Although you may not recognise her, you’ve probably seen her face. And while you may not be able to place her voice, you’ve almost certainly heard it. As a consummate impersonator, Jan Ravens, 46, has appeared in many different guises — from Dame Thora Hird and Ann Widdecombe, MP, to Nigella Lawson — more often than she has appeared as herself. Although she trained as a drama teacher at Cambridge University, it was her talent for mimicry that led her down another path, supplying voiceovers for
Spitting Image and the BBC Radio 4 show
Dead Ringers. When the latter grew up and moved to BBC Two two years ago, the work took on a new, demanding dimension.
For a start her weight and figure became more of an issue. “Most women who work in television tend to be a size 10, whereas I am a 12 on a good day. I also enjoy drinking and eating too much, so most of the exercise and dieting I do is about damage limitation,” she says. In a quick-fix attempt to lose inches before filming the new series, Ravens recently followed Carol Vorderman’s detox diet and lost about 8lb (3.6kg). “No meat, no fish, no coffee, no alcohol, no sugar, no wheat. It isn’t as hard as you’d think because there are some great recipes and you can make smoothies. But you’re supposed to do it for 28 days. I did it for between 14 and 21, then fell off the wagon.”
It was the prospect of “doing” Madonna, though, that most concentrated her mind. Apart from creating the look, she also had to perfect the song-and-dance routines. “I took singing lessons last year and found that it wakes up your head. It’s like doing a workout, it leaves you glowing. I also had a fantastic choreographer who studied the Madonna videos and gave me the moves. I thought: ‘This is the exercise I like best; I should do dancing classes on the go’.”
While dance has helped to keep her body trim, Ravens has also been working out with a personal trainer. Along with weight and toning exercises she started running regularly until she “became a bit too keen” and tore her calf and thigh muscles. “I loved it, but to start running at 46, you have to be really careful. I’m a bit of flibbertigibbet though. I find with all exercise that I get bored and move on from one to another.”
It is hard to see, frankly, with her home and work commitments — when Ravens is filming her day begins at 5am and she doesn’t get home until 8pm — how she might factor in such activities. As she says: “With three sons — Alfie, 17, Lenny, 13, and Louis, 6 — you’re kept awake until 2am by one of them, and then woken five hours later by another.”
Perhaps her greatest challenge to date though has been to impersonate thesinger Norah Jones, who “is not only slim but more than 20 years younger”. Just getting into character can take up two hours in make-up, and often gives Ravens crises of confidence. “One day I might be doing three characters, and so I get to spend a lot of time looking at myselfin the mirror, while thinking, ‘Oh my God, should I get that fixed?’. What normal women do, I do in spades because not only am I sitting there looking critically at myself but I am trying to be someone else who is either younger than me or has had lots of plastic surgery. Fortunately my face is quite malleable and we have brilliant make-up artists.”
When it comes to medicine, Ravens favours an integrative approach, swearing by the natural remedy Australian Bush Flower Woman Essence and essential fatty acids, along with whatever the doctor orders. “I take bucket-loads of evening primrose and fish oils. They’re good for the joints and apparently can help depression. I also took glucosamine after having keyhole surgery on my knee. And I make all the children take a supplement called Eye Q, which is basically marine fish oils and is supposed to be good for brain and neural function.”
A happy marriage, happy family, I remark, must make for psychological wellbeing. “Oh, absolutely,” she agrees. “And conversely,” she adds. Meaning, I guess, that an unhappy marriage makes for ill-being. The break-up in 1993 of her first marriage, to the composer Steve Brown, found her on a quest for self, ranging from the wilder shores of alternative medicine (aura cleansing proved “a bit too comical” to be taken seriously) to more conventional psychotherapy. “I was racketing around, trying anything really, reading The Road Less Travelled, by M. Scott Peck, and going to Buddhist meetings. I thought: ‘I’ve got to settle on one thing’. Therapy helped, partly because you have somebody you can say anything to, and no judgment is being made. It gives you the time and space to explore stuff that you just don’t have time to touch on in your ordinary life — if you did, you’d spend all your time in tears. I got a lot out of it, but I wouldn’t do it again. I think it’s good for everybody if they have the time, money and inclination.”
Ravens has also been impressed by kinesiology, a method of communicating directly with the body through a sequence of diagnostic muscle tests. Arcane though it sounds, it is rooted not in ancient Eastern mysticism but in the hard-nosed insurance business, having evolved in the Sixties from the motion tests devised for specialists to test the veracity of personal injury claims.
“As a child, Alfie was uncoordinated, and the educational psychologists recommended this wizard bloke in Guildford. He uses the sunflower method, which involves homoeopathic and natural remedies, and an element of self-hypnosis. Soon afterwards, Alfie took the lead in a production of The Government Inspector, which is a tour de force performance, and the way that his teacher had directed it, there was a lot of physical comedy. Alfie was like a different person doing it. Now he dances, he plays guitar, he’s got rhythm.”
The fact that her paternal grandmother died in her early forties of bowel cancer, has made Ravens mindful of intestinal health, and she is a great believer in colonic irrigation. “I’ve had treatments on and off for years. Some people say it’s unnecessary, that the body doesn’t need help to eliminate waste, but I went to this one therapist who every time you’d finished, would say, ‘Lighter and brighter’,” she mimics a cheesy West-Coast accent, “and you certainly do feel lighter and brighter. I’d like to go every six months, but I don’t always manage it.”
For all her faith in alternative approaches, in a crisis, however, the pragmatic Ravens opts for pharmaceuticals. “I don’t usually have problems with my voice, but the one time I did lose it, I was off immediately to Harley Street for steroids and antibiotics. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t for my work, but if you’re doing radio or television work, you can’t be ill.”
For all her evident warmth and effervescence, she confesses to being quite moody. “My father, who died at 72 of lung cancer, was depressive. He was hospitalised some of the time. He was a gentle man, a really lovely guy, but so troubled. He felt guilty about everything, and that was very difficult for my mother because one didn’t talk about it. It’s much better today, but there is still a huge stigma.”
Whether or not it is her genetic lot, she was gripped by depression last year. “Pre-menstrually, I would burst into tears at the slightest thing, shouting at the children, being really horrible, thinking that my husband was the worst person in the world.” For a while she resorted to Prozac, which, she says, “just takes the edge off it”, although at some cost to the libido. Happily, she escaped the serious side effects, addiction and withdrawal symptoms that afflict some unfortunate users.
“I took a low dose, then weaned myself off it. I’m glad I took it at the time, but I was also conscious that I didn’t want to be dependent on it for the rest of my life. It may be that I’ve got a depressive gene, and it’s something I am susceptible to, but if I keep taking the evening primrose and the Woman Essence, I won’t have to go back on the Prozac.” And she smiles an apparently radiant, so-not-depressed smile.
The new series of Dead Ringers is on Monday nights on BBC Two at 9pm BBC
