What are these shows, in which veteran entertainers regale us with clips from their glorious careers, if not attempts to grasp one more round of applause – without having to generate any new material? The virtue of Ruby Wax’s contribution to the genre is that she’s disarmingly upfront about this. In a show about fame-hunger and the experience of celebrity, it feels very on point. Co-hosted with her longtime TV producer, Clive Tulloh, Absolutely Famous finds Wax talking us through clips from her BBC show When Ruby Wax Met …, on which she interviewed the 90s’ and early 00s’ most controversial individuals: OJ Simpson, Imelda Marcos and a certain New York businessman whose notoriety was at that stage (oh, innocent times!) still in its infancy.
There’s no point pretending we experience the shock of the new: Wax has already reflected on these interview experiences in a retrospective for the BBC. There’s no denying either that the footage, plus Wax’s insights, make for a very entertaining evening. Here she is talking (and acting out) sexual positions with Pamela Anderson, and here she is being read the rulebook by a steely Madonna. Marvel as Simpson mimes stabbing Wax with a knife, and peek through your fingers at her encounters with Donald Trump and Bill Cosby – whose loathing for their assertive female interviewer seethes across the screen.
“There haven’t been interviews before or since that were so revealing,” Tulloh opines at the start. That may be a stretch, but he and Wax are persuasive that the circumstances for When Ruby Wax Met … may never be repeated. Skilled at ingratiating herself, Wax was allotted half an hour with Marcos, and got four days. She interviewed Simpson for 17 hours non-stop. You don’t get access like that nowadays; nor do BBC expense budgets. And Wax’s combination of humour and charm, psychological perspicacity and chutzpah, remains a rarity. A second-act Q&A adds more detail, more clips and more celeb gossip from Wax’s life as a Girl on Top – which, like the show as a whole, is non-revelatory but always engaging.
