Rod Stewart and Penny Lancaster buck the trend of celebrity couples and show how the other half should live

As he rolled into the area in his white Rolls Royce, it would have been easy to start talking about Sir Rod Stewart and “how the other half lives.” But when you find out the reasons why the singer ended up visiting the very NHS scanning centre in Essex earlier today, your tune will certainly change.

As an ardent supporter of the nurses during the NHS strike, Stewart certainly put his money where his mouth is and visited the centre to visit fans - and also perhaps check in on how those patients who he paid to undergo the scans they couldn’t afford were doing. Something that he said he would do after his highly publicised phone call to Sky News during the nurses’ strike.

During that live Sky News broadcast, Stewart told presenter Sarah-Jane Mee "There must be enough money in the coffers to pay up for these nurses. Only two years ago we were clapping and now listen - they worked so hard. If we don’t have the NHS, it will be like the United States."

"When you go into an emergency, they say, ‘right, go through your documents’ and it’s unbelievable in America. It doesn’t work there either, but I think it’s working better than [it] is here at the moment - we must pull it together."

It’s another interesting slice of humanity that Sir Rod Stewart and his wife, Penny Lancaster, are becoming very well known for. Despite their combined successes and opportunities, the pair seemingly would rather live a more modest, down-to-earth lifestyle - white Rolls Royce aside.

This has been one more evident than looking at the change in careers that Penny Lancaster undertook in 2021, after a seemingly innocuous appearance on the Channel 4 reality television series Famous and Fighting Crime back in 2020. That appearance led her to make a big change in her career.

Such was the enjoyment Penny Lancaster had during her time on Famous and Fighting Crime that she parlayed that reality television appearance into a desire to become a police officer. With the full backing of her husband, Lancaster joined the City of London Police as a volunteer special constable and began training.

Rather than a “wait and see” approach akin to Kim Kardashian’s attempts to become a lawyer, Lancaster threw herself into the training and only a year later became an official special constable. During her passing out parade with the City of London police, Sir Rod Stewart made sure he was present to show his support over the, at the time, unusual career move for the former model and Loose Women presenter.

Lancaster’s dedication to her new career earned her an important task so early on in her judicial career too; she was one of the many City of London police officers tasked with keeping the peace during the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II - a feat that local authorities knew would be a logistical nightmare yet the proceedings went ahead without too much of a glitch.

Her determination to become part of the City of London police was mentioned months before graduating into a special constable when Sir Rod Stewart was interviewed on The Graham Norton Show. During his appearance on the November 2020 episode, Stewart revealed “she loves giving something back, but more importantly she wants to protect the city she loves. She trained for eight months, and she loves it. I backed her all the way.”

In an era where celebrity couples give off an air of aspiration to the many followers they have on social media, the combined efforts of Sir Rod Stewart and Penny Lancaster come as a refreshing, humanistic change. For them to actively be involved in causes that they have a genuine interest in and then to show the lengths they’re willing to support those causes at a practical level is something that should be commended.

Or as Sir Rod Stewart summed up after meeting those at the Essex scanning centre - he wanted to “prove I am not all mouth and no trousers.” We think that the same reasoning can apply to the pair.