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| 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 20th-anniversary specials was high. In fact, after cursory
research, it appears the show was more highly lauded than I’d expected – the
BFI’s 17th 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?
