That Old Feeling: Ab Fab Forever

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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."