Abigoliah: Hello there! This is All British Comedy Explained, the podcast in which I finally learn about all the British comedy I’ve been missing out on. I’m comedian Abigoliah Schamaun, and to guide me through this comedy labyrinth is writer Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello there. Good to be back.
Abigoliah: Hello. How are you?
Tom: I’m all right. Yes, I’m really looking forward to this one.
Abigoliah: I just want to remind everyone that we now have a Patreon.
Tom: We do?
Abigoliah: Yes, we do. And for £3, not $3 – which is what I say every time we plug the Patreon – you can get ad-free listening to the podcast, what goes on the main feed, but no ads, just super easy. For £5 a month you get ad-free listening to the main podcast, as well as mini episodes where you and I discuss a theme from the show. So before we talk about the theme, what is the show we’re watching?
Tom: The show is Absolutely Fabulous.
Abigoliah: Yay!
Tom: Which you’ve been looking forward to for a while.
Abigoliah: I can’t wait!
Tom: And our bonus mini episode for Patreon listeners is going to be answering the question: Is Celebrity Dead?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So is this a different time than when Absolutely Fabulous was first broadcast.
Abigoliah: It’s a different time than when anything we’ve watched.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Comes out.
Tom: This was first broadcast in 1992.
Abigoliah: Okay, so the most recent thing we did was The Office, and this is right behind it.
Tom: Yeah, The Office was early 2000s. So for your cultural touchstones, this is the year in which George Bush and Boris Yeltsin declared the Cold War was over. The European Union was founded. Big fan of the EC – the European Community.
Abigoliah: Gosh, it was such a good idea. I don’t think anyone would ever leave.
Tom: Who would disagree?
Abigoliah: Who would disagree?
Tom: And Sinéad O’Connor ripped up a picture of the Pope during Saturday Night Live in 1992.
Abigoliah: Who was then vilified. But then history has shown she was freaking right, man.
Tom: And you know what the number one movie worldwide was?
Abigoliah: In 1992, E.T.
Tom: That would have been 1982. Damn. It was Walt Disney’s Aladdin.
Abigoliah: Ain’t never had a friend like me.
Tom: That’s such a good song.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay. I love it, and that’s when Absolutely Fabulous came out.
Tom: That’s right.
Abigoliah: So my backstory with Absolutely Fabulous.
Tom: Have you ever actually seen an entire episode or just bits?
Abigoliah: It’s again, it’s one of those where I’m like, I think I have, but I don’t remember it. What was I doing my whole life that I remember no television I’ve ever watched? After my first Edinburgh – so as I like to tell people, I never debuted at Edinburgh, I just showed up because I was an open miker and I heard there’s this land that you can go to and do an hour, so I did it.
Tom: On the year, once a year in August. Yes. Like Brigadoon.
Abigoliah: Exactly. And I do the Free Fringe. And my first show was called Beacon of Health and Fitness, because I was a yoga instructor, and my second one, I wanted to call it, due to an inside joke about me not having abs and my name being Abigoliah, Ab Fab. And everyone went, you can’t do that! And I was like, why? And they’re like, because that’s the name of a show. And I was like, no. But like no one’s heard of it. And it’s like everyone has heard of it. You cannot call your show Ab Fab. So I called it Fabulous Abs instead. Yeah. But the way I heard about Absolutely Fabulous was me going, I have this title that you will never believe and everyone…
Tom: Is gonna kill.
Abigoliah: Yeah, they’re like, it’s already been done. And by comedians better than me. So tell me all about this show.
Tom: All right, so cast your mind back to our conversation about The Young Ones and the cabaret group The Comic Strip. Very male. Yeah. They styled themselves as anti-racist, anti-sexist. But very few women were able to break through. There were a couple who had some early gigs, but really the only two that got anywhere were French and Saunders. And they were included not only on the bill at the comic strip, but in those Comic Strip Presents movies. They were part of that ensemble cast. The only two women in a sea of men. In 1985…
Abigoliah: By the way, that’s still how stand-up comedy is. I am often the only woman on a show where everyone’s like, we need more diversity. So they put one woman on a show, which means female stand-up comedians, we never know what the other is talking about. We never get to see each other work except for International Women’s Day weekend.
Tom: I forget this because producing The Guilty Feminist, I really only see female stand-up comedians. I don’t know what the boys are doing. I assume they’re funny, but I haven’t seen them, so I don’t know.
Abigoliah: I remember one time going in for an audition to be on a Comedy Central, like, stand-up show, and, you know, it’s like a showcase, right? Everyone goes up. Three of, like, the four women who auditioned that night, we all had jokes about getting a wax, like all of us, and I didn’t wind up getting the television show. They gave it to another person who did do a joke about getting waxed, but I told the producer, I was like, I would have picked different material had I known. But obviously none of us knew because none of us gigged together. So we didn’t know. We all thought we had come up with this interesting premise, and then over half of us did. Yeah, who freaking knew? Anyways, I’m sorry, I digress.
Tom: In 1985 – so this is three years after The Young Ones – together with Ruby Wax and Tracey Ullman, they made a sort of female version of The Young Ones for ITV called Girls on Top. And then a couple of years later they got their own BBC sketch show just called French and Saunders.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And that was on the air, on and off, until like 2007, something like that. But in 1991, Dawn French let Jennifer Saunders know that she and her husband, Lenny Henry, were working on adopting a baby. She was going to find it very hard to find any time for what would have been a fourth series of French and Saunders any time soon. And so she suggested that this would be a good time for Jennifer to do something on her own.
Abigoliah: I didn’t know that Dawn French and Lenny Henry were married. Oh, yes. Are they still married?
Tom: No. I believe they’ve split up now.
Abigoliah: Okay. Sorry. Just catching up with the gossip.
Tom: Yes. So almost all her professional work to date has been done as part of this duo. Yeah. So it’s with a little bit of anxiety, I think, that Jennifer Saunders began thinking about, well, what does Jennifer Saunders solo project even look like? And she began thinking about some of the sketches that she’d done with Dawn. And one idea stood out straight away. There’s a sketch in the third series of French and Saunders, which they called Modern Mother and Daughter.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: In which Jennifer had played an erratic, hedonistic partygoer.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And Dawn French had played her teenage daughter, who’s very straight and very square, and regards her mother with a sort of mixture of contempt and pity.
Edina: And like anything that I want to wear. What do you look, look. I look modern, you wouldn’t know, darling. I poured you a spritzer downstairs, so you must come down. I’m sending out for some sushi, darling. Yum yum yum. Jean-Pierre and Melissa are coming over, darling. And Bettina’s coming over. And she’s bringing her new jewellery collection that I want you to see, darling, and her son, Cosimo, who you adore, adore, darling. He’s an Adonis. So come down and share a joint with us later.
Abigoliah: And that’s how Absolutely Fabulous – that’s the archetype of the mother and daughter. That’s right.
Tom: Yeah. So she remembered finding that sketch very easy to write. And she was talking to the BBC’s Jon Plowman, and they both thought there’s a sitcom there. That relationship could be developed and deepened. And she spent some time writing it, and Plowman gave her advice, acting as a sort of unofficial script editor. And pretty soon they had at least the bare bones of a script.
Abigoliah: Is this a sketch that was famous before Absolutely Fabulous came out? Was this like one of their known sketches? No, it was just a good sketch with the bones of a sitcom.
Tom: The thing they were known for from their sketch show, and which became increasingly so as time went on, were these amazingly elaborate movie spoofs and sometimes TV spoofs. So they’d recreate things like Silence of the Lambs and Titanic and put a spin on them, and they went to extraordinary lengths to try and duplicate the look of these huge, big-budget movies on their BBC budget. So they were famous for anything as a sketch show as that. I don’t think anyone noticed Modern Mother and Daughter. I don’t think it stood out in any particular way until it became the template for Absolutely Fabulous. And now, of course, whenever there’s a documentary about Absolutely Fabulous, they’ll include clips from that sketch. So that was just a two-hander, but you can’t sustain a series of half hours with just two people, so they needed to expand the world. In the original sketch, Jennifer Saunders’ character doesn’t even have a name, but for the sitcom, she was called Edina Monsoon.
Abigoliah: Oh, I like that.
Tom: Or Eddie. And she was given a job, a PR consultant, which I think was something they thought was suitably pointless. Yeah, they had the earnest and critical teenage daughter who was called Saffron and remained Saffron or Saffy, but to kind of spice up the stew a bit, Edina also had a best friend and partner in crime, fashion editor Patsy Stone.
Abigoliah: Who played Patsy Stone?
Tom: So this was going to be a key bit of casting, and it was Jon Plowman who suggested Joanna Lumley.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: She was known by this stage to millions as Purdey in The New Avengers.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Anything to you?
Abigoliah: Well, I mean, it’s not a Marvel…
Tom: No, no, no, it’s not those Avengers. It’s different Avengers.
Abigoliah: I only know the Marvel Avengers.
Tom: Quick digression: in the early 60s, there was a British series called The Avengers, which initially starred Patrick Macnee and Ian Hendry. Ian Hendry was a doctor whose wife had been killed. Patrick Macnee was a kind of shadowy man from the Ministry.
Abigoliah: Wait, sorry. Is this a comedy?
Tom: No, this…
Abigoliah: Is a drama. This is dark.
Tom: Drama. Like an adventure show.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And they would go out and solve crimes together. Ian Hendry quit after the first year and was replaced by Honor Blackman in leathers, which suddenly gave the series a lot more sex appeal.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And then when she left to do Goldfinger, she was replaced by Diana Rigg. And then the series started being shot on film and then in colour, and it was sold overseas. And then it was a huge hit, and it finished in the late 60s and then was brought back as The New Avengers, still with Patrick Macnee, who’d been in it from the very beginning, but now supported by Gareth Hunt, who is best known for a series of instant coffee commercials, and Joanna Lumley kind of playing the Honor Blackman/Diana Rigg part.
Abigoliah: Because they need a new girl. They need a new hot girl.
Tom: This bowl haircut. And she was just as much of a go-getter, high kicker, awesome dame as her predecessors. Yeah. And she’d been playing those kind of roles since the late 60s. She’s in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay.
Tom: Only very briefly, but she is there, and she’s in ITV’s spooky series, sort of for children, but adults liked it, too, Sapphire and Steel. She played Sapphire opposite David McCallum, and she was always cropping up in shows. She’s in The Two Ronnies. She’s in Olympus. Lovejoy. You know, if a bit of glamour was needed, you call Joanna Lumley.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But she wasn’t well known for being funny.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Until…
Abigoliah: Because I only think of her as funny.
Tom: Until Ruby Wax co-opted her for a sketch in her series, The Full Wax, which you might remember Andrew Gillman talking to us about. Yes. Breaking into her home?
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Now, the whole point of that was to undermine her beauty and her grace. But it proved she was more than capable of sending herself up.
Abigoliah: Oh, so she was in on the joke.
Tom: Oh, yeah.
Abigoliah: Yeah, completely. Did they not expect her to be?
Tom: I think they were worried because she had – she is in a sitcom, actually, the long-forgotten sitcom now from the very, very early 60s, which is kind of a Girls on Top in the 60s, about three or four young women sharing a flat together. But she was just known as this imperious maiden. Oh. And so they weren’t sure if she could be a clown.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And she delighted to discover that she could.
Abigoliah: Great.
Tom: I mean, a little bit like André Previn.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Who knew?
Tom: Yeah. But the way Joanna Lumley tells the story is during the first read-through, nothing she did made Jennifer Saunders even smile.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: And she was so nervous that in the taxi on the way home, she immediately rang her agent and said, I can’t do this. Jennifer hates me. Get me out of it. Yeah. Luckily, the agent persuaded her to at least do the pilot.
Abigoliah: So when she auditioned, did she already have the role?
Tom: She wouldn’t have been auditioning. She would have been…
Abigoliah: She would have been. Yeah. She’s offer only. Yeah. Of course. Okay. And so she went in to do a reading for Jennifer.
Tom: Like a table read with the cast.
Abigoliah: Okay. So it’s a table read? Yes. Okay. Table read. She’s not getting any laughs. Jennifer’s just stone-faced. And she’s like, I’m in trouble. Yeah. Okay. Oh my gosh.
Tom: And I imagine Jennifer Saunders was just anxious because it’s her first solo project. She’s written the script. She’s never written a full half hour on her own before. She’s only ever written sketches, and she’s never written them in partnership with Dawn. I think she’s just thinking to herself, is this working? And she doesn’t know. Part of her job as leading the company is to support the other actors, because she assumes Joanna Lumley is this astonishing star who’s been in Hollywood movies. Why does she need special looking after? Well, she does.
Abigoliah: Into like, comedians don’t laugh at their own jokes.
Tom: And as comedy when you’re doing it isn’t funny. Yes, Posner taught us.
Abigoliah: Yes, Geoff Posner said it. Comedy is not funny when you’re doing it. Yeah.
Tom: And actually, she’s not the only member of the cast who tells a version of this story.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: So Julia Sawalha was cast as Saffron. Now, she had been in 40 episodes of an ITV kids show called Press Gang, written by future Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat when she was just a teenager. She’d done sitcoms before. Her father was a successful actor in his own right, so none of this was new to her
Abigoliah: Nepo-baby.
Tom: Yeah, but she’s taking over from Dawn French. She’s dealing with last-minute rewrites from Jennifer Saunders, and I think it’s always stressful doing a sitcom, which is this weird hybrid of film and live, because you have a studio audience there that you’re playing to, but it’s all being shot on camera. And so how much do you play to the audience? How much do you play to the camera? And then riding the laughs, and you’ve got one chance to do it. It’s not like doing a long run in the theatre where you can dial it in over the previews. She also asked her agent to get her out of it.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Jennifer Saunders doesn’t know this is happening, that everyone’s trying to bail on her project. What I like to imagine is Jennifer went home from that table read being like, wow, everyone’s great. Everyone was so funny. We got something, and everyone’s like, she hates me. It’s not working. Get me out of it.
Tom: Now one of the people who did audition for Saffron was Jane Horrocks. Heard of her?
Abigoliah: I don’t think so.
Tom: But maybe she’d made a big impact in Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet. She’d worked with Victoria Wood.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: She’s also from the north. She’d done an episode of Red Dwarf. She has a small part in Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And she clearly wasn’t right for Saffy. But Jennifer Saunders and Jon Plowman both thought she was brilliant. So they built up the part of Edina’s ditzy secretary, Bubble, and had her play that instead.
Abigoliah: Lovely.
Tom: And then the last member of the cast was real sitcom royalty. As Edina’s mother, they persuaded June Whitfield to take the part.
Abigoliah: June Whitfield.
Tom: Of whom you’ve never heard.
Abigoliah: Who is that?
Tom: Yeah, she’d been in radio comedy since the 1950s. She’d made dozens of appearances in television shows and comedy films, including three Carry On films. And she partnered Terry Scott in two sitcoms, Happy Ever After and Terry and June, in which they played essentially the same characters. Putting those two sitcoms together, you have a run from 1974 to 1987.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow. Yeah, that is a long run. Is it one of those where they had to take years off?
Tom: No. Not really.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow. Okay.
Tom: So Terry and June is the famous one. People have forgotten about Happy Ever After now. But Terry and June is sort of like if The Good Life is the best possible version of that sitcom, Terry and June is the mediocre version.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: The perfectly good. Nothing wrong with it, but it’s never going to be winning awards. It’s never going to be close to the nation’s bosom. But people like it, and it runs and runs and runs.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But it was after the alternative comedy boom. It would be, well, we don’t want to do it like Terry and June. We don’t want to be suburban and boring and safe like Terry and June. But everybody loved June Whitfield.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: The pilot was shot fairly quickly and cheaply with Bob Spiers as director. Does that name mean anything to you?
Abigoliah: Have we covered him before?
Tom: He has come up before.
Abigoliah: He also directed the second series of The Young Ones. Fawlty Towers, of Fawlty Towers is what I said. You know what, dude? The wrap-up of season one that we did this episode, I don’t know, I swear I did. After this freaking season, I am going to go through and re-listen to our podcast and take notes, because if you do a quiz, I aim to get an A next time. I learned so much doing this and about 3% of it stays in my head. The title of the show we watched and whether I enjoyed it or not, that’s what stays in my head.
Tom: So, yeah, Bob Spiers definitely knew his way around a sitcom set. But I don’t know if we talked about this with Fawlty Towers. There’s an early episode of Fawlty Towers where everybody felt as if the audience wasn’t really getting it during the recording.
Abigoliah: Talked about this.
Tom: Because people have debated whether this is true or not, because the very first episode, the pilot, people just get tickets to whatever is on. No one knows what Fawlty Towers is. You know, you’re going to get Monty Python, John Cleese fans. And for the second or third episode, there was like a delegation from an Icelandic television company. And so a full quarter of the audience didn’t have very good English.
Abigoliah: When you say a delegation, like they sent Icelandic people to watch Fawlty Towers?
Tom: The BBC was like, oh yeah, we’ll give you tickets. So what’s recording that night? It’s something called Fawlty Towers. That seems fine.
Abigoliah: Oh, no.
Tom: Yeah, but with Absolutely Fabulous, the audience got it straight away.
Abigoliah: Of course they did.
Tom: And it was the strength of the live reaction during filming which helped convince the BBC to give it a series.
Abigoliah: Amazing.
Tom: Really. We talked before about the impact that the live audience has, and I think you can really see it in these episodes. It really makes a difference to how the actors respond and the overall just feel of watching the show. Oh, something I didn’t touch on and I meant to. What do the five leading actors all have in common, other than being in Ab Fab and all being women?
Abigoliah: Oh, I was going to say they’re all women. They’re all white women.
Tom: They are all white women. But something even more specific than that. So it’s Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Julia Sawalha, Jane Horrocks and June Whitfield.
Abigoliah: They all begin with a J.
Tom: They do. Which is just kind of one of those weird things. They’re all J names.
Abigoliah: There’s no way they – yeah. That’s weird.
Tom: So series one did very well. And two more series of six episodes each followed fairly swiftly, and they were promoted from BBC Two to BBC One.
Abigoliah: Amazing.
Tom: And celebrity guests were desperate to be included in the show because it’s about celebrity.
Abigoliah: Of course.
Tom: So sometimes they’re playing themselves, as they’re playing characters, but people like Helena Bonham Carter, Richard E. Grant, Germaine Greer, Suzi Quatro, Lulu, Britt Ekland all make appearances. And that’s just in series two.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And then despite the last episode of series three already being called The End, Jennifer Saunders and team decided to wrap everything up with a final extra pair of 45-minute specials called The Last Shout.
Abigoliah: Okay, and were these Christmas specials or just specials?
Tom: Just specials.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But now Patsy and Eddie were comedy icons, and catchphrases from Ab Fab had become part of the national vocabulary. Jennifer Saunders has become a huge star in her own right, not just one half of French and Saunders. Dawn French, now happily parenting her daughter Billie, does recall thinking it would have been nice if the very first thing her comedy partner had done without her hadn’t been such an era-defining smash hit.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: But when Absolutely Fabulous won the BAFTA for Best Comedy in 1993, she did send Jennifer Saunders a huge bouquet of flowers with a note that simply read “cunt!”
Abigoliah: That’s awesome. Oh that’s beautiful.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: I love that they could have such a – one reads that as, oh, they’re being fun with each other.
Tom: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They’re still great, great friends today. They’re interviewed side by side on that Victoria Wood documentary that’s in cinemas at the moment. Yeah.
Abigoliah: Awesome.
Tom: Now, the story of Ab Fab doesn’t quite end here, but let’s pause. Let’s go and watch series one, episode four, which is called Iso Tank, and series five. Yes. Series five, episode three, which is called Panickin’. And then I’ll explain why there is a series five.
Abigoliah: Okay. All right. Are we also going to talk about the movie? No, we’re not going to talk about…
Tom: We’ll mention it.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But it doesn’t really require in-depth analysis.
Abigoliah: Fair enough.
Tom: Fair enough. All right. Ab Fab time.
Abigoliah: All right, let’s do it.
Tom: All right, sweetie? All right, darling? Hello.
Abigoliah: I feel like now I want, like, a glass of champagne.
Tom: That would be good, wouldn’t it? Yeah, we definitely should have done that. But it is only 5:00, so…
Abigoliah: I mean, I think they were starting earlier than 5:00. So I think Absolutely Fabulous is absolutely fabulous. The opening episode that I saw of season one, episode four, I mean, the fact that she had a deprivation tank just says so much about her as a person. Like, immediately I was like, I know who this character is. I’ve never known anyone to talk about deprivation tanks who isn’t part of an elite class of entertainment people who are slightly insufferable.
Tom: Yeah. And she’s like an old hippie.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: She was young in the 60s, of course. Yeah.
Abigoliah: I will say, okay. One thing that surprised me was the social commentary in both episodes, which is light, but they’re like the adopting a Romanian baby. I was like, can we make this joke? Is this allowed? Fun fact: there was a kid who I went to kindergarten with – I mean, actually, we graduated together. It was a small town – who was, but I remember when she came to kindergarten because she was adopted. She was from Romania, and she didn’t speak any English. And her first American word – and I say American for a very specific reason – was “Nintendo,” which is not an English word. But she understood the country that she was adopted into. That. And then the whole, like, panic room thing and about being afraid of the future and everything and of terrorism and stuff in 2003. Again, it’s not like heavy on, like, the political commentary, but it’s there. It’s in the shows. And I was kind of surprised by that. I don’t know, I just thought it was gonna be like, it could have happened at any point in time. I didn’t think there were going to be such anchor points in it.
Tom: Yeah, but I mean, there is a satirical intent behind the characters of Edina and Patsy. You know, we’re not just laughing along with them. We’re laughing at them and we’re criticising them. Yeah, and we’re finding fault with them.
Abigoliah: Yeah, they’re not getting it right.
Tom: They’re not just ridiculous figures. They are, to a certain extent, hateful figures. But we also kind of love them because we get little hints every so often. There’s a couple of moments, delicious moments in later episodes where there’s just a tiny little sliver of vulnerability, for example, from Patsy.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: There’s a bit where she wants a quiet word with Saffy. And then we cut to Saffy doing a breast check on her.
Abigoliah: Oh, really? Oh, boy.
Tom: And she’s so humiliated. But at the same time, she knows how much she needs it. So, for example, in the first episode, we watched that little flashback of them as schoolgirls. Yeah, there’s a little hints of vulnerability underneath this hard surface.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. And she also, like, wants her kid to like her, but, like, is not a great mum and is sort of trying but sort of disengaged but sort of engaged. I loved it, I thought it was great. Is she a single mum?
Tom: Yes. She has two ex-husbands who are recurring characters in other episodes, but I didn’t want to kind of fog this with too many recurring characters.
Abigoliah: Yeah, that was going to be my question. Is this like a 90s sitcom Full House, where it’s like the parent died, so now I’m a single mum doing it all?
Tom: But one of the exes is Christopher Ryan from The Young Ones.
Abigoliah: Oh, really? Fabulous. Okay, I need to go and watch more of this. I will say, the one thing I didn’t like is I loved the “I’m going to your school thing. If you don’t invite me to your school thing, I’ll adopt a Romanian baby.” I thought it was ridiculous. I don’t like the device of it was all a dream.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: I mean, the whole thing was hilarious. But when it was like, oh, she’s been in the deprivation tank for two minutes. But that’s a great line. “How long have I been in there?” “Two minutes.” But I guess how else do you get out of it? How else do you get out of that?
Tom: This is not something I know about how that episode was written. This is a balls-out guess. But I wonder if she was writing that stuff about Eddie wanting to go to Saffy’s presentation and then trying to blackmail her and doing the Romanian baby thing, and then getting out of hand and then thinking it would be great if the Romanian baby started turning up at the presentation. There’s no way I could do that. It’d be too ridiculous. Unless this was all a dream. And then she went back and bolted on the iso tank at the beginning. Maybe that’s just my pure guess about how this might have been written. I have no firsthand knowledge of the situation.
Abigoliah: I mean, either way, like the way it ends, because the Romanian babies show up, you are written into a corner because you can’t then have Eddie be like, I don’t want them, because that’s too cruel. Yes, that’s, because as the whole, like, “I’m going to adopt a Romanian baby” thing was going through, I was like, “just bring, I’ll pick one. Just bring them all over and I’ll choose, bring me a sample,” or however she said it, I was like, well, we can’t actually see babies because that’s too, like, this falls apart somewhere early. Yes. What is the trajectory of Bubble? Because I realised she’s bad at her job in the beginning sketch, although we see her being, like, on top of it. But it’s all a dream. It’s all dream. So that’s not real. But in the second sketch where she climbs through the window and then she’s talking about going to all these parties and stuff, does she become good at her job? Is she a socialite?
Tom: There’s also a thing about Jane Horrocks playing an incredibly annoying daytime television presenter called Katy Grin.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So she gets to play two roles in some episodes.
Abigoliah: Oh, fun.
Tom: Yeah, she’s so versatile. Jane Horrocks, she’s just extraordinary. There’s nothing she can’t do.
Abigoliah: I loved what she was doing just when she came in to the second episode we watched, which was in season five. I was like, there’s been a change to this character, but I don’t know what the change is.
Tom: I can’t remember the details. Apologies.
Abigoliah: Oh. By the way, oxygen bars. Do you remember? I mean, that suits me, right? I went to an oxygen bar in New York, of course, when I was a yoga instructor there. Stupid. I forgot they existed, but that just really rooted me in it. And then at the end of the season five episode, it said a Saunders and French production.
Tom: Yeah, just that production company.
Abigoliah: Okay. Cause I was like, well, did Dawn come back and help write later seasons after maternity leave? Okay.
Tom: She has nothing to do with it.
Abigoliah: She must have had a cameo.
Tom: Adrian Edmondson has a couple of cameos. He plays a food critic on the magazine that Eddie works for.
Abigoliah: I loved the Minnie Driver cameo because when you were like, you know, they’ll be cameos, I was like, all right, but I didn’t expect Minnie Driver. And also Bubble’s line of, like, “Also, Catherine Zeta-Jones really stole your thunder.” I was like, shots fired. And I didn’t even think about that. But actually, she probably kind of did because Minnie was on the up. And then Catherine Zeta-Jones did Zorro, and then Catherine was Catherine, then from then on.
Tom: Something else I think it’s interesting to notice: compare, especially Fawlty Towers, to this. But then also, I think The Good Life as well, because Fawlty Towers is “how much plot can we pack in to 30 minutes?” Or actually, as we talked about, very often 33 or 34 minutes. And there’s so little plot in these episodes of Absolutely Fabulous. Yeah, like barely enough for it to qualify as an episode. But hanging out with the characters is so pleasurable and they’re so well drawn and they’re so beautifully played. You sort of don’t miss the plot.
Abigoliah: It’s kind of more of a character study.
Tom: Much more of a character study. And then The Good Life is somewhere in between. The plot exists to create situations that the characters will react to. Joel Morris has a lovely way of talking about how sitcoms work. He says it’s a bit like a pinball machine, and so the plot is the new idea. You throw in, like, the ball, and then it pings off each of the characters in turn, and you’re waiting for them to react in their predictable ways because you know them so well.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But this is basically a hangout show with just enough plot to justify its existence. And you’ve got to be really good at dialogue, and you’ve got to have a really strong cast to make that work.
Abigoliah: And yeah, and all the characters have to have a really strong sense of character.
Tom: Who they are and who they are to the other people. Yeah, we didn’t see very much of Mother in these two episodes, which I only realised when we got on to that second episode. But she is as strong a character. She just tends not to be featured quite as much. Often it is either The Saffy and Eddie show or it’s The Eddie and Patsy show.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Does, I mean, how many episodes? Because Mother is, I mean, she’s an elderly woman.
Tom: She got to the end of the series.
Abigoliah: Oh, yeah. How old was she at the end of the series?
Tom: I do not have that in front of me, but she didn’t, so let me tell you the whole story. So they did three series pretty quickly, but after the third series, the strain was beginning to tell.
Abigoliah: The strain being there was no plot, and they had nowhere to go for a while, or the strain…
Tom: Just it sort of begins to feel a bit like we’re working very hard at this. And are the shows actually getting better?
Abigoliah: Did Jennifer write this all on her own?
Tom: Yes she did. Yeah. She has a script editor, Ruby Wax, and actually a couple of the later ones have an additional material credit for Sue Perkins.
Abigoliah: Okay. Oh, wow.
Tom: Maybe ask Sue Perkins to come on the show.
Abigoliah: I love all of this. All these women writing together. This is beautiful.
Tom: One of the problems was that none of the cast thought the scripts they were sent were really worth learning, because Jennifer Saunders would be rewriting every single day until recording actually started. So every day of rehearsal, there’d be a new version of the script.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s got to be really stressful.
Tom: So they did 20 episodes over about three years, and she felt she was kind of done with these characters by that stage. She went back to making more episodes of French and Saunders. Dawn French by this stage is making The Vicar of Dibley, and it felt like that was a thing that happened in the early 90s and then it was done. But people kept asking for more.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So in the late 90s, she and Joanna Lumley recreated the characters for a short segment, which was an exclusive extra on a VHS tape, which also included some Comic Relief sketches.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And it felt like the chemistry was still there. And as Jennifer Saunders started thinking about, well, what would Eddie and Patsy be doing now? Ideas started to flow.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So the BBC was delighted to commission six new shows, which went out in the summer of 2001.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: That’s series four. That was followed by a 2002 Christmas special, another series of eight in 2003.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: A 2004 Christmas special, and then three final specials in 2011 and 2012.
Abigoliah: Oh wow.
Tom: There’s lots of…
Abigoliah: Gaps.
Tom: Kept going, kept coming back for more. There is also a feature film released in 2016, and I would like to just draw a discreet veil over that.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: It has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 57%, which I think flatters it.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: It’s pretty bad.
Abigoliah: Does that make me want to watch it even more?
Tom: I mean, you’re welcome to. It’s not got nothing of value in it. It’s just it’s not the same. The lack of studio audience is a big problem. Yeah, it doesn’t work over that length.
Abigoliah: Well, as we were saying, because there’s not a lot of plot.
Tom: And the well is kind of run dry by this stage.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And it’s just hanging out with the characters.
Tom: Which over 30, 40 minutes is fine. Yeah, but over 100 minutes, not so much.
Abigoliah: It’s like, where are we going with this? Yeah.
Tom: There was an inevitable American remake shot in 2009. Want to have a guess at the casting?
Abigoliah: I feel like I should know what the – it didn’t go out as Absolutely Fabulous?
Tom: Oh, it didn’t go out at all. It didn’t get past the pilot stage.
Abigoliah: In 2009.
Tom: Two names, one name definitely you’ll have heard of. You probably would have heard of both of these women.
Abigoliah: I mean, part of me wants to be like, was it Joan Rivers? In 2009.
Tom: Shall I tell you?
Abigoliah: Hollywood people, right?
Tom: American film and television? Absolutely.
Abigoliah: I mean, I’m probably just because we mentioned it earlier today. Part of me wants to be like it was one of the cast of Friends. Like it was… Okay, just tell me, I’m not gonna…
Tom: Kathryn Hahn was Eddie.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s good casting.
Tom: And Kristen Johnston as Patsy. Kristen Johnston from Third Rock from the Sun.
Abigoliah: Oh, that is good. That is really good.
Tom: It’s surprising to me this was even attempted because the real Patsy and Eddie – in other words, Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley – had already cameoed on Roseanne in 1996, so there must have been an American audience for the British show. In which case, why are you trying to remake it? Anyway, it didn’t get past the pilot stage. There’s also a French movie remake called Absolument Fabuleux, which was released in 2001 and was a box office bomb. Really, nobody saw it at all.
Abigoliah: And this is a French version. So French actors playing them.
Tom: Playing the parts? Yeah. In French.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow. Oh, I hope Jennifer Saunders made so much money off it.
Tom: Well, let’s hope so. Well, she wouldn’t have made very much in royalties, but she got a nice fat licensing fee.
Abigoliah: Yeah. That’s what, yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.
Tom: So June Whitfield died in 2018, in her 90s, I believe. But everyone else is still with us. Jane Horrocks – this is a musical theatre one for you – she was a definitive Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes’s revolutionary version of Cabaret at the Donmar Warehouse. Oh, she is extraordinary.
Abigoliah: This is when Alan Cumming…
Tom: Was the emcee. That’s right. Yes. Yeah.
Abigoliah: Oh, she would have been great in that.
Tom: With Alan Cumming and Jane Horrocks. I don’t know why, because I’ve seen the video and she’s amazing as Sally Bowles.
Abigoliah: Oh, cool.
Tom: Yeah, because I hear her voice in lots of animated films. She’s in Chicken Run, Corpse Bride, Arthur Christmas, and an early Sally Wainwright series called The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, in which she plays someone who becomes prime minister without meaning to.
Abigoliah: Oh that’s fun.
Tom: Yeah, and Julia Sawalha is in Chicken Run as well. And then she also partners Rowan Atkinson in a Doctor Who Comic Relief sketch called The Curse of Fatal Death.
Abigoliah: Oh, fun.
Tom: She was a regular on Jonathan Creek for a while.
Abigoliah: Yes. And that is a show that I have seen. Yeah, actually, I’ve seen all of it.
Tom: And she took part in The Masked Singer.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Joanna Lumley is now more associated with Patsy than either of her previous iconic roles. As one generation that knew her as Purdey in The New Avengers, there was one generation that knew her as Sapphire in Sapphire and Steel, but now she’s Patsy.
Abigoliah: Yeah, she was just in Wednesday. Yes. Yeah, she was great in it.
Tom: She’s a wonderful cameo in The Wolf of Wall Street. She’s in everybody’s favourite film, Paddington 2.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: And she is the public face of the Gurkha Justice campaign.
Abigoliah: What’s the Gurkha…
Tom: So she’s fighting for equal rights for the Nepalese troops who served in the British Army.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: And you can tell Jennifer Saunders’ career is really on the skids, because in a last desperate quest for relevance, she and Dawn French started a podcast.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: 2020? It’s called Titting About, and it’s now on its sixth series.
Abigoliah: Oh, well, we should ask if we can guest.
Tom: Absolutely we should. It would be absolutely fabulous.
Abigoliah: It would be absolutely fabulous. Oh that’s fun. And yeah, so after doing so many shows that are in the 70s that, like, don’t end sadly, but all the “what happens next” is “and now they’re all dead,” it’s really nice to, like, listen to, like, oh, I’ve seen them in this recently. And they went on to do this, which I enjoyed, which is fun. This is one that I really want to watch, all of it from the beginning, because even though it doesn’t really matter where they are, again, like some of the character development, it’s like, and there was so much time between stuff, especially was quite curious.
Tom: It’s cool to see her start as a sixth-former, go on to be a young adult, have a baby and all that that entails and so on. So yes, her, she gets the best arc of anybody really well.
Abigoliah: I also like when we watch the season five episode. I was like, wait, is that her? Is that her? But Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley look the exact same. They look the exact, notwithstanding. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that’s so fun. When it gets all puffy. I like the line of when it was like, you keep putting stuff in your face, and now I should have written it down.
Tom: You have to balance it. You have to put it in the top. You got to balance it with the bottom beak. Yeah.
Abigoliah: This is why I don’t do fillers. No, because I’m like, no. It gets too out of hand and then you start to look weird. And also Saffron. Saffron, like, just where she’s insulting Joanna Lumley’s character, who’s called not Eddie, but Patsy. Patsy. Patsy, and being like mountaineers have gotten lost in the…
Tom: Crevices deeper than the. Yeah.
Abigoliah: Oh, and it’s so quickfire. It was really enjoyable.
Tom: And remember, these scripts have been rewritten daily. Yeah. Yeah, quite a lot of outtakes on the DVD.
Abigoliah: She does a straight face so good.
Tom: And the other thing I think you can notice, definitely compared to Fawlty Towers and The Good Life, is how much the art of making television has moved on. Yeah, there are different directors, a different director on the more recent ones. But even like Bob Spiers, who Fawlty Towers was one of his first jobs, is shooting stuff from inside the isolation tank and is doing different angles and has clearly some stuff pre-filmed. I think when you see them as the school kids, there will be two ways of doing that. One is you hustle them off to get changed and then you bring them back, and then maybe you do the stuff with them as adults in front of the audience or the other way around. But I think you can hear their timing isn’t quite on the money when they’re dressed as kids, so that clearly is the pre-filmed stuff. But it’s now all on video, so it looks much smoother. And that just helps to blur the lines.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So some of the stuff from inside the isolation tank, that first thing with them clambering out, probably that’s a pre-filmed bit as well because again, otherwise you have to wait for the actors to go and get changed. Yeah, it slows up the whole day. So much better to shoot that in the afternoon before the audience comes in, shoot it another…
Abigoliah: Day. A cameraman would have had to have been in the isolation tank.
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: To get the top of it. Yeah. And to turn to her.
Tom: Unless there’d have to be a piece which was the top, but it doesn’t have to be a tank.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Okay. So but basically, like, they’re in a small confined area.
Tom: I mean possibly, possibly they’re just shooting at a set piece and turning the lights down.
Abigoliah: Nope. They’re in a small confined area. All I’m thinking is the time my partner had to shoot a getaway scene, but someone, like, jumps into the back of a van. So he was in the van with the actors, and it’s driving away fast, and he’s trying to hold the camera while filming their getaway scene from the Nazis. So in my head, I’m like, no, no, no, he’s in the isolation tank because Tom had to be in the van. So yeah, I don’t know, I liked it. Okay, so here’s my prediction: is that there is a Colin Firth cameo where they freak out because of his Mr. Darcy connection.
Tom: No. No cameo.
Abigoliah: Is there a Renée Zellweger where she actually plays Bridget Jones because she also worked in PR?
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: Okay, I completely got this one wrong. This one was hard to come up with.
Tom: Yeah, because…
Abigoliah: Because what?
Tom: The premise is, episodes are so thin anyway. Yeah, but, I mean, there’s one where they go to New York for the day just because they can. There’s a French holiday one in the first series, which is pretty good fun. Some of the stuff from that last series in 2012 surrounds the Olympics, which was in London at the time.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So but usually it is just either which celebrity can we get to either play themselves or play some figure from one of their pasts? Yeah. And or who can they be attempting to get to like them today?
Abigoliah: Was there, in the world of tabloid media, is there anyone that they mention in the show or that they wrote a joke about that then that actor took umbrage with?
Tom: No, I don’t think so. With something like the Minnie Driver guest appearance, I think the majority of actors are quite keen for the script to sort of be quite cruel to them, because it shows what good sports they are.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: If they get an easy ride, it’s sort of what’s the point?
Abigoliah: But more like, not that, not the actors…
Tom: Who agreed…
Abigoliah: To be in it, but like when they’re like, oh, I’ve had sex with Hugh Grant. Yeah. Everyone’s had sex with Hugh Grant. Yes. Like, that’s such a point to, like, what was written about him in the tabloids and stuff, and I’m like, oh, I wonder if people ever were like, now, too far.
Tom: I think there are people, if that had ever happened, would strongly advise them not to take any action for fear of the Streisand effect.
Abigoliah: That’s actually a really good point.
Tom: Because the more you shout about what a disservice Absolutely Fabulous did you, the more people will hear the joke?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Good point, good point.
Tom: So Abigoliah, does Absolutely Fabulous claim a spot on the now quite crowded Shelf of Fame? When I say claim a spot, I mean claim the final spot. This, if it goes on, will be the 10th show that’s measured on. And after this, putting a show on means taking a show off.
Abigoliah: So I think Absolutely Fabulous goes in above Fawlty Towers.
Tom: Really?
Abigoliah: Yeah. Oh, wow. So it’s Victoria Wood at number one, The Day Today, Not Only… But Also, then Absolutely Fabulous, Fawlty Towers, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, The Office, then The Good Life, then The Young Ones, and then at number ten, we have Morecambe and Wise.
Tom: Gosh, if it wasn’t for the dream sequence, it might have been at number one. Yeah.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I just didn’t like that writing device. I just, I’ll take off a point. Late. No.
Tom: It’s what we in the improvisation community called cancelling, where you introduce a new idea that undoes the effect of a previous idea.
Abigoliah: I also thought the filming of the Minnie Driver in the shop was like, why does this look like a dream sequence?
Tom: Yes, I wondered about that. I have two theories. One, the director thought it would be fun and arty and would kind of make the shop look bizarre. There’s a whole other episode in which two guest performers are these interior designers, and they want the whole place to be white.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay.
Tom: So it might have been harking back to that. It might have just been a budget thing. This is supposed to look like the most expensive shop in the world. They’d run out of money so they can’t dress the set properly. So they just do white walls and overexpose everything.
Abigoliah: And you know you’re in an expensive boutique when you walk in and there are three things on one rack.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I’ve seen shops like that and you’re like, oh, no, I can’t be in here. To be honest with you, the Shelf of Fame, I’m like, there’s stuff that I think might come off of it that it’s not necessarily in the right order anymore. But I’m doing my best. Yeah, I’m gonna put it after Not Only… But Also. I still, The Day Today made me laugh so hard and Not Only… But Also made me laugh so hard. And I can’t, I can’t put two female-led shows at the top. That’d be sexist.
Tom: You can do what you like.
Abigoliah: All right.
Tom: All right, so our show for next time, we’re going to return to the horror of suburbia, which we briefly visited with The Good Life. But this is a bit darker and weirder.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Only a bit, but definitely a bit darker and weirder. One of my favourite shows that I think has been kind of forgotten about, despite several attempts to revive it, which we will talk about next time. This is The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.
Abigoliah: I’m looking forward to this.
Tom: Series one, episode one, starting at the very beginning. And then we’ll jump into series two, episode four. Despite the fact this is quite a serialised show, but I think we’ll be okay.
Abigoliah: I’m looking forward to this because I think everything else we’ve watched, I’ve, like, heard of. This one I’ve no idea.
Tom: No, it’s been kind of forgotten about. And I think that’s a shame because I think it is terrific.
Abigoliah: All right. I look forward to it. Guys, thank you so much for listening to All British Comedy Explained, a couple of ways you can support our show. One, you’re doing it right now, listening and subscribing on your podcatcher app or YouTube if you want to watch it. Thank you so much. Please go and leave a comment. Leave a five-star review on your podcatcher app. It helps other people find it. Or maybe tell a friend. Do you have a friend who’s into Absolutely Fabulous? Please share this podcast with them. And finally, we have a Patreon page. Now for £3 a month you get ad-free listening to all of our episodes here on the main feed, and at £5 a month you get ad-free listening to all episodes on the main feed, plus weekly mini episodes where we tackle a subject. And what will we be covering today?
Tom: In honour of Absolutely Fabulous, we’ll have a quick chat about: Is Celebrity Dead? And we’ll be recording that as soon as we finish this.
Abigoliah: All right. I’m ready to talk about it. Let’s get out of here and then get back online.
Tom: All right. Bye for now.
Abigoliah: Goodbye.