YOU know from the catch in her voice that something awful is going to happen. Joanna Lumley, aged two, is playing with her beloved toy, Kanga, on the top-floor balcony of a block of flats in Hong Kong. It is a small grey kangaroo exactly like the real thing - none of that anthropomorphic nonsense - and in its pouch is a baby joey, naturally called Roo.

"Somehow or other, baby Roo fell down on to the busy streets of Hong Kong," says Lumley, wide-eyed with impending tragedy. "We ran down and searched and searched and couldn't find Roo. It was a terrible blow. I cried and cried because I knew he couldn't survive. The running feet and walking people certainly wouldn't know it was a tiny, tiny Roo."

Instead of a sob, there is silence, and out of the silence Bob Hoskins utters a sympathetic growl: "It was your first experience of death." She gulps and nods, wobbling her blonde chignon.

What can he say to make her feel better? He thinks hard and recalls the time he pulled all the guns off a regiment of precious lead soldiers, not realising that toy soldiers must bear their arms for ever. "Don' t worry," says Lumley soothingly. "You were only little. You wanted them to put their guns down in order to pick them up again." But she still looks theatrically sad, so he tries another anecdote. In this one, his mother looks up from pegging out the sheets to see 18-month- old Bob standing on the roof of their house.

Lumley makes sudden fluttery movements. "My hands are full of electricity, just thinking of it," she says, remembering when her son, Jamie, once wandered close to the edge of a mountain pass and it was all she could do to stop herself from screaming. "The electricity is flying in your hands but you have to walk very smoothly and calmly and not be startling."

But there are yet more electrifying moments from the stunt-boy of north London. Hoskins: "One day, we went to Brighton and I jumped off the pier."

Lumley (agitated): "Into the water?"

Hoskins: "Yeah. Just to see. Both my parents jumped in after me. Now I suffer terribly from vertigo."

Lumley leans towards her bristly companion with psychiatric concern. "Do you remember when you tamed down?" she inquires. "Were you in your teens? When did you stop being completely . . . find-a-hole-and- fall-into-it?"

Hoskins: "When I was about 52."

Lumley's wide red mouth and gleaming teeth emit a sudden volley of laughter.

Why did it take so long to forge this cunning partnership of opposites? This inspired alchemy of bourgeois elegance and Cockney bull? Lumley and Hoskins: the Princess and the Frog, the Lady and the Tramp. A year ago, these two poles-apart screen stars had never met. Today, it seems as though they have been striking sparks off one another all their lives.

THEIR unusual friendship began when Graham Ralph chose them to do the voices for his short cartoon film, The Forgotten Toys. A gruff, pessimistic bear and a spirited rag-doll are dumped in a dustbin after Christmas by children who prefer smart, battery-operated, computer- inspired toys. Together, Teddy and Annie go in search of kinder owners.

"We were both born to play these parts," says Hoskins, beaming. "There was a sympathy, a feeling: we were both doing it for the same reason." Simply this: they believe in old-fashioned toys.

There could not be a more bearish sort of bloke than Hoskins or a lovelier, more eloquent doll than Lumley. He grew up in post-war austerity in Finsbury Park, the son of a book-keeper with Pickfords. She was raised in exotic comfort in India, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, the extrovert, tomboyish second daughter of an Army major who used to joke that her big mouth made her look like a hammerhead shark.

While Lumley thought she was ugly, Hoskins suspected he was just a damn nuisance. "My mother and father both came from big families - gipsy families from the Caledonian Road in Islington," he says. " They said they wanted a big family - until they had me. I think I was one of those hyperactive kids. They've got names for it now; then, it was just `lunatic'."

But their wildly different childhoods produced a kindred love of inventiveness and an abiding affection for one or two personal toys which accompanied them to the crossroads of maturity and beyond.

"I loved toys, not in a soppy, kissy way", says Lumley, "but as real characters who were involved in stories. Things were so different because we didn't have television.

"When we were out in Malaya, I went to one film a year, so by the time I was eight I had seen three films. Compare that with how many filmed and recorded and projected pieces of story young people see now. About five a day!

"You relied so much on your imagination. All you wanted was a character; it didn't matter a jot what he was. He wasn't tied to a story he had already come from. With him, you could be anything, go anywhere. When I see the metal man from Toy Story he seems so congenitally caught up in what he is that he can't really be much else . . . "

Hoskins nods agreement, making a grave distinction between real childhood companions and the trophy toys that children put on a shelf to be the envy of their friends. "Now, you buy the character because of the film," he says glumly. "When we were kids, you bought it because you were attracted to it in some way."

His first friend was a traditional teddy bear. "Most of my conversations were with my teddy. I was an only child, so he was my mate, my partner, the enemy, everything. When he fell to pieces, my dad made me an enormous rubber man out of inner tubes tied together with rope."

Lumley's early love, after the untimely death of Roo, was a sailor doll called Pinchy Pan who starred in all her childhood productions. She has brought him along to the Athenaeum Hotel where this year's best-selling toys (selected by Hamleys and the Toy Retailers' Association) are on display for a Lumley/Hoskins inspection. Pinchy Pan is not a pretty sight, but she is touchingly proud of his bald, earless state and apparently unaware of how cruelly upstaged he could be by a pile of modern Teletubbies, Action Men and leggy dolls.

"You can see some of my tragic mending on one of his arms," she says, "and where I rubbed his chest with Vick when he had a cold. He used to have a sailor hat and hair and a sailor jacket. I put a bow round his neck to make him nice for today."

Slumped in a chair next to Hoskins is Pinchy Pan's blind date. Its pebbly eyes are almost lost in dingy, unwashed fur, its body slack from an excess of affectionate squeezes. This is Cosa Nostra, a large bear given to Hoskins by the Mafia as a present for his eight-month- old daughter, Rosa. "Funnily enough," he says, "the Mafia were among the straightest, sweetest people I have met. They were lovely, much nicer than most film people."

The bear came into Hoskins' life while he was making his Hollywood debut in 1984 in the gangster film, The Cotton Club, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. When he returned to New York from a Christmas break, he found Cosa Nostra sitting on a chair in his hotel room. A letter to Rosa, tied round its neck, said: "Thank you for bringing your daddy back."

In years to come, Rosa and Jack, her younger brother, would be showered with Disney toys but none of them endured like Cosa Nostra and their other bears.

"The thing about them," says Hoskins, "is the body smell. Cosa Nostra has never been washed, because to wash him would be to destroy his smell."

This starts Lumley reminiscing about her son's decrepit Owl, and she lifts her nose as if to catch a whiff of it. "You invest in these toys such a sense of childhood and parenthood and safety and family, that if you throw them out, it's like throwing away part of your heart." She keeps them all in an old Hong Kong wicker basket and regularly checks to make sure they have enough air.

CHILDREN still love traditional toys and creative play, she feels; it is merely television that has made them passive.

"They don't actually use their bodies, hands or minds. Even with Blue Peter, they are just looking at everything being done. I sound 1,000 years old when I speak like this, but I dread more screens coming into our lives. With computers in schools, children will just sit and stare at another screen."

Nevertheless, she seizes a yellow Teletubby with a coil on its head and a screen in its stomach and pronounces it a dear little creature. "Darling! I love their ears. And that loose eye mechanism. A Teletubby with stuck-down eyes would be very disappointing.

"And I'm pleased to see that they've only got three fingers. Cartoon creatures only have three fingers because four looks too many. I wonder what they sell for?"

Someone informs her that there is a Teletubby famine and it could be as much as pounds 2,000 on the black market. She switches on Ab- Fab horror: "No, please. Steady on, darling. Get a grip."

Hoskins, who doesn't think Teletubbies are a patch on Sooty, glares ominously at the shiny patch on the creature's stomach. "That's what' s worrying," he says, throwing it aside, "the screen."

For two people who have made their fortunes from the screen, Lumley and Hoskins sound like a pair of butchers bemoaning the slaughter of lambs. But their anxieties are not frivolous.

"The thought of what we are losing is terrifying," says Hoskins, his button eyes blazing. "If you think of how Cro-Magnon Man brought up his own children, made his own weapons, fashioned his tools, ploughed his own fields, planted and reaped by the stars, hunted by craft . . . this amount of knowledge today would merit several PhDs."

Caught up in his historical pageant, Lumley hymns the days when young girls sewed samplers and young men sang glees round a piano. "No matter what sort of household it was," she says, "from the humblest to the grandest, you'd be able to stand up and sing or recite a poem. Take it back another 100 years, and everybody could manage animals. Now nobody knows how to treat anything. As Bob says, you just press a button and the food's cooked. Now we're being encouraged to sit at home, ordering everything with a screen. I think it's a weird plot."

The presence of their ancient toys, struggling to assert traditional childhood values, is obviously having a strange effect on Hoskins and Lumley, fusing them into a single nostalgic brain and a single sentimental heart.

They survey this year's top 10 Christmas toys, with suspect gaiety. "Is that a Barbie?" exclaims Lumley. "I don't think I've ever held a Barbie doll. Oh, her hair! She's completely stuck in the 1950s, isn't she? She's a sort of Doris Day doll, gorgeous and bright with a fresh little face. No matter how glamorous she is, she's completely unthreatening."

Skateboarding Barbie's companion is a large dog, Ginger, that is supposed to bark when shaken, but neither of them can make it perform.

They examine Wallace and Grommit toys with academic intensity. Hoskins admires the gaping mouths and saucer eyes because they remind him of how women make faces to amuse their babies; ("I learned to act by watching women"). Lumley deplores the way Grommit's front and back legs are stitched together in a sitting position. "The first thing I'd do is get the scissors."

Suddenly there is a bark. It is not Grommit. Hoskins has been fiddling with Ginger's batteries. "What did you do?" says Lumley. Hoskins looks wickedly pleased with himself. "I stuck me finger up its a ----," he rumbles.

1997 © Telegraph Group Limited