Jennifer Saunders, left, as Edina and, Joanna Lumley as Patsy
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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.")