TELEVISION: Stanley Peskin
ONE thing that every foreigner knows about the English is that Englishwomen write the best detective stories of all. Now it can unequivocally be stated that an Englishwoman called Jennifer Saunders has written and performed in the funniest comedy series that has appeared on television monitors in years. Absolutely Fabulous is just that. It’s very title implies an outrageous and extended linguistic joke in which Saunders and her company of actors — mostly women — pay scant attention either to the propriety of language or to the social conventions and mores embodied in it.
In Saunders’ hands, television becomes a licensed space in which women can say the unsayable and do the undoable. Both Saunders as Edina, often called Eddie, and Joanna Lumley as Patsy, whose actions belie the implications of her name, have mobile faces and expressive voices, the first plaintive and keening, the second abrasive and mocking. In one particularly vituperative line, Patsy describes a woman she dislikes as “so anally retentive that she couldn’t sit down without fear of sucking up the furniture”.
The main characters have a penchant for the disastrous. Whether in Fat, France or Fashion, they are Queens of Misrule in situations which frequently border on the life- threatening. Often in an advanced stage of intoxication induced either by alcohol or drugs, they stumble through a series of misadventures which are bizarre, hilarious and which satisfyingly come right in the end.
The series cocks a snook at family life, traditional values, and sexual “normality”. Edina’s daughter (Julia Sawalha) is prissy and pragmatic and she goes under the unlikely name of Saffron. She is told by Edina, “As your mother, I cannot be held responsible for your well-being”, and in fact Saffron is more mother than daughter to Edina. To her mother, Edina (who is hell-bent on pleasing friends who are into minimalism) says: “What do you want? God. I’ve enough trouble with surplus furniture without old people scattered about.” Her mother (June Whitfield), who has a knack of mangling foreign languages, is sublimely indifferent to her daughter’s insults. And most of the men in the various episodes are either ineffectual or “campy”.
The series draws on a number of genres. The Hollywood screwball comedies of the Thirties and Forties readily come to mind. The two cheerful and whacked-out “heroines” — magazine editor and fashion designer — seem to have abandoned all sanity as they trade wisecracks and insults. They are independent and mostly self-sufficient and they look on men not as predators but as prey; that is, when they can be bothered to have anything to do with men.
The emphasis is on speed and Saunders makes exhilarating use of farce and slapstick. There are also traces of The Goon Show, particularly in the treatment of Saunders’ blonde assistant, gloriously played by Jane Horrocks. And often, the scatological humour is as offensive and funny as anything to be found in the plays of Joe Orton.
A recurring complaint about comedy is that it often fails to travel, either through time (history) or space (place and culture). This is not the case with Absolutely Fabulous, which is absol-utely transporting entertainment.
Absolutely Fabulous is on M-Net on Thursdays at 20.35