A travel show with buckets of lovely Bolly? How utterly Ab Fab!
DARLING! Sweetie! Sweetie darling! Eddy and Patsy, the most disreputable double act on telly, were reunited and fuelled with gallons of lovely Bolly, in Absolutely Champers (BBC2). Surely disaster loomed.
This documentary didn’t so much tour the celebrated vineyards of Champagne as stagger about with a magnum in its fist, hooting and screeching, before falling flat on its back and burbling at the sky.
And what a wonderful relief that was. We’ve seen so many celebrity comedians turn travelogue host, on jollies around the world with us licence payers footing the bill. Too often they are dull, pompous prigs.
But certainly not Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley. For a start, the stars of Absolutely Fabulous are real friends, perfectly relaxed in each other’s company — criticising, poking fun, teasing and talking over each other.
Both notorious gigglers, they set each other off. At the champagne bar in St Pancras station while they waited for the Eurostar, Joanna could see Jennifer was still waking up and deliberately reduced her to incoherent laughter by talking to the camera with a mouthful of stuffed olives.
It was an unscripted moment — and much funnier for it. Eavesdropping on their constant silly chit-chat was a joy: this natural friendship made the viewer feel as though we’d known them all our lives, though the spontaneity was causing the film crew all kinds of problems. One conversation, in an ancient Citroen with the windows down, sounded like it was recorded in a wind tunnel.
Wherever they went, they were knocking back champagne — last thing at night in the idyllic courtyard of their B&B, at an open-air breakfast in the vineyards on harvest morning, in the cellars, in the Bollinger winery, in the bars, on a canal . . . as though Ab Fab wasn’t a sitcom but the true biography of Edd and Pats.
Even the voiceover was funny. They did it together, ad libbing to put each other off. The show only faltered when excerpts of Ab Fab were shoehorned into the flow.
It was as though the director didn’t trust the presenters to provide enough entertaining moments unaided, which was ridiculous. Clips from classic comedies are never as funny out of context.
Clips from movies, especially musicals, work much better, and the flashes of spectacular silver screen choreography in Looking For Fred Astaire (BBC1) were the highlights of the show.
Darcey Bussell was an assured presenter, talking us through the life of one of her heroes. She’s done this before, with Margot Fonteyn and Audrey Hepburn, and she’s good: confident on her facts and capable of explaining complex technicalities without getting bogged down.
She managed to make us understand what elements of Astaire’s peerless technique came from vaudeville and what was based on jazz dancers at New York’s Cotton Club. But her documentaries also tend to feature awkward scenes of her sitting and smiling tightly as she watches younger dancers in a mirrored studio, and stilted conversations with historians.
Darcey is too polite to make a good interviewer — maybe she should let fellow Strictly judge Craig Revel Horwood do those scenes. She did accidentally mortify one archivist, who produced her greatest treasure for the camera to admire — a straw hat, worn by Fred himself for a movie routine.
Darcey grabbed it, drummed her fingers on the brim and then waggled it round the room. Imagine the museum label now: ‘Fred Astaire’s boater . . . as wrecked by Darcey Bussell’.