The twinkling lights of Christmas prep might warm the cockles, but Dame Joanna Lumley is serving up a chilly reality check that’s got Britain pondering its place in the universe. In a bombshell interview with Radio Times published on November 26, 2025, the 79-year-old icon—fresh off terrorizing Netflix viewers as the iron-fisted Hester Frump in Wednesday Season 2—didn’t mince words about humankind’s trajectory. “We’ve become unbearably vain and destructive and we can’t remember how to stop destroying,” she declared, painting humans as a self-obsessed “plague” that breeds, consumes, and ravages without a backward glance. Tied to her musings on ghosts and godliness amid a new BBC ghost story gig, Lumley’s takedown isn’t just holiday humbug—it’s a full-throated call to arms against our eco-apocalypse, blending spiritual yearning with stark environmental alarm. As fans from her Absolutely Fabulous days cheer her unfiltered edge and critics cry “celebrity doomsaying,” the frenzy exposes a nation grappling with guilt over its carbon footprint and fleeting attention spans. With a star-studded Christmas reunion on the horizon, is Lumley the voice of reason in a reckless world, or just another posh prophet preaching from her ivory tower?

Lumley’s interview, timed to hype her lead role in Mark Gatiss’s A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Room in the Tower—a spine-tingling adaptation of E.F. Benson’s 1912 tale of spectral visitations—starts innocently enough with spectral beliefs. “I do believe there are ghosts,” she affirms, linking otherworldly presences to a lost “sense of godliness” that fueled history’s great creators. But the chat swiftly veers into existential dread, with Lumley lamenting how modern humanity has ditched that divine humility for a vanity-fueled rampage. “If history could be written by anything other than human beings, we would be seen as a plague, unable to stop breeding, to stop destroying, using up, never replacing,” she elaborates, her words dripping with the wry despair that made Patsy Stone such a gloriously flawed icon. It’s a theme she’s revisited before—her 2023 memoir A Good Bad Girl touched on bipolar struggles and planetary peril—but this feels sharper, more urgent, as if the ghosts of Christmases yet to come are whispering warnings through her.

At 79, Lumley remains a force: married to conductor Stephen Barlow since 1986, she’s balanced high-society glamour with gritty activism. Her 2009 Gurkha campaign, which secured residency rights for 4,000 Nepalese veterans, cemented her as Britain’s bleeding-heart aristocrat, earning a damehood and endless accolades. Yet she’s no stranger to controversy—recall her 2024 Cheltenham quip on migration limits that split the nation down the middle. This latest salvo, though, lands amid escalating climate chaos: the UK’s COP30 pledges are under fire, with 2025’s heatwaves and floods claiming 500 lives per Met Office tallies. Lumley’s “plague” metaphor echoes eco-warriors like David Attenborough, who in his latest docuseries warned of “irreversible tipping points” from overpopulation and overconsumption. But where Attenborough opts for poetic pleas, Lumley goes for the gut punch: We’re not just harming the planet; we’re vainly blind to it, scrolling past extinction alerts while bingeing Wednesday reruns.

The backlash—and backlash it is—ignited faster than a Yule log. Within hours of the Radio Times drop, #JoannaPlague trended on X, clocking 300,000 posts by midday November 26. Climate skeptics pounced first: Fox News contributor Steve Milloy, a Trump-era EPA gadfly, branded her a “glued-together, has-been actress” peddling Malthusian misery, complete with a snarky Photoshop of Lumley as a locust queen. “Condemns humanity for having babies? 🙄,” he sneered, racking up 34 likes from his denialist echo chamber. Over on TikTok, Gen Z creators flipped it into satire: duets of Lumley’s clip synced to Ab Fab‘s “Sweetie darling” audio, with captions like “Patsy after one too many fags: ‘We’re all doomed, pass the gin!’” One viral skit from @EcoRoastUK, viewed 1.2 million times, dressed as Lumley to roast “boomers who flew private to protest pipelines.” Detractors, including Labour MP Zarah Sultana, accused her of “eco-fascism lite,” arguing the real plague is inequality, not population—pointing to how the richest 1% emit more CO2 than the poorest 66% combined, per Oxfam 2025 data.

Yet Lumley’s defenders are legion, turning the tide with heartfelt huzzahs. The Telegraph’s thread—”Has Joanna Lumley got a point?”—garnered 4,000 engagements, with users like @GreenGuardianUK declaring, “She’s spot on. We’ve plundered the Earth like entitled toddlers. Time to grow up.” Environmental groups piled on: Friends of the Earth tweeted a graphic of Lumley’s Gurkha wins overlaid with her quote, captioning, “From fighting for heroes to fighting for the planet—Dame J’s always ahead.” A YouGov snap poll showed 55% of Brits “agree with her sentiment but hate the delivery,” while 30% hailed it as “refreshingly honest.” Even The Independent op-ed framed it as “Patsy’s planetary wake-up call,” praising her for channeling Ab Fab‘s chaos into climate critique. Social media sleuths unearthed her history: Lumley’s narrated Attenborough docs like The Hunt (2015), where she voiced over nature’s brutal beauty, and her Joanna Lumley Trust has funneled £2 million to refugee education since 2010—proof her “plague” plea stems from love, not loathing.

Tying it to her festive slate only amps the irony. The Room in the Tower, airing December 22 on BBC One, sees Lumley as a haunted matriarch opposite The Crown‘s Tobias Menzies, in a tale of ancestral curses and midnight visitations. “I’m not tremendous on gore but I do love frightening stories,” she told Radio Times, hinting the supernatural mirrors our self-inflicted horrors. And then there’s the Amandaland Christmas special—her first scripted team-up with Ab Fab soulmate Jennifer Saunders since 2016’s movie flop—where Saunders plays her on-screen sis, Aunt Joan, in a riotous family reunion. “Playing Joanna’s sister is guaranteed to be a laugh—who doesn’t love a family reunion SoHa style?” Saunders quipped, a balm to Lumley’s bleakness. Amid tinsel and turkey, her plague talk feels like the ultimate party pooper—yet it’s sparking real talk: petitions for UK carbon taxes hit 100K signatures overnight, and #LumleyLegacy trended with user pledges to “replace what we use.”

Critics might scoff at a Bond girl-turned-dame lecturing from her Kensington perch—net worth £15 million, per The Sun—but Lumley’s no armchair activist. She’s trekked the Hindu Kush for refugee docs and lobbied Parliament on menopause equity. Her “wretched bunch” line echoes philosopher Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011), which dubs us “the most dangerous animal,” but with Lumley’s flair, it’s less dry treatise, more dinner-party dagger. Psychotherapist Dr. Becky Spelman told Hello!, “Joanna’s channeling collective eco-anxiety—vanity as denial, destruction as distraction. It’s cathartic, even if it stings.” X user @PeterChurcher2 fired back at naysayers: “Only Far Right types are ‘unbearably vain’—Joanna’s calling out us all.”

As 2025 closes with COP30’s high-stakes haggling in Brazil, Lumley’s words hang like a ghost in the attic: a plea to reclaim that “godliness” before the plague consumes us. Will Britain heed the dame’s dirge, swapping vanity for virtue? Or dismiss it as Yuletide yakking? With her Christmas double-bill looming, one thing’s clear: Joanna Lumley’s not fading quietly. She’s rattling chains—literal and figurative—forcing us to face the monster in the mirror. Merry crisis, everyone?