Fashion moves in cycles, and the backlash against bland colours has kicked in But don't be fooled. While you may think that the buyers and designers of the high-street stores are working with you in mind, there are very few people of pasty, northern European complexions who can get away with wearing colours that are best left in the fruit bowl. So how did this acid explosion happen? And who allowed it to happen? You cannot blame the innocent consumer (these colours do not differentiate between the sexes) for presuming that they should be wearing lime-green and orange when the shops are full of it. The last time the British high street saw so much vivid colour was in the early Eighties when there was a fad for day-glo yellow and fluorescent pink. Soon after that shocking outburst - no wonder people started wearing sunglasses after dark - the shops were swamped with serious black, which was relieved by neutral shades of beige towards the end of the decade. The sweets might be mouthwatering, but bright orange and lime-green clothes were made to make your eyes water and put your teeth on edge And yet, these are the colours of the summer of '96.

If you haven't already bought anything in what fashion commentators describe as shades of citrus, chances are, by the end of the summer, you will have succumbed - either out of a temptation to look fashionable and modern, or desperation that there is nothing else available. Ms Lumley says she would be happy for it to end, as she wants to spend time with her husband, the opera conductor Stephen Barlow. "I am quite looking forward to not being up there, and if necessary I shall construct my own dismounting process," she has said. But she has also said that "I can't stop taking an interest in the next thing ..." Roll on the next thing.. The tyranny of the fashion designer has struck again. With a flick of their marker pens, they have transformed quite sane women and men into looking like the contents of a packet of Opal Fruits. In PR terms it is an excellent move - the combination of Patsy and Oxford has proved irresistible to journalists.

But there is a serious side; Ms Lumley has served on the Reference Committee of Friends Provident for six years, and the fellowship marks her stepping down.With Patsy and Ab Fab effectively laid to rest - a last special is planned for the autumn - the Green College fellowship would be a fitting epitaph to an extraordinary career. When the oil tanker the Sea Empress foundered at Milford Haven in February, Ms Lumley sent a personal letter of protest to the Prime Minister.It actions such as these that have prompted the Friends Provident Financial Group to sponsor a research fellowship at Green College, Oxford, in Joanna Lumley's name. The company specialises in ethical investments, and the fellowship is for post-graduate research into environmental or wildlife issues, particularly in Africa. And since 1980 she has tried hard to honour a commitment she made to do at least one straight stage-play every year, including Hedda Gabler, The Cherry Orchard, and most recently Somerset Maugham's The Letter.Joanna Lumley's dedication to animal and environmental causes is renowned.

In 1994 she emerged in tears from a film on the export of live animals for slaughter, and earlier this year she made headlines again when she took a piglet to Parliament as a member of a delegation from Compassion in World Farming. But was she interesting, what did she have to say? "Some women are beautiful, most are not. She was," is his final word on the matter.She is that and more, summed up by some seminal Lumley milestones. She came top of a panel of celebrities asked to sit the public schools Common Entrance exam by a newspaper, scoring just 2 per cent less than AJP Taylor in the history paper; then there was a sponsored strip before a bemused Terry Wogan on Children in Need in the Eighties; she was a columnist on the Times, and a member of the Booker Prize panel in 1984. She is popular with women, too, and perhaps it is women who have the greater debt to La Lumley. Over the years her sharp intelligence, her independence - she was a frowned- upon single mother in the Sixties - her talent and glamour, and her outspoken commitment to good causes, and, above all, her triumph over the menopausal years, have shown that it is possible to be all things to all men without alienating them, scaring them off or becoming a joke.Undoubtedly, she has some advantages.