Pamela's back on TV - and asking other people about their sex lives

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11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Deep in the embrace of an armchair sits a small woman with pokerstraight blonde hair. The room is so dark that the only evidence of the guide dog lying on the floor is the occasional glint from its eyes.

"How did you get your sex education?" the woman asks David Blunkett, who is sitting opposite her on a sofa.

He looks rather uncomfortable. "Erm," he says, "from other boys, from the radio, from reading books..."

"Did you get the correct information from them?"

"Well, I don't think in those days we were brought [up] to understand women, and that's perhaps why relationships have been, over the years, so rocky," admits the hapless former Home Secretary.

What possessed him, one wonders, to agree to be interviewed by a Californian psychotherapist (special interests: sex, trauma and hypnotherapy) for a television programme? And not some semitrained psychobabbler, but a bona-fide professor of psychology who could winkle secrets out of a stone - and knows plenty about the vicissitudes of fame herself.

Seldom has anyone in the public eye so completely refashioned themselves as the former comedian Pamela Stephenson, whose latest project is to try to break the mould of the television celebrity interview by using self-hypnosis and other therapy techniques.

Once, she enjoyed outraging the stuffier elements of British society, and now she may be about to do this again - though in a very different context.

"When did you first have sex?" she asks the comedian Robin Williams (who plunges into a long and nervous riff about his high-school days). Her five in-depth interviews - the others are with Sharon Osbourne, Stephen Fry and the Duchess of York - will be screened at the start of next month under the rather larky title Shrink Rap, but they are in no sense light entertainment.

Fry confesses to having woken up that very day and wished he were dead; the Duchess of York speaks plaintively of wanting to be a child; Sharon Osbourne weeps over the pain of her childhood.

According to Pamela, this is all very healthy. Celebrities, she believes, are usually under pressure to present "a glorified self" that is no more than a fantasy. But the more they project this fantasy, she believes, the more likely they are to feel ashamed of their very human frailties.

That has certainly been her own experience. So let's roll back to the end of the Seventies for a moment, when she was the first outrageously sexy female comedian on British TV - not only delivering saucy impressions of Royals and newsreaders on "Not The Nine O'Clock News" but later mutating into a spiky-haired, one-woman show, complete with a stage prop that consisted of a gigantic pair of plastic breasts.

She gloried in provocative misbehaviour: on the Parkinson show, she wrapped her legs around a newscaster's neck; in a nightclub, she teased a paparazzo by stripping to her underwear; and once, after the Mail's drama critic gave her a bad notice, she sent him a (fake) cowpat.

Notoriously, for Prince Andrew's stag night, she hired policewoman costumes for Sarah Ferguson, the Princess of Wales and herself - and trooped off with them to the nightclub Annabel's for a raucous night out.

Little wonder she was hardly ever out of the papers or that her affair with the (married) Scottish comedian Billy Connolly whipped up a furore that threatened to lash right back into her pretty face.

Then Billy and Pamela started having babies together and moved to California, where she abruptly stopped work.

When she re-emerged into the public eye six years ago, it was as the author of a bestseller entitled "Billy", about her husband's difficult childhood.

Three more books followed; and this autumn, she will be bringing out a guide to self-analysis (working title: Head Case).

We have met in Los Angeles, where she is filming the interview with Sharon Osbourne, far from the Connollys' homes in Scotland and on the East Coast of the US Now in her mid-50s, Dr Connolly (as we should now call her) is one of those slightly intimidating people who hold themselves very erect and very still.

Her features - in this town of dazzling, ageless blondes - are largely unremarkable, with the exception of a fine pair of eyes that focus on yours with such intensity that you almost want to start confessing to something, anything, to watch them deepen with understanding.

Surprisingly, she finds talking about herself uncomfortable. "Every now and again" she explains, "I do a session with a patient who says: 'I was watching TV the other night, and there you were with massive, moving breasts, falling over a table.' It can be a problem. Patients don't want to be confronted with hearing too much about me."

Some, apparently, are even prepared to sue if they find out something that "ruins" their view of a therapist.

For different reasons, she will talk in only the briefest terms about a much-loved child who is mentally handicapped. Now an adult, her daughter is learning new skills at an American residential college.

Was the birth of this child responsible for kindling Pamela's interest in the workings of the mind?

No, she says: even before becoming a psychologist, she had learned all that she could about her daughter's condition and had a lot of input into her development.

"If you have someone in your family who's struggling with anything out of the ordinary, it's what you do as a mother. You do the best you can.

"You respond to your children and help them and you love them and try not to look at them clinically."

Slowly, Pamela begins to unwind. I ask her about that uncharted period immediately after the height of her fame, when she was performing on America's prime satirical show, Saturday Night Live. Then - pfft - she all but vanished.

At the time, she and Billy already had one daughter (they went on to have two more), and had just won custody of his son and daughter by his first wife. No question about it, Pamela says: life would have been simply "too chaotic" with two comedians in the family - particularly as Billy (in her view, a clear-cut case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) can never stay in one place for long.

"I really needed that time to take stock," she continues. "I was feeling very burnt-out anyway because I tend to drive myself to an extraordinary degree.

I didn't realise right away that I was actually tired of doing comedy. Being a comedian, at that point, was part of my identity, but not loving it was making me unhappy."

It's hard now to see why she ever gravitated towards comedy. During her childhood in Sydney, she says, she was "a serious little thing, a nerd" - which, in many ways, she still is. Having established herself as a "serious" actress in Australia, she brought all those acting skills to bear on reinventing herself as the queen of British satirical comedy.

In fact, the Pamela Stephenson fondly remembered by men of a certain age never really existed at all.

Nerdy Pam was improvising - following the example of the comic actor Steve Martin - and then feeling misunderstood when people saw her as "whacky Pam" rather than an artist in her own right. And even the improvisation wasn't what it seemed: she prepared everything.

"The most difficult thing was that doing comedy was so much at odds with my serious nature," she says, "so it was always a problem when people expected me to be funny offstage.

"Then, on top of that, I was seen as glamorous, which wasn't my view of myself either.

"And I'd be very, very nervous when I was about to go on stage - I'd want to throw up. I always used to spend the day wishing I wasn't a comedian.

"I'd watch people walking by, on their way to work, and know I'd have given anything to be one of them."

After Saturday Night Live, she went into therapy - which, incidentally, helped her to understand her husband better ("He'd been baffling me since we met").

And she found herself deconstructing her 100mph lifestyle. "I was helped to come to the realisation that I needed to move on from being a comedian. It was actually quite hard at first, and I fell into a kind of existential slump. If I wasn't Pamela Stephenson, comedian, then who was I? What would I do instead?"

So, what was it like, suddenly being little wifey of the celeb rather than a big beast in your own right? She laughs.

"I belong to a sort of unofficial famous wives' club, where we share horrible things that happen when we're out with our more 'useful' halves. And I quickly learned the rules:

"1. You walk at the back of the pack - first him, then his manager, his publicist, his agent, then you.

"2. Any invitation for you both to dinner, premiere, screening etc is not transferable - i.e. no hubby, no show. If you went alone, you'd be stuck at a terrible table with other losers who'd also made social gaffes.

"3. Having a different surname from your famous husband only confuses people - I quickly learned to call myself Pamela Stephenson-Connolly.

"4. Never tell anyone your real age. Other women will get upset because if you look younger than them, you've 'outed' them. I made the mistake of telling people how old I was and quickly got reprimanded.

"5. Look fabulous at all times. This I could not achieve.

"6. Have Botox so people won't know you're frowning at them when they are rude to you, because you are the wife, and the wife has to be utterly compliant.

"7. America is more prudish and judgmental than people in the UK imagine. Having children and being unmarried is a no-no. We got married.

"8. When you're at a premiere and people say 'Hello, how are you?', you're not supposed to answer because that would detract from their time focusing on the famous Scottish person they really want to bond with.

"9. The Red Carpet is a no-go area for you. Your husband and entourage walk it, while you peel off and fight your way to the side entrance of the cinema.

"10. If you haven't remembered to carry your own ticket and party pass, you're in big trouble and will have to wait until a furious press agent rescues you, long after the movie has begun.'

Behind this wry acknowledgement of her tumble down the celebrity pecking-order is a long period of adjustment.

At a loss for something meaningful to do outside the home, she had dithered about going into law but finally enrolled in a psychology class - and discovered that she loved it.

Nerdy Pamela, whose sense of humour is clever and dry, had regained ascendancy over zany, cowpat-through-the-post Pam.

The long haul to a PhD and then a licence to practise (requiring 3,000 hours of clinical experience as well as oral and written exams) coincided with her youngest child starting school. "So I was free to fill my mind with statistics, psychosis and personality disorders," she says.

"But it was actually a huge relief to be so excited about something again, and Billy, who loves to read and be quiet at home, welcomed the atmosphere of calm that he thought I brought to the household, compared to the craziness of my comedy years."

After starting to see patients, she did some extra training in sexuality - then an unpopular option - and a big study on sadomasochism "because I felt that people who had that erotic interest were being ill-served and nobody had done a proper study".

What conclusion did you come to? "That the assumptions previously made - that those people were psychologically unhealthy - were basically untrue."

She remembers occasionally being shocked in her first couple of years of clinical practice, particularly during sex therapy.

However, after 12 years as a Beverly Hills psychotherapist - with patients who have included the cream of Hollywood - she doesn't think that she could ever be surprised by anything now.

This non-judgmental approach, combined with her speaking eyes, clearly does much to relax her television guests - as does her policy of filming for two hours on a darkened set without breaking for so much as a pat with a powder puff.

But is it wise to encourage famous people to expose their vulnerabilities to millions of people on TV? After all, there is nothing to stop viewers being judgmental.

"There's no knowing what people will make of Shrink Rap, but we can never control that,' she feels.

"People may be shocked by the sex questions but, take Robin Williams - he brought up the subject of dating and sexuality, and I think it's always interesting to know when people become aware of themselves as sexual beings.

"With Stephen Fry, sex was very much part of our conversation, too - and prudish people may find it uncomfortable."

Her fervent hope is that "you can talk about deep things on TV as long as you've got it in context".

Maybe so. But I can't help wondering if the Duchess of York will come to regret her own candour on the show.

"I've been a child all my life, which has been great," she tells Pamela. "I don't really like talking to grown-ups very much.

"I mean grown-ups are nice but you're always having to be sensible and talk eloquently and know things about Nasdaq and money things... I'm sure it's very interesting to many people, but I'm happier on the ground with Ken and Barbie, Ken and Cindy."

Is this admission helpful to a former Royal who was recently criticised for talking about going "on the pull" with her daughters?

Pamela isn't aware of the Duchess's latest gaffes. Sarah, who has long been a friend, "obviously has many, many struggles," she says, looking concerned.

"One can't help but be empathic when you begin to see people's struggles."

Blunkett, as you might expect from a bluff Yorkshireman and therapy virgin, is the least confessional - barely touching on his affair with a married woman and the birth of their son - and the most insistent on keeping a grip on his feelings. Pamela feels that he embodies the traditional British view.

"Moving on after trauma is good, if we truly can," she says. "The trouble is that, often, traumatic moments get buried in the psyche and are sitting there in our unconscious mind, still affecting the way we act, feel and relate to others.

"Blunkett did his best to express his feelings, but I think his isolation as a child, as well as being sent away from his parents at an early age, and the loss of his father and grandfather, taking on his mother's pain, his difficulty with dating, understanding sex and finding female partners - on top of his struggles with being blind - were all deeply traumatic.

And some of those elements affected choices he made later and even led to the difficulties he eventually had with relationships and at work.

"I wish he'd had psychotherapy when he first began to become prominent in politics. Unfortunately, he is like many men of his generation: never rewarded - in fact, punished - for having or expressing feelings. He feels somewhat ashamed of them."

Should the former Cabinet minister be looking for a therapist now? She pauses. "I think everybody would benefit from therapy," she says.

Shrink Rap will be broadcast at 11pm on More4 from April 2, Mon-Fri, and then weekly at 9pm from Wed, April 11.

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