That’s Absolutely Fabulous: Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders return for new series
Ubiquitous
Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders will return for a new series of
Absolutely Fabulous, the BBC has confirmed.
The pair will reprise their much loved roles as Patsy and Edina for a
three episode run of the hit show – the first new shows for six years.
Filming is scheduled to begin this summer although Miss Saunders has yet
to write the script.
‘In late August I start filming on three episodes of Absolutely
Fabulous, which we are all ecstatic about. Miss Saunders has been so
busy writing Uptown Downstairs Abbey for Comic Relief and also Spice
Girls: The Musical, I don't think she's started [the script],’ Miss
Lumley told Hello! magazine.
The Daily Mail revealed the show was set to return last November in an
interview with Miss Lumley.
‘Jen wrote to me and said, “Let's talk through it. What do you think?'.
And I said, 'Bring it on'. Because we're all still here. Mother's still
alive, the wonderful June Whitfield. Julia Sawalha [and] Jane Horrocks
[are] all still alive and available ... and I think we just have to do
it,' she said at the time.
'The great thing is that because ... we fast-forwarded to where they're
very old and nearly dead and practically plugged into vodka machines, it
doesn't matter how beyond [the original series] we do it,' she added.
Absolutely Fabulous was first broadcast in 1992 and ran for three series
and a two-part special until 1996. It returned for two more series and
another two specials between 2001 and 2004, with a Comic Relief edition
on BBC1 in 2005.
A BBC spokeswoman said: ‘We're putting the finishing touches to the deal
to bring it back.’
The final episode of the BBC show aired on Christmas Day in 2004 after
seven successful years, from 1992 to 1996 and then from 2001 to 2004.
Since then it has continued to be repeated on BBC2 and on satellite
channels. The series, affectionately nicknamed Ab Fab, followed the
lives of the fashion and fad-obsessed PR women who valued fame and
fortune over everything else in their lives – including their families.
They spent most of their time in Edina’s London home in swish Holland
Park, where her daughter Saffy, played by Julia Sawalha, and senile
mother, played by June Whitfield, would berate them for their childish
and outrageous behaviour.
A revival of the globally successful sitcom would mark a
much-anticipated return for Miss Saunders, 52, who has spent the past
year undergoing treatment for breast cancer.
Her husband, comic actor Adrian Edmondson, told the Daily Mail last
month that she was still being treated for the disease.
He said: ‘No one gets the all-clear. The treatment lasts five years and
we’re only a year into it.
‘The big chemotherapy’s finished and the radiotherapy’s finished.
There’s this low-level treatment that carries on for five years, but you
know from the beginning of the treatment when it’s going to stop.
‘So, there is no battle. I hate the word battle. You just get battered
with a load of drugs.
People want the words “trauma”, “battle” and “ life-changing”, but it’s
not a great three-part TV drama full of moments, it’s a long grind, like
a slow car crash that will last five years and then, hopefully, we’ll
get out.'
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