Once again, those “wheels on fire” are ablaze, as the theme song threatens: Edina and Patsy, those designer-drenched Amazons battling midlife and middle-brow morality, are back in combat.
A fifth season of “Absolutely Fabulous,” with eight new episodes, returns at 8 p.m. Friday on cable’s Oxygen Network. There are a few minor changes. Edina (Jennifer Saunders, also the series’ writer), is now a celebrity publicist working from home, “cocooning,” as she calls it, still undone by her aptly named assistant, Bubble.
More ominously, daughter Saffy (short for “Saffron”) returns from her goodwill mission abroad sporting an African souvenir: She’s 25 weeks pregnant.
Might that not temper the materialism, indulgence and hedonism that make Edina and best chum Patsy (Joanna Lumley) the wicked witches of fashionista self-indulgence?
Thankfully, no. Grandmother is not in their vocabulary. “I shall have its tiny tongue removed if it even begins to form the `g’ word,” Edina snarls at her daughter. Then there’s the inevitable flash of skepticism that goody-goody Saffy could get pregnant in the first place: “Was it test tube or a drunken gay man?”
The U.S. and Britain may now be at war in Iraq, but the loopy ladies of Holland Park have lost none of their sting, dysfunction or self-congratulatory gall. They’re as unwholesome and politically off the deep end as ever.
Here’s former spice girl Emma Bunton, a guest in one episode, on Edina’s new spray-on tan: “You’re the color of an old man’s scrotum.” Edina, on explaining to Saffron why she installed a home spa: “The one at the gym is like a smoothie of old excretions.” Oscar nominee Kristin Scott Thomas shows up in one episode as Plum, a ditzy devotee of Conde Nast globetrotting, sprawled on the floor and briefly mistaken by Edina as “a bit of old sushi.” She’s there for the ladies’ somewhat oxymoronic book club. The first installment: A fanzine piece on Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Celebrities get their workout. “Is that Liza Minnelli next to a coconut?” Patsy asks, glancing at a magazine photo. “No, darling,” Edina notes. “That’s her husband.” “I love little Liza, she always hugs you,” sighs Patsy. “That’s not a hug,” Plum explains. “That’s how she makes it around the room.”
Patsy and Saffron, meanwhile, mince none of their epic enmity. “Oh, it kicked,” Saffron coos about the baby. “Of course it did,” replies Patsy, eyeing Saffron’s womb with ghastly horror. “Who wouldn’t?”
The performances of all the intrepid actresses of this piece remain unflagging and expert, though Lumley, whose Patsy always combines raucous slapstick with cool underplaying, is stretching here and there to preserve her one-of-a-kind acerbity. Still, with luridly painted looks and oddball strut, Patsy remains as daft and original as television caricature gets.
And where else would you laugh so loudly at the idiotic antics of a midget midwife, whose instructions for childbirth to Saffron amount to sticking a doll grotesquely through a pelvic skeleton and alternately shrieking, “Aaaaaaaaargh. More drugs. Aaaaaaaaaargh. More drugs.
“Still want to have the baby at home, dear?”
