It was as if someone had walked into the room and said, ‘The Beatles have got together again and they’re going to be on TV tonight!” Yeah right. On Channel Ruby in the Sky. With diamonds and a walrus that can sing We All Live in a Yellow Submarine. Backwards.
Actually, it was more akin to somebody grabbing your arm and saying, ‘Hey, have you heard? They’ve made a new series of Fawlty Towers and it starts on M-Net tonight!” As if, after 26 years, John Cleese would be able to get his goose-stepping leg half as high as he could swing it in the Germans episode in 1976. Mind you, a fresh look at Gourmet Night could be fun, what with the current fascination with cooking trends.
But this news came fairly close, and better still, it was true. Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley had managed to stay sober long enough to make a whole new series of Absolutely Fabulous, and it was starting on M-Net that night. I was like a kid who’d been told he was getting a second Christmas.
If this is news to you, and you’re an Ab Fab fan, you’re about to kick yourself three times, because that’s how many episodes you’ve missed of the best reason to stay home on Wednesday nights. Several years having passed since the earlier series, there are subtle changes and some less subtle ones, such as Patsy’s new hairdo. They’ve also redone the intro music and visuals, but the updating is gentle enough not to interfere with the sense of wanton comedy and runaway irreverence that makes Ab Fab a treasure among britcoms.
There are references to e-mail, dotcoms, New Labour and Jamie Oliver. Saffy seems older than her mother and has a new role model in Cherie Blair. Edi’s mother has taken up ‘guacamole” (she means salsa — the dance, not the sauce) and has tarty old friends who are to Edi what she is to Saffy.
They’re Wrinklies Behaving Badly, but fortunately for Edi she’s too pissed herself most of the time to notice.
That wonderful English comedienne and singer Jane Horrocks (change it, Jane, nobody called Horrocks is ever going to make the Hollywood A-list) is back as Bubble, but now has a second role which has yet to become clear. Twiggy, the Sixties supermodel, did a turn in the first episode as some kind of TV personality — the latest of the has-been stars that Saunders likes to bring on for old time’s sake.
Patsy’s new hairstyle is vaguely punkish and off-kilter, as if she’s read in one of her glossy magazines that models have been taking scissors to their hair and hacking bits out of it. It makes her look like a drunken Barbie doll who’s put her wig on skew. It’s therefore entirely in character.
The one who has changed the least is Edi herself, always the centre of the show despite Lumley’s undeniable presence. But there’s no reason to change a winning formula and Saunders, who in real life is remarkably soft-spoken and sophisticated, as is the sparkling Lumley, is wise enough to know this.
It confounds me that there are people who don’t get to Ab Fab. Who see the same things I see and hear the same lines, and who conclude that Patsy and Edi are dreadful people who in real life should be avoided and kept as far away from the kids as possible.
Which could be true, depending on the disposition of said offspring. We don’t want the age-disadvantaged falling in dead faints all over the place when the grown-ups are trying to watch the telly.
Absolutely Fabulous is on M-Net on Wednesdays after the 8pm movie