Putting Pam on the couch

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5 April 2012

The doctor is in. Pamela Stephenson is power-dressed, in a black suit with gold pinstripes, sleeves pulled up over freckled arms. She is 57, and looks a decade younger, if a little less svelte than she is in the public memory, as an irreverent and sexy comedienne on Not The Nine O'Clock News.

She is here to talk about fame, and her television programme Shrink Rap, in which celebrities such as Robin Williams and Sharon Osbourne engage in a psychological conversation about themselves. But, before we start, there is a little power play. "So," she says, settling into the window seat of a west London brasserie, "what are your thoughts about psychology?"

Stephenson - in her professional guise as Professor Pamela Connolly - has been a practising psychotherapist for 15 years, but her interest in the subject began early. "I was a great reader as a child. That was pretty much all I did. And my favourite story about Greek and Roman myths is the story of Psyche. You know, there was sex and everything in it. It was pretty hot. That whole thing she had with Cupid."

She specialises in the study of sexuality, but is also an expert in fame, not least in her two books about her husband, comedian Billy Connolly. She has a complicated theory about celebrity, to do with competing notions of the self, but the simple version is that fame is overrated. It is, she says, a "hollow victory" which fails to deliver on its promises of increased self-esteem and happiness, bringing instead envy and insecurity.

"What really happens is that every relationship you've ever had changes. There's tremendous loss involved. Including things that you wouldn't think would be traumatic, like loss of goals. Losing the goal to become famous is actually a rather important psychological element. You've suddenly got to work on maintaining fame and that's a much harder thing. And so ..."

She can, and she does, go on, and to hear her in full flow on her pet subject is impressive. As viewers of Shrink Rap will see, Stephenson has an endearing bedside manner, empathic and gentle, but subtly strong. In the show, this prompts remarkable results, whether it is Robin Williams talking about his fascination with weapons, David Blunkett struggling with his own emotional inarticulacy, or Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, revealing that Princess Diana once told her she was lucky to be at the bottom of the heap, because she (Diana) was on a pedestal, and had no way to go except down. Stephenson - who famously gatecrashed Prince Andrew's stag night with Diana and Sarah, all three dressed as policewomen - thinks that both princesses endured a lot of pain.

"We delegated family roles to these two women which were opposite. One was the good child, one was the naughty child. We weren't going to give this up, no matter what they did. In some ways it became a self-fulfilling prophesy for both of them."

At times, the programme goes beyond show-and-tell, notably in Stephenson's tussle with a recumbent Stephen Fry, who stubbornly refuses to define a teenage sexual experience as abuse. In this instance, the doctor's face betrays her with an expression of pure horror. Fry, meanwhile, shows every sign of treating psychology as a kind of mental sudoku in which he is the puzzle.

Shrink Rap does have psychological content, but it is showbusiness, and it's hard to resist the conclusion that Stephenson's suspicion of fame was rooted in her own experience as the attractive face of Not The Nine O'Clock News. Of this time, she says, there was the "fleeting satisfaction" that she was famous for doing good work, "but I didn't enjoy everything that went along with it".

Her unease stemmed from the fact that she was famous for being funny. "Here was the character of Pamela Stephenson out there being wacky, and me behind it going, 'this is improvised, interesting work, but they think I'm really like that'."

Stephenson's comedy success shouldn't be underplayed. After Not The Nine O'Clock News she joined the US sketch show Saturday Night Live. She enjoyed this because American audiences were more used to women in comedy. "Also I didn't achieve the same level of fame as I did in this country. I was one of a cast of very famous people. That was a comfortable thing - it was a good experience."

She stops talking. "Am I boring you?" She isn't, but the suggestion allows her to curtail the conversation. Later, she notes that this period in New York was "a nightmare: I'd just had my first baby and I was trying to deal with the drug culture of Saturday Night Live."

Stephenson's response was to retire into family life, and to study. She might have remained Dr Pamela Connolly, with a discreet practice in Los Angeles, if she hadn't agreed to write a psychological analysis of her husband. I suggest that perhaps there was only room for one comedian in that relationship.

"In the logistics of family life, absolutely. It was good that at least I had some semblance of a left brain. Billy is so rightbrained, he is just so totally creative, a ball of Billyness. At least I could be saying, 'We have to pick up the kids at three o'clock.' He could be trained to pick up the kids, but there was no guarantee he was going to remember. That still exists - that's who he is."

They met when Stephenson - playing Janet Street-Porter - interviewed Connolly on Not The Nine O'Clock News. She says she didn't know who he was, which may have helped their relationship. "But I do think it's interesting how even now I will see him as 'Billy Connolly: King of Comedy'. I will go to his shows and sit in the audience and laugh my head off, as if he's not my husband. I did it the other night. I do think he has genius, and he can do that."

But still, writing a psychological biography of your husband is a novel approach to fame-management. Stephenson resisted the idea initially, but grew fearful that if she didn't tell Billy's story, someone else would. "It was quite useful.

To us, as a couple. To go through hearing his story from A to Z."

She says that the pain of Connolly's childhood is so profound that he may never fully recover. "His brain does work in very unusual ways, which works brilliantly for comedy, but not for anything else in his life. That has the effect of making him feel stupid when he's not. He's really very bright, and busy reading everything Dostoevsky ever wrote. He's much better read than I am, yet he still thinks of himself in the way he was made to as a child - blazing stupid."

Even without the idea of introducing the patient-doctor relationship into the marital home, this does seem an extraordinarily intense emotional process. "It is," she says, with a throaty laugh. "I was so over him by the time I did the second book! I was like, all right, I'm gone now ... boat!"

In 2004, she embarked on a cruise of the South Pacific, following the path of Robert Louis Stevenson, a journey documented in her book, Treasure Islands. She concedes that this journey was also a response to the fact that her three daughters had left home.

"When my youngest got ready to leave that was the time to do it. It's a very tough time. But what you discover very quickly is that they still really need you and they're still going to be around, if you've done things right."

I ask how central motherhood has been to her sense of self. She looks momentarily abashed. Then she shouts, with a machine-gun laugh: "If you think you're going to f**king psychoanalyse me!"

That, I tell her, will be a defence mechanism. "Very much so," she says. "Proud of it." But she agrees that motherhood has been important, and that she thinks she has been quite good at it, if not perfect. "It was a big relief to read [Bruno] Bettelheim's book, A Good Enough Parent-It's almost pathology to strive to be a perfect parent, but we just have to be good enough. You have to support your children, you have to let them know that they're loved, protect them in important ways. You have to give them room to grow and help them make their own decisions. Thank God I came to that stuff just in time."

Earlier this week, The New York Observer reported that the Connollys had bought a $3.85 million loft in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, so they could be nearer to their children. Stephenson is visibly shocked when I mention this. The move was supposed to be secret. But she concedes that being near the children (two of whom are at college in upstate New York) was behind it.

By now, her composure is gone. "I'm sorry," she says, "I'm just really upset. One doesn't want fans and people coming anywhere near."

She says that Connolly has had problems, notably when supporters of the late Pastor Jack Glass used to throw bags of coins at him, shouting "Judas", as a response to his sketch in which the Crucifixion was likened to a drunken night in Glasgow. "I'm just trying to think through the ramifications. I would almost say I wish we hadn't bought there, if the address is going to become public, because you just never know. And Billy's very outspoken. And there are crazy people. And then there's the children - that bothers me. I value privacy."

Time is up. The doctor dusts her face in anticipation of the photographer. "Have I made any really fatal make-up mistakes?" she asks. "Spinach teeth perhaps? I did eat spinach at lunchtime."

We end like David Blunkett in his interview with Stephenson, rendered speechless by the cruelties of fame.

Shrink Rap is on More4 from next Monday to Friday at 11pm.

Putting Pam on the couch

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