There is something very Eddy and Patsy about Absolutely Fabulous getting an in-depth, bells-and-whistles retrospective, not for its 25th or even 30th anniversaries, but for its … 32nd. Absolutely Fabulous: Inside Out is an indulgent treat for fans, bulging out of its Lacroix sample sizes with gossip, memories, outtakes and a warm, if too brief, cast reunion. If, like many of the talking heads here, you believe it to be one of the greatest British sitcoms of all time – and it is, obviously, particularly the first three series – then this is a fantastic and revelatory deep dive into who and what made it so special.
As regular listeners of the French and Saunders podcast Titting About will know, Dawn French took some time away from their double act in the early 1990s to raise her daughter, leaving Jennifer Saunders without her comedy partner and in need of a new project. Saunders admits that at that point, her writing experience had been limited to sketches. But one of those sketches, Modern Mother and Daughter, saw French playing a Saffy character, and Saunders the mother, then called Adriana. You can see how much of the show is there already. It only needed the addition of best friend and fashion editor Patsy – whom Joanna Lumley poetically refers to as a “succubus … like ivy, or one of those insects that feed off you” – to flesh it out. If a single sketch could be nine minutes long, Saunders reasons, you only needed to put two of them together to call it a sitcom.
