How Absolutely Fabulous! Easily the funniest sitcom special of the Christmas season, Amandaland reunited Joanna Lumley with Jennifer Saunders and unlimited champagne. Heaven, darlings.
Dame Joanna told an audience at London’s South Bank last week that she strong-armed her co-star into accepting a guest role in the one-off, telling her: ‘Do it or I’ll have to kill you.’
It’s hardly surprising La Lumley, as world-weary grandmother Felicity, was so keen to have Jennifer play her younger sister, Joan. In a show crammed with laughs big enough to have you snorting sherry from your nose, ‘Flick’ had the very best and most outrageous gags.
Even playing Patsy in Ab Fab, she never landed a pay-off line quite as wicked as the one that closed this half-hour episode. After a storyline that hinted Sir Mick Jagger was the father of her daughter Amanda (Lucy Punch), Felicity admitted: ‘I did sleep with Mick once or twice, but not in the way you’d get pregnant.’
This perfectly constructed comedy playlet took the main characters out of London and catapulted them into a decrepit country pile outside Cirencester in the Cotswolds – the ancestral home of Amanda’s family. Turns out she’s not nouveau riche but proper old money, the kind that reeks of wet labradors and drives a 1970s Volvo estate.
Seated, left to right, Jennifer Saunders, Lucy Punch, Joanna Lumley and (behind) the cast of the Amandaland special
In one of the few duff lines, Amanda’s neighbour Mal (Samuel Anderson) surveyed the Georgian frontage and murmured: ‘Eat your heart out, Downton Abbey.’ In fact, the house was more Jilly Cooper than Lord Grantham. It would have been no surprise to see randy Rupert Campbell-Black chasing someone else’s wife around the tennis court.
Mal was acting as Amanda’s unwilling chauffeur, stopping on the journey west to collect not only her mum but her dowdy friend and unpaid PA, Anne – who was bereft at missing her own family Christmas after all flights to Dublin were cancelled. If Mal and Anne were impressed by the grandeur as they rolled up the drive, Felicity was dismissive: ‘It’s only 11 acres and a ha-ha.’
She wore the face of a woman determined to keep her promise by attending a family reunion and even more determined to hate every moment. Lumley, once known as an action-dolly in shows such as The New Avengers and Sapphire And Steel, surprised everyone when she revealed her exceptional comic timing as an actress in Ab Fab.
The undercurrents of darkness beneath the comedy in Amandaland suggest she could surprise us again if she tackled straight acting with a bleak edge – something like the dementia drama Goodbye June with Helen Mirren, now airing on Netflix.
With a withering glance at the ancient Christmas decorations on the lawn, Felicity hissed: ‘This is why I don’t go to therapy. Some memories are best repressed.’
At that point, enter Saunders. She flung open the front door, wearing a pearl necklace and a blood-drenched apron, like Mrs Sweeney Todd dressed for a dinner party. ‘Oh dear,’ she hooted. ‘You caught me mid-giblets!’ From that moment, Punch stepped back, almost taking a supporting role in her own show. The central joke of Amandaland is usually how appalling she is, how completely oblivious to other people’s feelings and how they perceive her.
But though she still had some well-timed laugh lines, and even the suggestion of frisson between her and Mal, she knew this was now the Jen and Jo double act.
What made it better still was the co-operation between the two grandes dames. This was not a duel and they were not in competition. It was easy to believe in them as a pair of sisters, once truly fond of each other but who, for complicated reasons, no longer get together very much – which is, perhaps, the impression these actresses give of their real-life relationship.
Absolutely Fabulous stars Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley reunite for the Christmas special
Samuel Anderson as Mal, the downstairs neighbour of titular character Amanda, portrayed by Lucy Punch
The ending had them seated on bales of hay in a stable, reminiscing about the traumas of being teenage debs. ‘Do you remember what they used to call us on that ghastly debutante circuit?’ said Joan. ‘Great Hair… and The Spare.’ Felicity couldn’t resist a chortle. ‘Actually, that’s rather good.’ Also rather good, and even older than the house, was a coarse joke stolen from Shakespeare. During a game of hide-and-seek, Anne was hiding behind the floor-length curtains when she gave herself away by breaking wind.
Joan flung back the drapes and declared: ‘Hoist with your own petard’ – a line from Hamlet, a play in which someone hides behind a curtain and ends up kebabed on the point of a sword.
There were countless other memorable touches – Joan scraping the top layer off the trout pate after a dog had licked it, Amanda’s children calling their grandmother GanGan and the whole family standing to sing God Save The King.
Cleverest joke of all was a piece of physical comedy from Punch, who was wearing leather trousers and a blouse with banner sleeves, like Jagger in his eyeliner era.
This get-up took on new significance when Mel and Anne were seen whispering in the hall after discovering a packet of old photos that appeared to show a young Felicity, heavily pregnant, in the arms of the Stones singer.
Surely Amanda couldn’t be Sir Mick’s love child? As they were debating whether to show her the prints, she summoned them to the dinner table by sliding across the stone floor, thrusting her pelvis to the side and clapping her hands over her head.
It became clear how much, with her big lips and wide mouth, she really does look like him.
The resemblance couldn’t have been more obvious if she’d demanded Satis-Fax-Shurn!
