Jan Ravens – the impressionist who got Liz Truss down to a T

For more than 20 years, Ravens has been the genius voice of countless high-profile women on the Radio 4 impressions show Dead Ringers, a new series of which starts on Friday 9th December. Truss was shaping up to be a Ravens classic, but her time in office was so short that she came and went after one run of Dead Ringers had finished and before the next one began.

“She was a golden opportunity,” Ravens says. “If only she’d held back a bit! It was a shame.” Fans of Ravens weren’t entirely deprived, however. The skits on Truss that Ravens posted on Twitter last summer – “Hi everyone! It’s the Trusster here!” – were pure joy.

“I was glad I made the most of it when I could,” Ravens says. “It started when she was made Foreign Secretary. I thought, how is this possible? It was like she was this little girl whose daddy had always told her she was funny. She had this untrammelled sense of self-belief.”

It was Ravens who came up with the “I know!” catchphrase for Truss – two words that somehow encapsulated all the soon-to-be-PM’s mix of incredulity and smugness, along with a wildly misplaced estimation of her own abilities. “I’m Foreign Secretary! I KNOW!”

The catchphrase “came off the top of my head”, Ravens says, and it was so perfect that it deserved a longer run-out. But Ravens’s regret that it wasn’t to be is purely professional. “Yes I’m an impressionist, but I also live in the real world. I think it’s fair to say that it can only have been a good thing that she moved on so quickly.”

Ravens’s gift for impressions manifested itself early. As a child growing up in Hoylake on the Wirral, she would mimic her mother. “She had all these Lancashire phrases like ‘She’s got a face like a fried shoe!’” Then Ravens’s schoolteachers became the object of her mimicry, and soon she was setting herself to become an actor.

At Cambridge University, Ravens became the first female president of the Cambridge Footlights, performing alongside Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry. She retained her ambitions to do “serious” acting, and went on to spend a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But her destiny really lay in comedy. She was a voice on Spitting Image, and established herself in comedy panel shows on Radio 4.

“I actually think comedy is harder to do than ‘straight’ acting,” Ravens says. “And when it comes to impressions, there are so many demands – it’s not just about being funny and being accurate, it’s also about how insightful you are. And yet there’s sometimes this perception that you’re just a kind of ‘turn’.”

Reduced status seemed to come with the territory. On Spitting Image she was obliged to accept that Margaret Thatcher was being voiced by a male actor (Steve Nallon), but it felt like an encroachment too far when Nallon started doing the Queen Mother. Then when she joined Dead Ringers in the early 2000s, she found that the only characters she was playing were Posh Spice and a secretary.

“I really had to push for more female characters. It was all Tony Blair, George Bush and Gordon Brown. I was always saying, let’s do Tessa Jowell, Harriet Harman, Hazel Blears. I started doing broadcasters – Fiona Bruce, Sue MacGregor, Charlotte Green and so on. The boys all had these sports commentators to mimic, and I’d argue for us to pick up on property programmes like Changing Rooms and Location, Location, Location.

“I don’t want to make it sound like I was constantly sitting in a corner fuming – that was only occasionally! – because it was a privilege to do the show, but it seems extraordinary the battles I had to fight.”

Now Ravens has a glittering track record of sublime Dead Ringers creations — from the late Queen and Diane Abbott to Laura Kuenssberg and Kirsty Wark. But her favourites, she says, are the less obvious figures.

“I enjoyed doing Hilary Mantel when she was giving the Reith Lectures. She had this sort-of toothy, breathless voice. Germaine Greer was another one. And Emma Barnett. I went on Woman’s Hour recently and said I was glad she’d taken over because I felt I could never master Jenni Murray. Some people have a timbre that’s just completely outside your range, and she was one of them. For a long time I felt I couldn’t do Judi Dench. Then I saw her in the Bond movies and it was like I finally I got it.”

Does she ever worry that the show goes too far? That her Theresa May and Liz Truss might be regarded as a bit cruel? “Of course I feel sympathy for them as human beings, but if they are going to assume positions of power, they’ve got to be prepared to have the p**s taken out of them. Satire isn’t going to bring down the government but politicians have to be held to account.”

Ravens, who is 64, has written and performed two semi-autobiographical one-woman shows, and she says she would like to do more. In recent years she’s been confronted with a huge challenge in her personal life. In 2015, a devastating brain illness befell her then husband Max Hole. His memory of the previous 30 years, including their relationship, had gone, and they have since divorced. Ravens says she has tried writing about the experience, “but it’s just too difficult”.

For now, there is the latest Dead Ringers – three editions in the run-up to Christmas – and I wondered if the show might find a way to give Liz Truss an afterlife? “I hope so. We’ll see.” Oh go on. Please. We’d all love a bit more “I know!”

Read more:

• David Jason: ‘I miss Only Fools and Horses terribly’
• Mackenzie Crook on Detectorists reunion, plot twist and losing Diana Rigg

Dead Ringers is on Radio 4 on Friday 9th December at 6:30pm.

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