Dame Joanna Lumley describes humans as ‘unbearably vain and destructive’

Dame Joanna Lumley has bemoaned humans for being “unbearably vain and destructive”.

The actress, who stars in the upcoming A Ghost Story For Christmas: The Room In The Tower, said she loves “frightening stories”.

“I do believe that there are ghosts,” she told the Radio Times.

Naming Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn, Dame Joanna added: “All those great creators believed in gods.

“They had a sense of godliness.

“And I think if we skip out on that, we’re missing out on something.”

Dame Joanna, who is married to conductor Stephen Barlow, went on: “We’ve become unbearably vain and destructive and we can’t remember how to stop destroying.

“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.

“We’ve got to strive not to be completely bloody, to make amends for humans’ dreadfulness to each other and the planet.”

Dame Joanna stars opposite Tobias Menzies in the latest “spine-chilling” episode of Mark Gatiss’s A Ghost Story For Christmas.

Multi-award-winning Gatiss has written and directed A Ghost Story For Christmas: The Room In The Tower, which is based on the short story by E F Benson and was originally published in 1912.

It tells the story of Roger Winstanley, who has long been haunted by an unsettling, recurring dream, an invitation to spend the night in the house of an acquaintance where an unseen terror lurks.

It is the eighth A Ghost Story For Christmas to have been adapted for the BBC by Gatiss and follows last year’s Woman of Stone.

Dame Joanna will also star in the Amandaland Christmas special opposite her Absolutely Fabulous co-star Jennifer Saunders.