Bolly good show! The girls have still got it

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (PG) ★★★★✩

WHAT Jennifer Saunders has assembled around her in this romping, gorgeously self- parodying film is almost a matriarchal dynasty.

Here’s June Whitfield, female comedy icon of my distant childhood with her comedy timing sharp as ever 60 years on; here’s an aged Marcia Warren, a glimpse of Joan Collins and a flash of Dame Edna; of course here are the modern comedy troupers, Celia Imrie and Kathy Burke and Jane Horrocks.

And here is the youngest, 15-year-old Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness as Saffy’s rebel daughter being recruited to mayhem by the wickedly accident-prone old lags.

Feature films based on beloved sitcoms are a famously risky graveyard of ambition: for every one that works (such as the Alan Partridge vehicle Alpha Papa) there are half a dozen so dire they almost spoil the joyful memories. So it is understandable, and felt a bit ominous, that Saunders would make this into a virtual red carpet so dense with famous faces that it forms a kind of insurance: even if it had been thin it would be a pleasurably shrieky face-spotting exercise.

Tricky, maybe, to pack into 80 minutes some 60 celebrity cameos, from Kim Kardashian to Paxo, but you can get rid of a rapid dozen in a London Fashion Week catwalk sequence, more in dream sequences of lives Edina might lead as a revived PR queen and Patsy’s South-of-France yearnings – and fast-paced direction by Mandie Fletcher whips through the others at a dizzying rate.

And of course splash! Kate Moss, rather brilliantly deadpan, is famously thrown into the Thames, fag and glass in hand, to set off the Thelma and Louise plot of the central pair’s escape from the police.

And that’s continuous silly fun; but the point is that all we really longed for was the old team back: Patsy and Edina 20 years more frayed by life and unable to come to terms with twerking, Tinder, onesies, mindfulness and being ‘trollied on Twitter’; but still strutting, posing, bickering, longing to get just one or two letters higher in the alphabet of cool. We wanted to see whether Saffy’s bootfaced disapproval is intact (oh yes it is!) and to connect again with the exes, inlaws and colleagues, including a magnificently savage Kathy Burke as the magazine editor.

The old mob deliver, and that’s where the real joy is; the extra celebs are just icing, spangles on the top.

Our frayed pair, out of credit, can’t find any ‘hand money’ to keep up their lifestyle; after the Moss debacle they head south in the hope of using Patsy as manbait for some old lover (and goodness, what a marvellous, wicked moment she has with John Hamm, covering his face in shock with an ‘I was 15!’).

Jokes spring out at you from our crumpled old friends, sharp and fresh and silly and fast and pleasingly tasteless. Twenty-five years on, it’s far better than it has any right to be. The girls have still got it. Bring on the Bolly!