Jan Ravens makes an impression on Rosanna Rothery

By [rrothery]

JAN Ravens spends every day of her life with other people's voices in her head. For some that might be a cursed hindrance. For Ravens, it's a career.

The Spitting Image and Dead Ringers impressionist has achieved for the girls what Mike Yarwood, Rory Bremner and Alistair McGowan did for the boys.

Not only has she given women equal opportunities when it comes to being ridiculed in public, she's also given them status — basically if you're famous enough for Ravens to be 'doing you', you're a bona fide celeb.

So here come the girls — the great, the good, the glamorous and the ghastly. Who can forget her smouldering, simmering Fiona Bruce? (She purrs: 'You know how to read the news don't you? Just put your lips together and blow'). Her breathless, finger licking Nigella Lawson, making the simplest action, like picking up a wooden spoon, highly indecent? Or her deadpan, dead fish eyed Ann Robinson fronting The Weakest Link.

Ravens, apparently, bumps into many of the women newsreaders and actresses she's parodied, at BBC parties. Socially embarrassing? Not at all. Many like Fiona Bruce appear to be flattered by the likeness.

"I suppose if somebody is going to portray you as a kind of untouchable sex goddess of the newsroom there are worse things that could happen, aren't there?" laughs Ravens. "Politicians might feel more uneasy as the material tends to be a bit edgier. I don't quite know what they would think as I've never met any of the politicians that I've done."

From slouch potato to sex pot, Raven has a larder full of looks. Glamour is something she can put on or take off like a diamond-encrusted shrug.

"I never felt like one of those people that was glamorous," she confesses. "I mean I was fine but I always had a pretty friend, you know. Yet the way people perceive you, just because of the way you look, is quite extraordinary."

Ravens admits she gets treated very differently depending on her guise, even when she's off camera in a TV studio.

"You are just thinking: 'I am just me inside here: I might look like Ann Robinson, Ann Widdecombe or Jordan but inside it's just Jan'. People react to you differently depending on the way you look. That was what inspired me to work with the charity, Changing Faces. It gave me a slight inkling as to what it must be like for these people with facial disfigurements. It got me so interested in the whole subject of appearance. It's such an obsession these days."

Ravens is speaking to me at her Cornish home on the Helford River. She's a huge fan of the West Country and in 2008 won mastermind with her specialist subject: the Cornish author Daphne Du Maurier.

"We live right near Frenchman's Creek so we really immersed ourselves in Daphne. She was quite a fascinating character and had a really fascinating life. There was lots of deep, psychological, messy business going on. We think of her as this kind of lovely English lady with these nice old romances but they are really chock-full of psychological complexity."

Her first encounter with the South West was as a student performing at the Minack Theatre — Ravens was elected the first female president of Cambridge University Footlights in a year that might have been a Who's Who of the nation's luvvies: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson to name a few.

Around 30 years later she rediscovered the South West and fell in love with it again. The fact that her second husband could whisk her away to a Cornish hideaway might just have tipped the scales in his favour.

"He came complete with a Cornish cottage. That was pretty compelling," she laughs.

Ravens is at the Plough Arts Centre on Saturday with her first full-length one-woman show. Having spent a lot of her career as the supporting player, she is thrilled, at the age of 51, to be stepping out alone into the spotlight.

"I was hampered by lack of confidence early on in my career," she admits. "I look at people like Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Victoria Wood, the women who have created their own material from an early stage. That's what I admire. I didn't have the confidence to generate my own material at that point."

She must be proud, though, to have forged a career in an industry that traditionally belongs to the boys?

"I'm proud of still doing it," she laughs. "I'm proud of having survived. It's an extraordinarily male dominated profession still."

The show looks behind the scenes at the world of impressions: how you go about creating the characters and how you actually do the impressions. No doubt she'll parade all the characters she's made famous in Dead Ringers plus plenty of new ones.

So why should we turn out to see her?

"With all our leaders having disappointed us so much this year it is good to get out there and have a laugh," she replies. "You get a bloody good laugh for your money."

● Jan Ravens is at The Plough Arts Centre, Torrington, on Saturday September 5. Box office: 01805 624624.