Joanna Page ‘didn’t want to make a fuss’ after being groped by a male TV presenter, who was known to be ‘handsy’.
The Gavin and Stacey legend recently revealed she was warned by a producer that the host would ‘probably start touching her’.
She first made the allegations in her book Lush!: My Story – From Swansea To Stacey And Everything In Between.
‘You don’t ever go, “Oh God, I’m going to report this” because in those days you kind of didn’t, you just got on with it, it was what happened at work,’ Joanna, 48, shared with PA.
‘It wasn’t every single job I went into, but in lots of different jobs there would be one type of thing.’
While on the entertainment show, she was told that the inappropriate behaviour was just ‘how he is’ and she shouldn’t worry about it.
‘I was in my dressing room and the producer came in and said, “Oh, just to give you a warning, he does like to get a bit ‘handsy’ with the women,” Joanna revealed.
The producer apparently thought the unnamed host was ‘going to like’ the Love Actually star and wanted her to ‘be prepared’.
She continued: ‘It was like, “Oh, Ok, right, well, I can deal with that”. So I went out on set and we’re filming and then he starts groping me and I said something like, “God, I feel like I’m in Bristol Zoo” and knocked his hand away.’
In the uncomfortable situation, Joanna felt the only thing she could do was ‘laugh off’ the approaches as she ‘didn’t want to make a fuss’.
‘It’s all very well saying “You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that” but you’re a woman, you’re in there and it’s so hard to get jobs anyway and you don’t want to make a fuss,’ she continued.
‘I couldn’t have sat in a studio and gone, “Excuse me, can we please just stop this because he’s touching me up and completely groping me? I’m not happy with this”.
‘For starters, I’m a people pleaser. I don’t want to make a fuss or draw attention to what’s going on.
‘I just want to get on with it. So the only way to deal with it was [to] laugh it off.’
Joanna cannot name the host for legal reasons and previously told The Times that her legal team told her to ‘be careful’.
This wasn’t the only time she had to protect herself from a man in the industry, with a well-known theatre director also attempting to grope her.
She had been in her dressing room, barely clothed, when the director who had seen her performance walked in.
‘I remember being in my knickers and wrapping the curtain around me and this director coming and hugging me and wanting to give me a kiss and not leaving me alone,’ Joanna recalled.
‘I remember holding on to the curtain and not letting it go and just carrying on the conversation, being all polite and really nice, until eventually he went because nothing was going to happen.’
Sadly, the Bafta winner believes ‘there are always going to be predators in an environment like this’, even with improvements around safety.
She said: ‘When you’ve got young, beautiful girls who are desperate to get a job. It is so hard to get that job.
‘Most of the time the people who are giving you those jobs are older men and they know that you want the job and there’s a million girls out there trying to get the job.
‘I think that will continue.’
Joanna praised intimacy coaches as ‘fantastic’ and added there are now helplines in place and people to report to for anyone feeling unsafe or ‘bullied’.
‘But I think, personally, that [sexual harassment] always going to continue because there’s too much opportunity for it to happen in this profession.’
Joanna’s memoir Lush! goes on sale on Thursday, September 25.
This Is Not Right
On November 25, 2024 Metro launched This Is Not Right, a year-long campaign to address the relentless epidemic of violence against women.
With the help of our partners at Women’s Aid, This Is Not Right aims to shine a light on the sheer scale of this national emergency.
You can find more articles here, and if you want to share your story with us, you can send us an email at vaw@metro.co.uk.
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