Joanna’s husband James Thornton was forced to exhume their dog’s body(Image: John Phillips, Getty Images)
Gavin and Stacey star Joanna Page has revealed how she forced her husband to exhume her dead dog’s bones from their garden the night before they moved house. Fellow actor James Thornton, best known as Emmerdale’s John Barton, had to wear a head torch as he dug up the little Jack Russell’s grave.
Joanna explained on the Shagged Married Annoyed podcast that her dog Daisy had been with her since she was 21: “She lived until she was 16,” Joanna said. “We’ve been through like everything together.”
She added that after the little dog died, Joanna struggled to let go: “I said: ‘I can’t cremate her. I just can’t imagine doing that. I just want to keep her and I’m just going to bury her.’
“So that is what we did. And then we all buried her and the kids were there and then we put her in a basket and put loads of flowers around her and put a little blanket in.”
When Joanna and James were preparing to move house, the Swansea-born actress decided she couldn’t bear to leave Daisy behind: “I said to James: ‘Well, you got to dig her up … she’s my first child. She’s my firstborn. You have to dig her up. And he didn’t even say anything.”
Joanna was devoted to her dog(Image: Mike Marsland, Mike Marsland/WireImagevia Getty Images)
Joanna described how James put the grisly job off until the very last minute: “He had, you know, a head torch on and everything and he’s there digging her up.”
She doesn’t plan to re-bury her beloved dog until she finds a home that she and James will live in for there rest of their lives. So, for now, Daisy’s body and her basket are stored in a clear plastic storage box in their garage.
Joanna added: “Until we actually move somewhere where I’m like ‘OK, this is us retired and we’re going to be here forever, we will bury her here’.
“We’ll either do that or – oh my god, this sounds awful – if I die before then, basically, that whole box is just coming in with me.”
Joanna confessed that she loves scouring charity shops for quirky ornaments(Image: Mike Marsland, Mike Marsland/WireImagevia Getty Images)
Joanna revealed that her final wish is to be buried in a coffin filled with her children’s nursery school drawings, and the remains of her beloved Daisy: “Pour all of that on me. Put the lid down, then you can bury me,” she says.
As podcast hosts Chris and Rosie Ramsey chuckled at her bizarre story, the actress went on to reveal something even stranger: “I was in Wales and I was in a charity shop. I love buying all sorts of like mad or sweet cute little ornaments”
One of the things that caught Joanna’s eye was a small plastic dog-shaped item that she thought was a paperweight: “I bought it and brought it home, showed it to all of my friends and they said ‘It is it’s a dog’s ashes.’ I said ‘Of course it’s not. It’s a paper weight, it’s got sand.’
“They said ‘That’s not sand. Those are a dog’s ashes… can you see those big solid bits which are on the top? Those are bones which haven’t gone to ash’.”
Anxious that she might have accidentally “bought someone else’s dead dog,” Joanna searched for similar items and found the exact item: a plastic dog-shaped urn for the ashes of a beloved pet.
“So I brought someone else’s dogs ashes from Wales all the way back home to Oxfordshire.” Poor James repeatedly asks Joanna if he can throw the bizarre item out, but so far, she has refused.
Catch Joanna on Taskmaster tonight (Thursday, April 16) at 9pm to 10pm on Channel 4.
