us, and be with us, and see the family all the time. Ten years after Rain died, which must have been beyond devastating. He died in 2002 I think. I did. And ten years after that you remarried, you married your current husband John. Yes. And what I'd love to know from you is, how at its best does a good marriage look? Well I absolutely, I mean, John could not be more different from Rain. John is very sensible, and gregarious, so unlike Rain, Rain never liked, he was practically reclusive. And John has been, I mean he has saved my life really, because I don't think, I think I need somebody to like. You know I'm doing this one woman show at the moment. We have questions after the end of them. And one of the questions, inevitably, is about falling in love at 17. You fell in love at 17. How does that feel? Well to be honest it feels exactly like falling in love at 17. You know you have the same heartbanging and concern that, you know, can I ring him up? Dare I text him? Does he really fancy me? Am I imagining it? You know, all that stuff at the beginning. Nothing changes, just because you're old. So, I'm a great advocate for Jerry Astor's love, I think it's good for you. How do I view the value of money? Well I think it's naive and ridiculous to think it's not important. I mean, you talk to anybody who has no money and it dominates their lives. Of course it does. We don't know where your next meal is coming from. So true property is appalling. I think I've always been so lucky because I came from a well-to-do South African family. My mother was a successful theatre person. My dad was a director of a subsidiary of ICI, which was a huge company at the time. So we lived in a very nice house and we went to private school and we lived in a nice area of Johannesburg. I never went, as a child, into one of the South African appalling townships. Although I theoretically knew there were lots of poor people, I'd never seen some... It's extraordinary how you can live in a country and not be aware. Anyway. So, yeah. No, I don't know what you want me to say about money. Obviously money is important. I don't think I would ever do... I've had the luxury, because I've always had... My parents helped me in the beginning. I was given help when I... My mother helped me when I opened my restaurant. She put £11,000 into my restaurant. And when I first started my business, I had an allowance from my parents of £10 a week, which is now, today, would probably be £1,000 a week, or £5,000 a week. So I always had help. And... But I've always been quite careful with money. I've never lived above my income. And I've been, luckily, successful with my business. So I've always managed to live within my income, but now I have huge income from it all. And have your career choices been motivated by money? I mean, do you choose with your heart, and then money's a by-product? I love business. I absolutely enjoy it. I'm a real trader. The reason I have a glasses range and a necklace range is because I actually love trade. I love making stuff, and I love designing things, and I love people buying them. You know, it just gives me huge pleasure. But the business... I've always been saying to students, don't be torn full of profit. You know, I went to talk to a lot of art students at Goldsmith College once, years ago, and I met this wall of people saying, art for art's sake. And I was saying that I thought the college should teach them marketing skills, but it's no good being the best silversmith or the best painter or the best sculptor in the world if nobody's going to buy your work. The only way you can go on making beautiful artwork is by selling some of it and selling how important money is. And I've never taken a job just because the money's good. However, I don't think I would have done, let's say, Baycom, if I was supposed to do it for free. And you know what? I am so grateful to it, because for an awful lot of the things that I can do now, I wouldn't have ever got a one-woman show off the ground, would I, if it wasn't for Baycom. Because every single one of those people who buy tickets for seniors come because of Baycom. I mean, they like me. They come because they like me, and they like me because they like Baycom. I do think that happiness makes a huge difference to one's energy levels. And John is really encouraging me. He's always up for anything. And that's just extraordinary. I mean, he's come with me. He's done 33 of these one-woman shows, and he's come to every one. I mean, he doesn't all. He often sits at the back with his Kindle. I don't think he watches it. I don't think much of that. But he's always there. He's always on top of my back. He's my bag carrier, but he's far more than just a bag carrier. I mean, I wouldn't do it if it wasn't for him, because it wouldn't be any fun. It wouldn't be so much fun. It would be quite a bit of fun. But I don't think I would have done it if he wasn't coming with me. But that's true, I think. I'm really lucky with that. You don't believe in God. I think it's a wonderful fairy tale. If I have a religion at all, it's that I really believe in the innate kindness and goodness of human beings, and that I don't think that Christians or Buddhists or Muslims have some kind of monopoly on goodness or on morality. There are lots of very good people who don't believe in God. Jesus doesn't have some kind of monopoly on goodness. Does your goodness, because you are obviously a very good person and you're very caring and you do an awful lot for other people, has fame made any difference to that? Do you have to concentrate on staying well behaved? I don't think I've ever changed. You know, it's interesting that people often say, if they like me on the television or they like me on my one-woman show or they like what I write, they will often say, you are so consistent. You're always just you. And I think I don't know how to be anything else than just me. And I do realise that sometimes that is irritating. A bit too talkative, a bit too bossy, a bit too cavalier. But I don't know what to come to. I think that you cannot be happy if you... Because I think that happiness is the ultimate goal. I don't think you can be happy if what you are enjoying is at the expense of somebody else. If you... If you get your kicks from being ram and beaverish and behaving badly to other people so that you feel special, that can't make you happy. That's a kind of hell that is totally unsatisfactory. I mean, everybody wants to be loved and nobody loves a bleep. Thank you. You've said before that your main concern is not having enough life left to live. Do you mind getting older? No, I don't actually mind getting older. I mean, I'm having a great old age. You know, I'm fairly healthy. But I would like longer because I still would like to do a lot more things. But I don't want to live I don't want to... Well, you know how I feel about euthanasia. I don't want to live. It would seem awful pity to have had such a lovely life as I have. Almost everything has gone right for me, almost everything. And then have to spend weeks or months or years in pain and suffering. I'd rather end it. Although I'd love to live for a very long time, I don't want to live in sickness. At the end of the day, what really matters in this life? Love. Love. And it doesn't have to be, you know, love of your husband or love of your children. But you have to love something. It could be I don't know, rare orchids or your spaniel. You must have something to use that wonderful thing which is... If you really love something or someone it makes you happier and makes everybody around you happier. I think love. Or appreciate in this case, and I'm sure that's right.