Bolly, Stolly, sweetie, darling?

Good grief. I missed a significant cultural anniversary last weekend!

The first episode of Absolutely Fabulous, otherwise known as The Campest Programme Ever, appeared on our screens on 12th November 1992.

Happy 30th birthday, sweetie, darling!

Absolutely Fabulous -Patsy Stone best bits

Ab Fab - Wine Tasting

An inpiration.

An Icon

"I've looked forward to being older because you will have that many more miles covered. We mustn't be led into thinking getting old is bad. Growing old is good."

Sharing a birthday as she does with a bizarre mix of names such as Una Stubbs, the Duke of Wellington, Wes Anderson, Calamity Jane, Judy Collins, Romaine Brooks, Glenn Ford, Rita Coolidge, Danielle Darrieux, Bernard Butler, Shirley Horn and Ray Parker Jr. - the one-and-only Joanna Lumley is 75 years old today!

Model, dancer, Ken Barlow's girlfriend "Elaine Perkins " in Coronation Street, "Bond Girl" (in On Her Majesty's Secret Service), "Hammer Horror Girl" (in The Satanic Rites of Dracula), "Sapphire" in Sapphire & Steel, "Purdey" in The New Avengers, the former school friend turned high-class prostitute in Shirley Valentine, "Donna Sinclair" in Dr Willoughby...and, of course, "Patsy Stone" in Absolutely Fabulous - she's done it all!

Nowadays, she has cemented her "national treasure" stakes by not only standing up for the Gurkhas who were being denied British citizenship, but also by stepping into the well-trodden footsteps of Michael Palin, Simon Reeve, Michael Portillo and the rest with several TV series of travelogues (she's done Russia, the Caribbean, the Silk Route, Greece, Japan and India and we're currently watching her tour of Britain).

Naturally, we adore her.

All hail, Joanna Lamond Lumley OBE FRGS (born 1st May 1946)!

Read my tribute to her on her 70th - amd much more over at my other blog Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle.

Thanks to you

Gran: "You've got your grandmother's hips."
Edina: "Thanks to you. Thanks for all the chips and lard and potatoes and white bread and suet pudding covered in treacle I had to eat as a child. You know, the endless cups of sugary tea..."
Gran: "Mr Whippy."
Edina: "Biscuits and chips and meat fried in six inches of animal fat. Thanks to that!"
Gran: "Before we had the deep freeze."
Edina: "God, even then it was the same food, only colder. And do you know, darling, the real problems started, sweetie, because I wasn't even breast-fed."
Gran: "Don't be ridiculous, dear. It wasn't done in those days, Imagine me having that clamped to my breast."
Edina: "What you two don't seem to realise is that inside of me, inside of me, there's a thin person just screaming to get out."
Gran: "Just the one, dear?"

It's Mothers'Day Mothering Sunday again, dear reader!

Hope you sent a bouquet...

It's a mixer, Pats

This "Gay Xmas Eve", we must pay due tribute to one of the most influential of all British comedy performers and screenwriters, Miss Jennifer Saunders, who is sixty years old today!

Alongside the dearly departed Victoria Wood, "Our Jen" - whether in partnership with the wonderful Dawn French, the eternal Joanna Lumley, or whoever - has provided much of the quotable material that enriches our daily lives, such as:

• "We ARE those Lucky Bitches."
• "It's LaCroix, sweetie!"
• "You can have a Hubneub. That's Swedish for Hobnob."
• "It's a mixer, Pats, we have it with whisky."
• "Dry clean a t-shirt, I couldn't believe it - I should be dry cleaning her knickers next time."
• "What did the Krankies say to you? They said 'Fan-daby-dozy'."
• "Gorgeous, tasteful, little stylish little gorgeous things!"
• "Are you going to do the accent at all?"
• “The last mosquito that bit me had to book into the Betty Ford Clinic.”
• "Your mother sucks jelly babies in hell!"

...and so on...

We adore her.

Happy birthday, Jennifer Jane Saunders (born 6th July 1958)

S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G, we're shopping...

Some practical footwear...



A game for all the family...



Something inspirational...



And a little ornament for the garden...

Fuck it, jump for joy!

She's seventy years old, you know...

"I find it a great antidote... lipstick and mirrors and hairspray."

"You only have one go at life, which is thrilling. Only you can make yourself into who you want to be. Don't blame anybody else. You are entitled to free fresh air, and that's it. Do the rest yourself."

"I've never felt the constraints of social acceptability."

"If you haven't got taste, money doesn't matter: You'll always look ghastly."

"Getting older isn’t a sin. If you’re alive, you’ll get old. There is no point denying it. Fuck it, if you’ve done how much I’ve done, you are just jumping for joy when you hit my age!"

Joanna Lamond Lumley, OBE FRGS (born 1st May 1946)

The clever thing was to do it without being saucy

“I pity the young because I think it’s very different for them; and because they see all those reality shows and they think ‘I could have a go at that’ but it doesn’t work out that way.”

“I’m doing exactly the same as I’ve always done. It’s what’s around me that’s changed. I mean, Arthur Askey and Julian Clary, they’re not exactly the same. But the process is the same."

"I know I'm incredibly privileged to do something I love and to meet wonderful people. Acting keeps you moving and gives you a reason to get out of bed. It certainly stops you sitting down and feeling sorry for yourself, because you know there's something you've got to be doing and you've got to get on with it."

“I think the fact I’m still working is my proudest work achievement.”

“The three ages of man: youth, middle age and 'my word you do look well'.”

One of the last surviving members of the golden age of British radio and television comedy, the legendary June Whitfield CBE is ninety years old today.

In her long, long career she played alongside generations of the greatest and most popular British comedians including Roy Hudd, Julian Clary, Morecambe and Wise, Arthur Askey, Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, Benny Hill, Pat Coombs, Reg Varney, Peter Jones, Leslie Crowther, Ronnie Barker, Bob Monkhouse, Peter Butterworth, Dora Bryan, Richard Briers, Dick Emery, Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell (Steptoe & Son), as well as appearing in three Carry On films. With Terry Scott, first in Happy Ever After then Terry & June (both shows having viewing figures in their millions), she was among the top-rated performers in light entertainment television during the 1970s.

It is, however, for her remarkable "renaissance" as 'Gran' in Absolutely Fabulous that shamefully-not-yet-a-Dame-but-a-national-treasure-nonetheless June found a massive and avid new audience across the world. This much we know.

Her anecdotes about early 20th century theatrical life and her part in it, however, are perhaps less well-known:

In 1952 she was cast in a Noël Coward musical, Ace of Clubs, and found herself swept into a glamorous new life.

“After the show, we would go to the Café de Paris – I saw Bea Lillie, Liberace, Marlene Dietrich. And I adored Coward; I wanted to curtsey every time I saw him.

“His parties at his house in Gerald Road in Belgravia were star-studded. I remember he and Kay Thompson playing two pianos on a raised area – wonderful. And we would play 'The Game'. It’s like charades, you act out a book or a play without talking, but of course people would do saucier and saucier things, like 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover'. Although the clever thing was to do it without being saucy.”

While in a Coward show, “you became part of his family”, she recalled. When young June asked a few of the cast back to her house for drinks, 'The Master' requested an invitation. “My mother nearly died on the spot,” she says. “We didn’t get anything special for him though – we only had salads and cold meat, and wine and beer.”

I dare say 'The Master' wolfed it down...

As he did, we adore June Rosemary Whitfield CBE (born 11th November 1925).

Many happy returns, Ma'am!