The brilliant mind behind the success of Absolutely Fabulous (aka Ab Fab), Jennifer Saunders has this to say about the two lead characters, Edina Monsoon (played by Saunders) and Patsy Stone (played by Joanna Lumley - who credits the Ab Fab show with salvaging her life):
Edina lives through Patsy, you see. Patsy does all these things. Edina probably never did the hard drugs even. But Patsy did.
This is an excellent summation of the Ab Fab phenomena, as one would expect from the person most responsible for its existence. Absolutely Fabulous started as a skit on the show French and Saunders, with Saunders playing Edina and her business partner Dawn French playing her daughter Saffron (Saffy). From this relatively humble beginning we were blessed with the wildly irreverent spoof of two women trapped in an anachronistic semi-counter-culture world where Edina's fashion and retail schemes somehow make money. Money that Patsy needs to maintain her rather raunchy, cocaine and alcoholic existence.
A world also populated by Edina's mother, her daugther who is engaged in a running battle with her sworn enemy Patsy, who sees Saffron as a threat to her lifestyle; two ex-husbands and their lovers, a son who avoids Edina like the plague, a son that she prefers to Saffron, a wonderfully kookie office assistance named Bubble and an assortment of other slightly less than normal characters among them are Edina's competitors, clients, occasional lovers, quasi-friends from Edina's hippy past and every kind of odd personality that the Saunders genius can produce.
The show is not your standard bit of humor by any means, as Edina and Patsy travel around the world from New York to Marrakesh creating mayhem and passing out from drink and weed.
In its own peculiar way it is today's version of Lucy and Ethel, with a lot more sweetie darling talk. Yeah babe Absolutely Fabulous may not be Shakespeare or Chaucer but it damn funny
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