| 02 August 2011
Former comedian, sex therapist and wife of Billy-Pamela Stephenson-Connelly certainly isn’t letting the grass grow under her dancing feet.
“I happen to be a person who loves good sex,” says Pamela Stephenson-Connolly, the saucy 61-year-old whose shimmering sex appeal on BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing made her the star of the show. Never have sequins looked so seductive, a rumba so risqué, or a pasa doble so passionate. Indeed, never has dance so lived up to its reputation as the vertical expression of horizontal desire.
Which is hardly surprising, given that the glamorous blonde, who has been married to exuberant Glaswegian comedian and award-winning actor Billy Connolly for 22 years and with whom she has three grown-up daughters, is something of a sex goddess.
She got a new body out of the TV series, losing two-and-a-half stone as she shimmied her way to the final, which, she’s confessed, really turned her 69-year-old husband on. She’s working hard to maintain her sleek new silhouette – running 6k a day and still tangoing, although, sadly, not with the gorgeous James Jordan, with whom she put the sauce into salsa. “We’ve both been travelling, so I haven’t seen him for months,” she sighs.
The New Zealand-born, Dr Stephenson-Connolly, a comedienne turned sexologist and clinical psychologist, is “fascinated” by sex. It would, she notes with a throaty laugh, be pointless if she weren’t, as she specialised in sex therapy at the Beverly Hills psychotherapy practice she established in 1994 and, as an Adjunct Professor at the California Graduate Institute, she taught human sexuality and sex therapy to psychology students.
Now she’s written a definitive book on the subject, the 472-page long Sex Life: How Our Sexual Experiences Define Who We Are (Vermilion, £20), which she’ll discuss at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Back in their London apartment, she says: “Most of us struggle enormously with the concept of ourselves as sexual beings and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this book. Also, there has been relatively little research into most areas of sexuality – except when someone stands to make serious money from ‘proving’ that enough people suffer from some kind of sexual difficulty.”
So, she decided to record the astonishingly frank testimonies of men and women of various ages because she wanted to write a book rich with the language of all kinds of different races and religions. Language, she warns, that is raw, sometimes even “coarse.”
She wanted to show that there is no such thing as “normal”. While researching her book, she ran into far more resistance from carers of people in their eighties and beyond than from the elders themselves. “The older generation were usually quite happy to talk about their sex lives with someone who was non-judgmental, but even the prospect of such a discussion is distasteful to many younger people.
“Our society prefers to think that granny and grandpa are asexual, but I have news: many are having hot sex, so get over it!”
Certainly, Stephenson-Connolly has made no secret of the fact that her husband is a wonderful lover. She told one national newspaper recently that when she and Billy are apart they enjoy bouts of ‘phone sex’.
She’s open about her own very active sex drive and says she’s thought long and hard about her personal sexy “beastie,” that troublesome inner monster over which we have no control. “I couldn’t have asked people to share their most intimate feelings with me if I hadn’t been prepared to talk about my own obsession with sex,” she says. “My beastie, for example, can leap out unexpectedly.”
She tells how while writing her book in her New York study, she looked out of the window and saw in the window opposite “a gorgeous, young man in tiny briefs posing for the photographer who rents that office.” She called to her 22-year-old daughter in the next room: “Amy! Male-model alert! In tighty-whities! Window opposite!”
“I was feeling flushed, excited and lucky,” she writes. Then she wondered if she’d behaved inappropriately, either in choosing to look at him, or in including her daughter, who told her she thought it was “hilarious... and awesome.”
Nonetheless, Stephenson-Connolly asked her husband what he thought. “Do you think I’m a perv?”
“Yeah,” he said, with a smile.
Charlotte Square,
15 August, 4.30pm
From £8, Tel: 0845 225 5121
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