That Old Feeling: Ab Fab Forever

“So bad they’re good.” It usually describes works of pop culture that possess an endearing incompetence, that take brave, solemn swan dives and make artistic belly flops. But the phrase can also refer to people or, at least, fictional characters. Two such are Edwina Margaret Rose (Edina, or Eddy) Monsoon and Eurydice Colette Clytemnestra Dido Bathsheba Rebelais Patricia Cocteau (Patsy, or Pats) Stone, the chain-smoking, chain-drinking, pill-popping, cocaine-snorting members of the British uppers class in the sitcom “Absolutely Fabulous.” As incarnated by Jennifer Saunders (the series’ only writer) and Joanna Lumley, Eddy and Pats are so evil they’re medieval, so mean they’re keen, so bad they’re great.

Edina, flighty, selfish and given to wearing frocks two sizes too small for her figure, runs a London public-relations firm and, now and then, a TV production company and clothing shop. Eddy has gone through two husbands; one is now a rabbi, the other’s gay. It’s a hard job raising a kid alone, and she botched it. Eddy’s a baaaad mother to Saffron (Saffy, or Saff), played by Julia Swalha as a poignant, insufferably sensible young woman — a grind at school, hiding behind thick glasses and inside bulky cardigans — who’s 180 degrees different from her trend-following mother.

Patsy, whom a tabloid headline once labeled a “fash-mag slag,” is the show’s own Ivana Tramp. She was the executive fashion director of, and is now a consultant for, a posh woman’s magazine. “I decide what goes in the magazine,” she brags. “Y’ know, one snap of my fingers and I can raise hemlines so high that the world is your gynecologist.” Model-slim, Patsy walks with the stooped, nocturnal posture of a hunchbacked vampire and ingests only alcohol, cigarette toxins and other drugs; other than one potato chip, she hasn’t eaten since the early 70s. But it’s what she spits out that makes her as naughty as she is haughty: corrosive disdain for all those around her, sometimes including her best friend Edina, and always focused on Saff. Pats has hated this sorry spawn even before its birth. “Abort abort abort! I said, ‘Bring me … a knitting needle!'”

“Ab Fab” had a short, brilliant life: a prototype sketch in 1990 on the “French and Saunders” show she did with Dawn French, then three six-episode seasons of “Ab Fab” ran on BBC in 1992, 93 and 94, and a one-off, called “The Last Shout,” aired in 1996. After that, it vanished into rerun land. The brightest, nastiest comedy of the decade was imitated on American TV (in the series “High Society,” with Jean Smart and Mary McDonnell in wan versions of Saunders and Lumley, and “Cybill,” featuring a Patsyish character played by Christine Baranski). Roseanne Barr tried to get a U.S. version made with Carrie Fisher and Barbara Carrera in the lead roles, but the ABC censors couldn’t accept the implicit approval of a degenerate life-style.

The tributes continued apace. “Sex in the City” has to have taken some inspiration from Eddy, Pats and their gal-pals. Two muppets styled after Patsy and Edina showed up on “Sesame Street,” enriching pre-schoolers’ vocabularies with the words “sweetie” and “darling.” And this August saw a feature-length French version, Gabriel Aghion’s “Abolument Fabuleux,” with Josiane Balasko as Eddie Mousson and Natalie Baye as Patricia; Saunders bestowed her blessing by making a cameo appearance. But Abfabulytes — devotees of the one true show — had to make do with memorizing the 19 old episodes by watching them on videotape or DVDs.

So hail BBC and Comedy Central — and mainly hail Saunders — because six new episodes begin this Monday the 12th on CC and continue through December 17. Since each show lasts about 29 mins., and the network needs to get its glut of commercials in, it will air three shows (a new episode and two old ones) in a two-hour block each week. CC will excise a few “shit”s and one remark from the third episode. This one: As she takes lunch with Saffy at a posh Paris restaurant, Eddy notices a statue. “Look at that Buddha,” she says. “Better not let the Taliban know it’s here.” We’ll see this week if another line is cut. In episode one, Patsy offers Eddy a new de-wrinkle injection that Saff claims came from the biochemical labs in Iraq; Eddy shrugs, “If it’s good enough for Saddam, it’s good enough for us.”

OLD

What’s a show from the 90s doing in a column that celebrates venerable entertainment? Well, I love it; that’s reason enough. But a better one is that Edina and Patsy are relics from another era: dinosaurs from the go-go 60s. That’s the time the girls are stuck in, the one they measure all later, drabber decades against. They are dinosaurs who no longer rule the earth but are so blitzed to notice their own extinction.

The show cagily cites all manner of 60s artifacts and artists. The theme song is “This Wheel’s On Fire” written in 1967 by Bob Dylan and The Band’s Rick Danko. In “The Last Shout,” as Eddy careers down the slope toward death, the last thing she hears is a 60s-style pop band sing “Good Morning Starshine” (from “Hair”). In a episode that flashes back to their high school years, Patsy tells Eddy, “You look like Kathy McGowan” (a presenter on the pop music show “Ready, Steady, Go!”) and Eddy replies, “You look like Marianne Faithfull” (Mick Jagger’s one-time girl friend).

Faithfull — who had a 1965 hit with the Jagger-Richard “As Tears Go By,” fell into heroin addiction, put on a few stone, dropped her voice an octave and reemerged as a Dietrichy chanteuse (all in all, an exemplary pop-icon career) — appears twice in “Ab Fab”: once as God, in “The Last Shout,” and in the new season as an angel fighting over Eddy’s soul with the Devil, played by a horned Anita Pallenberg (who endured her own drug problems and, not to be outdone by Faithfull, had affairs with three of the Rolling Stones). Patsy herself used to date Keith Moon, late of The Who. Well, not date, exactly: “I woke up underneath him in a hotel bedroom once.” But no wonder Eddy and Pats are nostalgic for the 60s; it was such an amusingly self-destructive period. As Patsy asks scornfully, “Who dies in their own vomit today?” Eddy shouts, “Nobody!”

Many relics of the Profumo-Beatles-Carnaby Street years have done guest stints on “Ab Fab.” Twiggy, still pert at 52, is one of Edina’s clients at the P.R. shop. Eleanor Bron, female lead in the Beatles’ “Help!”, played Patsy’s mother. Germaine Greer, a Cambridge grad who in the late 60s was writing “The Female Eunuch,” materialized as Eddy’s dream mother; her real one (TV comedy veteran June Whitfield) is very much alive, to Eddy’s eternal chagrin.

Other 60s survivors to appear include Britt Eklund (Mrs. Peter Sellers in the 60s), Kate O’Mara (TV and Hammer Films star, later of “The Persuaders,” “Dr. Who”), designer pop cutie Lulu (“Shout,” “To Sir With Love”), Zandra Rhodes (she opened her first store in 1969), slam-glam 60s model Annegret Tree, Profumo scandal wench Mandy Rice-Davies and Lady Penelope, the marionette from the 60s show “Thunderbirds” (which was the first-ever movie satirized on “Mystery Science Theater 3000”), with the voice of the original Penelope, Sylvia Anderson. Saunders and her team appreciate old wine, and old whine; so does her loyal British audience. For Americans, it’s fun to try remembering people we may never have heard of the first time around, and to imagine how ravishing they must have looked before time ran its fingers through their lives.

Indeed, for those on this side of the pond, the show has made London swinging again. As we did in the 60s — attempting to translate the dialect and identify the references to Strawberry Fields and Blackburn, Lancashire — we listen hard to the rapid-fire dialogue, check maps to find Holland Park (Edina’s neighborhood) and brag about the real-life models for characters: Eddy is supposedly based on P.R. queen Lynn Franks, and a new character this season, Katy Grin (played by Jane Horrocks, who also does Eddy’s idiot assistant Bubble), is a malicious twist on morning-show host Anthea Turner, the Kathy Lee Gifford of British TV. All in all, Saunders deserves an M.B.E. for her services in reviving the image of the hip Brit.

RANT

If “Ab Fab” were just a wallow in moldy mod, it wouldn’t appeal to the vogueistas of today. It surely does, because Saunders has artfully plumbed an even older, and even more vibrant, British tradition: the articulate ranter. In dramatic literature, this stretches from the inexhaustibly cunning and acerbic rhetoricians in Shaw’s plays to John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter in “Look Back in Anger” to the bitch-and-moan specialists in Dennis Potter’s TV plays (all hail to the ailing, wailing novelist in “The Singing Detective”).

In American culture, people kill each other with guns and knives and fists; the Brits do it with words, and they are marksmen at it; after all, they’ve been practicing much longer. Their trained eye finds a vulnerable spot in an opponent — a physical imperfection, a slow mind, a naive belief — and takes deadly aim. They share a mission and a manner with the excoriating preachers of old (Jonathan Swift was one) who used the art of homiletics to challenge and frighten their flocks. As Britain became secular, the role of scold devolved on writers and performers. Their job, as well as their pleasure, was to stoke the righteous hellfire.

So instead of mounting a pulpit each Sabbath, Jimmy Porter would sit and home, read the Sunday papers and roil at the world — the world and its women, all deplorable, all conspiring against him so that his invective was a form of defense — finally reducing his silently furious wife Alison to crying or shying a hot iron at him. Jimmy’s verbal sport was an exercise in sadism, since Alison was unable to play the insult game at his level, and a lonely job too: masturbation or forced verbal entry. His tongue was his dick, and both were to be employed not as tools of love but as weapons. Like Shaw’s John Tanner and Potter’s Philip Marlow, Jimmy was a member of the ruling sex who believed himself (s)mothered by women. Mostly, vitriol was a caustic for use by men only.

Saunders’ wit is an all-girl guerrilla band, fearless in hunting the enemy — though most of their enemies, like Jimmy Porter’s, are women: family, friends, rivals, selves. It’s masochistic to the extent that Edina and Patsy are ragging on people very much like themselves. The wounding wit of British ragers is often directed both outward and inward — this social hate is essentially self-hate — and they and their victims have the scars to prove it. But Saunders makes the game fair: she gives the tongue scalpel to all her characters.

Patsy and Saffy have enjoyed, if that’s the word, years of vigorous hand combat. Saffy tells her mum’s old friend, “Sleeping with you must be akin to necrophilia,” and Pats says of Saff, “She’s a virgin in a world where men will even turn to soft fruit for pleasure.” In this week’s episode, Patsy urges Eddy to try a new skin injection, Parralox (it’s Botox, only it paralyzes you). Pats has a nearly numb face from injecting herself, and Saff asks: “This your idea of avoiding death by embalming early?… You look like a haggis with pointed toes — a tight old bladder skin holding together some rotting old offal.”

Brit ranters must think it therapeutic: spitting out venom cleanses your system. Or perhaps it’s an art they practice because they’re so dreadfully good at it. The bayoneting badinage also has a military precision to it (both Saunders and Lumley come from RAF families); what was once done for the imposition of empire on the brown and yellow is now done for local sport. These word warriors are like decommissioned Khyber riflemen turned into fox hunters.

Only in “Ab Fab,” it’s women on the prowl. They squint and spit at everything they see in politics and culture. In the first new episode, Eddy vents against “the new PC flagless sexless OK anodyne milky-white British New Labor brand.” And on the trip to Paris she wonders, “Why do we have such crap when everything here is so nice? I mean, they dress their meat better than we dress ourselves…. When I die I want to be dressed by a French butcher.”

Occasionally, their prey is men. In “The Last Shout,” the long episode about Saffy’s near-marriage to a rich piece of Euro-minge, Eddy tells her daughter, “God, I hope your not inviting that bloody bollocky selfish two-faced chicken bastard pig-dog man, are you?” And Saff replies, “You could just say ‘Dad.'” The new series has a gag about Mick Jagger (he’s “a jumping old scrotum with lips”). But usually the girls are clawing at other cats, including the Rich and Famous. (Edina, in a new episode: “Yoko — that wall of hair!” Patsy: “You couldn’t tell where the pubes ended and the feet began.” Edina: “Sort of Yeti.”) And sometimes the R&F are allowed to strike back. Twiggy gets a little rant at Edina’s selfishness: “It’s always you-you-you. You orbit Planet You. You’re your own moon. You moon yourself.” (Eddy’s rival Claudia murmurs, “Not a sight I’d relish.”)

Edina gets it from all sides and at close range. Her mother, who only seems dithery, has an instinct for Eddy’s jugular. In an early episode, Eddy is ready to try another fad diet, announcing, “Inside of me, there’s a thin person screaming to get out,” and her mum gently asks, “Just the one, dear?” As for Patsy, even when she’s trying to caress her best friend, those acryllic talons get in the way. “You’ve been a fabulous mother,” Patsy tells Eddy in an early episode. “You’ve let them ruin your figure, your stomach’s stretched beyond recognition, you’ve got tits down to your knees — and what for, for God’s sake?”

SEX AND DRUGS

There’s a scene in “Broadcast News” where budding anchorman William Hurt has to go on the air with an emergency report and, with his producer Holly Hunter shouting questions through his earpiece, performs an impromptu job with urgent panache; after it’s over he tells Hunter that their collaboration under pressure “was like great sex.” Well, the badinage between Eddy and Saffy, or Patsy and anyone, is like great dirty sex.

Sex is ever on our heroines’ minds: Eddy because she doesn’t get much (though in next week’s episode she has a brief tryst with a gardener played by Crispin Bonham Carter), Patsy because, however much she’s had, she can’t get enough of it. In a new episode, she shrugs off her latest conquest: “Oh, he was just a windscreen washer I picked up at the traffic light. Buns so tight he was bouncing off the walls.” Perhaps Patsy is so sympathetic to men because she was once was one. She had a sex-change operation in Morocco and was a man for a year, “But it fell off.” (Being a female female impersonator is just part of Patsy’s aura as a gay icon. This season Saffy wries a play about her home life, and the Patsy character is played by a man. When she and Edina visit New York City, she runs into three drag queens and is greeted as one of them. In a real Manhattan gay bar there was an all-guy Patsy and Edina lookalike contest.)

Such is the sex in the city for a single girl, even one whom catty observers would say is a tad past her prime. Eddy, exercising to get herself in shape for sex with the randy gardener, complains, “I just don’t think I have any pelvic floor muscles.” When Patsy sniffs through her nimbus of cigarette haze, Eddy says, “You haven’t had kids. I’ve had two heads through mine.” Patsy notes that “Mine’s more a one-way system. I can still blow smoke rings through mine.” Eddy shoots her a look and asks, “Are you doing it now?” “Oh yeah!”

One cannot, alas, live in a state of perpetual orgasm, but one — two — can be blotto most of the time. Patsy and Eddy are champagne socialists (or, as Eddy’s mother says, “Bolly bolsheviks”), but the drugs are more important than the doctrine. Patsy knows the secret of getting people to show up at whatever social event you’re planning: “It’s cocaine. Lines inside mean lines outside.” She’s done so many that her way of saying things are good is “The world is your toilet seat.”

FADS, FASHION AND FAT

Though she spends most of her time in the living room and basement kitchen of her home, Edina is a working mother. At first, Saffy wasn’t quite sure what she did, and her mum exploded: “P.R.! I P.R. things, people, places, concepts… Lulu! I P.R. them…. I make things fabulous. I make the crap into credible, I make the dull into…delicious.” It’s instructive to see Edina in her work mode: planning Saffy’s wedding, she rattles off instructions to her new assistant Catronia: “I want you to book Clifton — the whole hotel for the whole weekend. I want OK and Hello Magazine pit-bulling for that front cover. I want limos so long they’ve got stretch marks, and for flowers, just now the Netherlands. No expense spared!” One has to wonder how successful Eddy might have been if only she’d given her job as much energy as she does to screwing up her and her daughter’s lives.

In a famous early speech, she crows manically at having lured the privileged to her charity fashion show (read this very fast): “Everybody’s there, everybody. Big names, y’ know: Chanel, Dior, Lagerfeld, Givenchy, Gaultier, darling. Names, names, names. Every rich bitch from New York is in there: Hochvanden, Ruchenstein, Vanderbilt, Rothschild, Hookenfookenbergen, Datsun, Rottweiler.” (“A whole row of skeletons with Jackie O hairdos,” Patsy interposes.) “Harper’s, Tattler, English Vogue, American Vogue, French Vogue, bloody-Aby-bloody-ssinian-bloody Vogue, darling…. I’m going down in history as the woman that put Princess Anne in a Vivian Westwood basque.” By this season, though, when they are invited to a “Sponsored Celebrity Fun Run for Anyone Who Can’t Form a Scab,”Eddy and Pats have wearied of celebrity charity events. Says Patsy, “Every abnormal skin cell now has its own premiere.”

Edina is not just a fashion-setter; she is a slave to every fashion. In an early episode she machine-gunned these instructions to Bubble: “Cancel my aroma therapy, my psychotherapy, my reflexology; my osteopath, my homeopath, my naturopath; my crystal reading, my shiatsu, my organic hairdesser — and see if I can be rebirthed next Thursday afternoon.” Eddy claims to be a Buddhist: when she dies, she says, “I want to be lain out on a rock in the middle of the Ganges, darling, and then just pecked by birds.” She goes to see rock bands who weren’t born when she was a mother. This season she and Pats return from a Marilyn Manson concert wearing Bigger Than Satan T shirts, but Eddy also sports a few bruises; as Patsy notes, “She tried to crowd surf and the tide went out.”

The biggest fad — and so enduring that it passes beyond obsession into religion — is dieting. It happens that Jennifer Saunders is a handsome woman with a figure that would be admirable at any time in history but the past half-century, since Audrey Hepburn vied with Marilyn Monroe for the thinking man’s 50s pinup, and then Twiggy helped turn anorexia into a fashion statement. I suspect that, to morph into Eddy, the actress puts on a few pounds and some ill-fitting, wackily colored designer clothes before each season’s taping. Wearing too-tight couture is the trick. In an scene where Eddy browses in a Christian Lacroix showroom, the shopgirl tells her, “We don’t have that in your size.” “I don’t need my size,” Eddy retorts, “I don’t WEAR my size.” For her, humiliation at exorbitant prices is a fashion statement of both exhibitionism and self-loathing.

In the cycle of self-abuse, constant eating chases the tail of constant dieting. In this week’s opening episode, Eddy vows to lose it and and then some. “In three weeks I want to be on the cusp of organ failure… I want my bosy just to be, just to be a relief map of veins. O wanna be an X-ray with a pulse.” She tries elaborate stretching exercises so that “I’ll be able to kiss my own ass from both directions.” But starvation is driving her bats; an inner voice is gurgling. Patsy tells her (and who better than a best friend?), “Eddie, y’ know, your stomach’s like a dog that doesn’t know when it’s gonna be fed next, so it just hangs around till you want to kick it.” Toward the end she finds a temporary solution: admit that she’s fat and “get a body double for life.”

MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

In “Modern Mother and Daughter,” the skit that started it all, the “Ab Fab” theme is already underlined: the mother is the daughter (craving both sensation and attention) and the daughter is the mother. “Mother,” begs French as the college-bound girl, “would you please stop swearing!” (And turn the music down, and take your birth-control pills.) It’s the motif that drives “Ab Fab”; the adventures of Eddy and Pats are just the inspired chrome on the show’s chassis. Edina pouts, wheedles and sneaks booze and drug when Saffy’s not around. Saffy cooks for Eddy, tells her she’s late for an appointment and nags nags nags. Parental responsibilities, and what she sees as a lack of her mother’s love, have made Saff a dull girl in everything but what we might call mother wit.

In the Eddy’s cramped and sodden heart, she feels unloved: a donkey to Patsy’s race horse, bullied by her friends, censured by Saffy, outcareered by her rival Claudia Bing. And it’s partly because she her parents ignored her misunderstood her dreams and fed her lard at meals. Alas, Mum is still around to remind Eddy of her failure as a daughter (both when she was a kid and now, when she’s Saffy’s charge) and to make airily snide remarks. After one of these, Eddy says to Saff, “Now you know why I have to take it out on you, darling.” But she’s planning her revenge. “Don’t think you’re so clever,” she tells her mum. “I’ve started Repressed False Memory therapy — I’ll get something on you yet!”

In the new season, we can spot vagrant mellowing in Edina and Saffy (or in Saunders). A Paris excursion warms feelings up for a moment — until Eddy betrays her daughter atop the Eiffel Tower — and there’s an “awwww” moment, involving a kitten, at the end of the fifth episode, a wonderful show about an autobiographical play Saffy has written (“Self-Raising Flower”). Now that Saffy is in her mid-20s and Edina is approaching menopause, the two have become more like bickering sisters. (Saunders, 43, is actually closer in age to Sawalha, 33, than to Lumley, 55.)

In seasons to come — and we thrill to hear that Saunders is planning more “Ab Fab” — the relationships are likely to mature even if the characters are destined to remain as they are. With brilliant writing and ferociously precise acting, the show can’t get much better. But even if it were to stay on this exalted level, it would be absolutely…well, you know.