70 and Fab, sweetie
On set with Joanna Lumley for new Ab Fab movie
On a grey London morning, a paparazzi pack has surrounded a house in the city’s outer suburbs, jostling for a glimpse at the besieged occupants.
Given the city’s ferocious press culture it should be no surprise, except that these paps are fake; they are paid extras on the set of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie.
Things get a little weird, however, when a second cluster of paps turn up – real ones, responding to a tip-off from a neighbour – hoping to get a slice of the action. Suddenly life is imitating art, or is it art imitating life? In the jagged, ridiculous and sometimes not-so-fictitious world of Edina Monsoon and her joinedat-the-hip best friend Patsy Stone, it is difficult to know which is which.
The moment serves as a magnificent metaphor for the two women at the centre of this absolutely fabulous story: Jennifer Saunders, who plays Edina, the fading publicity consultant to the who-used-to-be-who of the world’s B-list, and Joanna Lumley, who plays Patsy, the magazine fashion journalist and man-eater turned career freeloader.
Both women are, in their own lives, profoundly different from the characters they portray on screen. Saunders lives in Devon and is an accomplished equestrian, while Lumley is married to the opera conductor Stephen Barlow and devotes her time to documentaries and political activism.
‘‘The weird thing is, Edina is very different, but she’s also such a part of me now that . . . she is every neurosis I would have, [that] I get out of me by just being her,’’ Saunders says, as she takes a break on set. ‘‘She’s been the perfect release: everything you shouldn’t say, don’t want to say, shouldn’t laugh at and don’t want to wear.’’
Similarly, Lumley describes Patsy as a ‘‘strange avatar; the polar opposite of what I really am. Although I am not Patsy, she is mine. I jealously guard her.’’
Lumley, 70, relished the chance to don Patsy’s French roll hairstyle once more. ‘‘I love meeting her again,’’ Lumley says. ‘‘Any time that her hair goes up, the smoke goes in and the voice drops down a bit, the glass of Champagne appears, I’m as happy as a clam.’’ Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is the latest – perhaps final? – cinematic chapter in the longrunning television series of the same name. Though it made its debut in 1992 the series traces its origins to a French & Saunders sketch written in 1990, about a chic London mother named Adriana struggling to interact with her bookish daughter, alternately complimenting and insulting her.
Fascinatingly, many of the smaller details which blossomed in the series much later are present in the sketch, including references to Humphrey, Edina’s friend from Morocco, Edina’s onetime boyfriend Jean-Pierre, her friend Bettina, the death of Edina’s father and even the phrases ‘‘sweetie, darling’’ and ‘‘bugger, bugger, bollocks’’.
Saunders says she and co-writer Dawn French were immediately aware they had created something different in the original sketch, and it almost immediately took on a life of its own.
‘‘It did stand out as something, I think, which is why it was so easy to go back to,’’ Saunders says. ‘‘It was a sketch, but it also was long enough that it had its own life. It wasn’t too sketchy.’’
Off the back of that, two years later a pilot episode was commissioned. The show’s (and film’s) producer Jon Plowman recalls that first episode was written in pencil by Saunders, in an exercise book. ‘‘That was the last time during the series that we had a full episode written before we started filming,’’ Plowman says, smiling.
When the series launched it was an immediate hit. Saunders bestowed Edina with touches of truth, including some characteristics based on real-life London PR Lynne Franks, plus a client roster of B-list notables including Lulu, Queen Noor of Jordan, Baby Spice and Twiggy.
Lumley, meanwhile, properly breathed her own life into Patsy, including small biographical
notes, such as Lumley’s turn as a Bond girl, which was twisted into Patsy’s pre-journalism life as a softcore porn actress, in films such as Booberella, The Four Dimensions of Lusty Happycrack and three Bond-sploitation film, Bond Meets Black Emmanuelle, Boldfinger and The Man with Thunder Balls.
‘‘They’re gifts along the way,’’ Lumley explains, laughing uproariously at the reminder of Patsy’s cinematic oeuvre.
‘‘Because my life has been full of comedic moments. Modelling, which is divine, which I did for three years and loved dearly. It’s got such a lot of comedy. All those daft films. I did lots of fairly crappy films. Not that they were seedy, but they were just not totally brilliant. That whole world; acting is itself quite funny.’’
And with Edina came a longsuffering daughter Saffron (Julia Sawalha), an unnamed mother (June Whitfield) and a brilliantly stupid assistant, Bubble (Jane Horrocks) to complete the mosaic.
Patsy – full name Eurydice Colette Clytemnestra Dido Bathsheba Rabelais Patricia Cocteau Stone – came with a motley bunch of colleagues at Ella magazine, Magda (Kathy Burke), Catriona (Helen Lederer) and Fleur (Harriet Thorpe).
But all of that alone could not make Absolutely Fabulous a genuine cultural touchstone. At its
‘Although I am not Patsy, she is mine. I jealously guard her . . . . I love meeting her again. Any time that her hair goes up, the smoke goes in and the voice drops down a bit, the glass of Champagne appears, I’m as happy as a clam.’ Joanna Lumley, on her character in Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie.
heart there had to be something far more substantial, and something more universal, about the often complex relationships between mothers and daughters.
The enduring appeal of Edina and Patsy – as one grapples with a daughter whom she dearly wants to love her, and the other with the memory of a Bohemian mother whom she knows did not – is that they have moments of genuine pathos.
In one episode, when their friendship fractures, both founder alone until they are reunited at the top of a New York building.
‘‘I like those moments,’’ says Saunders. ‘‘When they’re absolutely tapping into something real.’’
There are also exquisite moments between mother Edina and daughter Saffron when the combative exchanges give way to something more personal.
‘‘One of my favourite episodes ever was when Saffy wrote the play [about her childhood] and Edina was suddenly, actually forced to look into a mirror,’’ Saunders says. ‘‘She never looks in a mirror. I loved that moment.’’
When we remeet Edina Monsoon in 2016, things have changed. The woman who once declared ‘‘the zeitgeist blew from me’’ now finds herself professionally becalmed. ‘‘The curve has caught up,’’ says Saunders.
‘‘There is a saturation point: money, fashion, life, social media, people, parties, you just can’t keep up with everything. Modern life has so many outlets.’’
For Edina’s ever-present companion Patsy, though, life has not changed much. ‘‘Patsy lives her life like Groundhog Day,’’ Saunders says. ‘‘She gets up, puts on the same things, gets to work, has a drink, gets drunk, goes to sleep. Edina is still trying to fight for a position in the world, still wanting people to love her, which Patsy never cares about.’’
The film shrewdly breaks open the structure of the series. Though it still features a kitchen set as its centrepiece, the story – Edina and Patsy must flee London after Edina signs Kate Moss and then accidentally kills her at a launch – takes the cast on the road to the south of France.
‘‘When your life isn’t chugging forward the way you thought it would, or leaping, or slicing into the worlds of fabulousness . . . when the chance of Kate Moss comes, it’s huge,’’ Lumley explains.
‘‘Edina can do it, she knows she can, she always psychs herself up into believing she can do things so she and Patsy, they form a pincer movement.’’
As a defacto road movie, the film’s scale is much larger. ‘‘Jen was under no illusion she had to do something,’’ explains Plowman, who is now back on the set dressed for his cameo as one of the paps besieging Edina’s home. (He played the same pap in the episode where Edina and Patsy take refuge in a hospital after the ‘‘MP in drug-crazed sex romp with shock with fash mag slag’’ scandal.)
The film is ‘‘a bit different, bigger and larger,’’ Plowman explains. ‘‘And with a plot, because we’d never done plot on television. We tried to avoid it. Well, we hadn’t tried to avoid it, [Jen] never knew how to write it. It allows these guys to go deeper in an arc of emotions and relationships that were hinted at in the series.’’
The story then deposits Edina, Patsy, Saffy and daughter Lola and Edina’s mother, whom they encounter by chance on the road, on the French Riviera. As a faded relic of tourism’s golden age, Lumley says the Cote d’Azur was the perfect setting.
‘‘It was chic, it was sensational, the people with big yachts were really rich, the food was delicious, the beaches were golden,’’ says Lumley. ‘‘It was everybody in the world’s dream of chic, of sunshine, of glamour. So, when they must escape . . . of course they would go straight down to the Cote d’Azur. They think paradise will be there waiting for them.’’
For fans of the television series, the film is an embarrassment of riches, featuring appearances by AbFab’s pantheon of lesser players, including Magda, Catriona and Fleur, hippie Bo (Mo Gaffney) and rival PR maven Claudia Big (Celia Imrie), plus Lulu, Emma Bunton, Joan Collins, Jon Hamm, Jerry Hall, fashionista Suzy Menkes, Dame Edna and Janette Tough – aka Jimmy Kranky – as Huki Muki, the designer whose haute couture gown was infamously soaked in a TV episode when Saffy’s waters broke.
‘‘In the same way that you wouldn’t do The Simpsons without Mr Burns, we couldn’t do it without them,’’ says Plowman. ‘‘There are various people who, at the mere mention of AbFab, pick up the phone and say, I am still in it, aren’t I?’’
Having them along for the story, he adds, is honouring a twodecade-old contract between the show and its most ardent fans. ‘‘It’s Christmas, isn’t it? It’d be odd if you didn’t invite the second cousins ad well as the cousins,’’ he says.
Less certain is the next step. The rush of affection for the film has prompted questions of a sequel.
‘‘They haven’t gone,’’ observes Lumley, who says the option is always there to bring them back. ‘‘Jennifer sometimes pretends they have. She knows they haven’t. Even today, she was saying, maybe we could [do another movie].’’
And yet, says Lumley, the decision isn’t theirs any more to make. ‘‘They actually exist now, in some strange way, in their own right,’’ she says.
‘‘There’s a parallel world they live in, which is such bliss to step into, because they’re so absurd, and it’s so wildly glamorous, and so extreme, and so ridiculous, that it’s just heaven for us to bathe in it.’’
❚ Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie opens on Thursday.