Absolutely Fabulous: Identity

Edina & Patsy (Jennifer Saunders & Joanna Lumley)
in their glory days. © BBC 2011

Having never seen a full episode of Ab Fab before, I didn’t know exactly what my expectations for this should be. I’d seen miscellaneous work by most of the cast (Saunders’ Shrek 2 voicing and French & Saunders, Lucy Montgomery in Armstrong and Miller, Horrocks’ Little Voice, the fleeting Naoko Mori in Doctor Who and Torchwood and of course Lumley’s ball-crunching takedown of MP Phil Woolas on the widely-reported issue of Gurkhas’ resettlement rights in 2009, as well as various Comic Relief sketches and her Bond Girl performance), and the occasional clip of the show – my favourite’s at the end of this post – so I almost felt I could grasp the shtick of each character. Patsy Stone is drugged-up, opinionated and completely out of touch with the world, Edina Monsoon is also trying far too hard to be ‘cool’ and younger than she really is through clothes and speech, her daughter Saffy’s the long-suffering sane one trying to help them and her Mother is prying, unappreciated and a kleptomaniac.

And of course I’d heard of the general reputation of the show – my parents thoroughly enjoyed its original run and I remember it being talked about, so it wasn’t a surprise that the buzz for its return in the form of three 20^th-anniversary specials was high. In fact, after cursory research, it appears the show was more highly lauded than I’d expected – the BFI’s 17^th greatest British TV show of all time in 2000, and celebrated recently by Attitude magazine’s Paul Flynn in the Guardian as “prescient […] tour de force comedy and searing satire”. High praise for sporadic splurges of 37 episodes over five series, a two-part TV movie, three one-hour specials and a Comic Relief sketch (and apparently plans for another film). So why did this new half-hour reintroduction feel a bit flat?

It’s entirely possible that I just haven’t got into the groove of the show enough to appreciate the details. Having not known about the character of Sarah before (Saffy’s previously hard-drinking ex-best-friend who suffered a meltdown, producing Naoko Mori’s squeaky, frightened adult-child waif we see on screen), I was completely perplexed by her brief scene – where did she fit? Why does she carry herself like a meek teenager? Does she have anything to do with Saffy’s time in prison?

The five Js of the series (Jane Horrocks,
Julia Sawalha, Jennifer Saunders,
June Whitfield and Joanna Lumley).
© BBC 2011

That bit seemed to work fine with me – I understand Saunders wanting to shake up the series and the characters a bit over the period of absence, especially now that Saffy’s older and has had a child for several years (thanks, Wikipedia), for which the release from prison and ensuing storyline was a good start. But she didn’t quite seem to have a lot of direction after this – a while was wasted in the middle of the episode with a bland reference to and cameo from The Killing, something which I felt instant hostility to after the recent trend of shoehorning references to other BBC shows into their sitcoms. Since that mess of a BBC1 Christmas trailer that felt like the simultaneous end of 30 peoples’ careers (I know you’ve made some bad decisions, David Jason, but why?) it felt awkward to see an obvious “AUDIENCE APPLAUD NOW” cameo like that – but fortunately it didn’t last too long and Edina bumbled through it in an entertaining way. 

The episode meandered around through a bit of filler (I found Bubbles laughable but might have to get used to her character a bit further before that graduates to “enjoyable”) before a tight-but-fast ending, with a good solid sketchlike scene with Patsy’s investigation into whether she exists in the world of paperwork. Brief, but good material – and if the next episode continues right from that moment, I’ll certainly watch.