Joan Sims has beaten drink and depression - and sorted out her differences with fellow Carry On survivor Barbara Windsor. Now, incorrigible as ever, she joins a gang of old troupers in a film about women growing old disgracefully.

WITH heroic self-restraint, Joan Sims rejected the temptation to use a Carry On pun when choosing a title for her recent autobiography. It is called, instead, High Spirits. She has needed them lately. Over the past six years alone there has been a fractured rib, a fractured spine, an attack of Bell's palsy and a hip-replacement operation. "I've started to think I might be accident prone," she says, deadpan.

She has also had to deal with a stream of bereavements. The Carry On crew seems to have suffered a particularly high and early rate of attrition: Sims, 70, is now one of the few survivors of the early team. She suffered from clinical depression and went to a counsellor two years ago. "I found it very helpful, even though at times it was distressing," she says. It was certainly better than Banstead, Surrey, the Dickensian mental hospital where Sims spent two months in 1982. "That was a hellhole. One's morale went down terribly. You are strip-searched when you go in, and you meet all these odd bods.

"Mark you," she adds, brightening, "it was wonderful for character studies. There's always something comical in the deepest tragedy. If they sold little bottles of humour in the shops, it would do so many people a lot of good." She receives me in her small, bright, rented flat off a Kensington square. It's homely but bare of memorabilia, apart from a photograph of Sims meeting the Queen and a miniature pair of bosoms in a box which Ronnie Barker gave her. Sims walks with a stick, but looks dapper in a loose, delphinium-blue trouser-suit. Her hair had been done the day before and her make-up is immaculate. She has a lovely smile.

She's looking very well, I remark. "It's just the bodyworks that are a bit rusty," she says. "I've come out of a very bad period in my life. But here I am again. Emerging." She has even beaten the demon drink. "I don't have a palate for it any more. I tried some wine not long ago and, half-way through it, I was wondering why I bothered. It made me feel hot and uncomfortable. And I am on quite a lot of medication."

She waves at a plastic container marked Thursday, which is full of pills to combat diabetes, arthritis, back pain and blood pressure. "This sweet little box is my daily supply. I've already downed 13 tablets this morning, darling," she explains (it is 11am). "I'm a regular pharmacist."

All the more remarkable, then, that she is appearing in BBC1's The Last Of The Blonde Bombshells, a drama in which a decorous widow, played by Judi Dench, revisits her rackety past in an all-girl swing band during the Second World War in a cast which includes Ian Holm, Billie Whitelaw, June Whitfield, Cleo Laine, Olympia Dukakis and Leslie Caron. It's a slight but poignant piece about women defying convention and finding the nerve to grow old disgracefully.

Sims's character, the rakish pianist, is found tickling the ivories in a tatty pub at the end of Hastings pier, an establishment which reminded the actress of the rigours of location shooting.

"There were no loos," she says, "and the easiest way to transport me to the nearest ones, near the pier entrance, was to shove me in a wheelchair. Of course it was pouring with rain, absolutely pouring, and I had this old mac thrown over me and a plastic hat. I must have looked like 'Penny For The Guy'."

She laughs at the indignity, but it would doubtless take much more than this to confound the person for whom Dick Emery, when she was working on his television shows, would record bouts of flatulence at home and bring the tapes to work on his grand old reel-to-reel player.

"To be a comic woman, you have to put up with quite a bit of banter," she says. "But I didn't mind. I've got a dirty sense of humour and I never found those things really offensive."

She has deftly escaped the attentions of the press to a remarkable degree - but there was the publicist friend who took her to tea and then splashed their (furtively recorded) conversation in a Sunday tabloid: My Battle With Booze, followed by Loneliness Of The Carry On Star. There was a rash of stories, mostly snippets, when High Spirits came out in May. One recent profile portrayed Sims as a solitary has-been - but to judge by the jangling phone and the comings and goings in her apartment, she is anything but. She has also missed out on the critical acclaim that is her due. The BBC made six tributes called Funny Women, in 1997. They included Beryl Reid, June Whitfield and Patricia Routledge, but not Joan Sims. There was no space for her, either, in a 19-part ITV series of comedy stars.

"I do sometimes think that perhaps I may have been undervalued," she says carefully. "But I don't let it bother me." Does she still get recognised? "Yes I do. Indeed. I had a moment of joy the other day when I went to a barbecue in the country and somebody was heard to say, 'Which lady is Dora Bryan?' I was even once mistaken," she adds proudly, "for Shirley MacLaine in a fish-and-chip shop off the Edgware Road."

One wonders why we haven't seen more of her lately, and in chunkier roles. We cherish her Lady Ruff-Diamond ("Oh dear, I seem to have got a little plastered") in Carry On Up The Khyber, deemed by connoisseurs the best of the series, but where is her Lady Bracknell? And, if she is not up to treading the boards, the voice is still supple, fluting, hovering and pouncing with deadly precision on the punchline - a natural for one of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads.

Sims started out in repertory and a string of early comedy revues which belie the myth that British satire began with Beyond The Fringe. But her fondest memories are clearly of the Carry Ons (she appeared in 24 of them). "We were all frightfully eccentric, I'm quite sure. A box of liquorice allsorts. But very dear, very lovable. I can't emphasise enough that it was a joyous experience. Like a family."

It was a surrogate family for Sims, an only child who grew up in Laindon, near Basildon, where her father was the station master. She recalls the isolation of living far from the neighbourhood children, and the sense of rejection by a hypercritical, undemonstrative mother.

"The actors were like a bunch of naughty schoolchildren on the set," Sims continues. "And the jokes were usually on me. But I was a good recipient. You might get something that perhaps deep, deep, deep down might give you - oh! - a little twinge, but you think, 'Just cast it off, that one went a bit wrong.' The Carry Ons were my training, because there was no way you could afford to be sensitive, as a woman. You would have been crucified."

Is it possible to be both sexy and funny? Sims ponders. "Well, one of the greatest exponents - is that the right word - was Marilyn Monroe. But a lot of funny women are never thought of as sexy and in that I include myself. I always used to feel that a lot of my femininity was stripped from me being a comedienne. I felt that very, very deeply. Men are often put off women if they are funny."

She never married. "I don't think I've ever had anybody say the words, 'Will you marry me?', not even someone tight as a tick at a party. Kenneth was the one and only to suggest it." This, astonishingly, was Kenneth Williams, who even promised to give her a child. "I think it was he who wanted a child, like a lot of gay people," she says. "I knew by his voice that he was utterly genuine. But I couldn't have coped with Kenneth; he could drain you completely. I was quite embarrassed and it was never mentioned again."

It is one of Sims's few intimate confessions. She doesn't hold with dishing the dirt or kissing and telling, and stoutly voiced her disapproval when Barbara Windsor made public Sid James's infatuation with her. Terry Johnson's play about their affair, Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle And Dick, played at the National Theatre in 1998 to warm reviews. Sims refused to see it then, but did catch it at Easter on television (where it was renamed Cor, Blimey!).

"I thought the play was unspeakably awful." An edge creeps into her voice. "I will say here and now that I don't want to talk about it any further because it's quite evident that a spat is intended to flare up between Barbara Windsor and myself. I talked to Barbara about it last night, in fact, and said, 'I get the feeling that they're wanting to make a little spat between thee and me,' and she said 'So do I'. But I can assure everybody, and put their minds at rest, that we've ironed it out."

Strong words. There are hints, in both Williams's and Windsor's autobiographies, of a coolness between the two women. But Sims has her Stern Matron face on and one has the premonition that any attempt to pursue this further will end in an enema and bed without supper.

Mercifully, the photographer arrives. He wants a quick snap of me for my by-line picture. "Any advice?" I beg Sims, but she sighs that, no, at her age she's still hopeless at it. Fiddlesticks. As soon as it's her turn before the lens a startling transformation takes place. Whatever the reason, while talking she cameacross as warm, whimsical, vulnerable, but a little formal. Perhaps it was her glasses, or the stiff, high-backed chair she sits in on account of her back, or the hospital table in front of it. Or perhaps it was simply anxiety.

But now the specs are cast aside to reveal a twinkling, wicked brown gaze "Ooo," she says, "I'm so glad I put my false eyelashes on this morning." Her face is marvellously mobile. The Bell's palsy, she says, has gone completely. She squints cross-eyed into the light-meter. A bit of business with the lipstick and compact ripens into some louche patter. Then it's time to demonstrate how she can erect her collapsible walking stick with a flick of the wrist, before flourishing it aloft like a mad dominatrix.

The only thing she is not game for is to be photographed smoking, lest some innocent Carry On admirer succumb to the weed. It looks like the interview could go on indefinitely but, she says, "my men will be here soon" (she is expecting a new orthopaedic chair).

Later, I look back at her book and read again: "More than anything, enthusiasm from an audience satisfied my need to feel wanted . . . Once I'm out there in front of a camera I've got all the confidence in the world, but switch that camera off and I sink back into my timid self." The oldest cliché in the actor's book - but hadn't she just proved the truth of it?

The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, BBC1, September 3

Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this article from the Electronic Telegraph on August 28, 2000.

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