British actress/writer/comedian Jennifer Saunders says that some twenty years after starting to write the screenplay, she has finally finished writing the movie version of  her classic BBC television series Absolutely Fabulous. Saunders said, “I’ve finished the first draft. I’m feeling euphoric. My proper New Year’s resolution is to do the film, otherwise it’ll be a pointless year of procrastination.”

For those not in the know, Absolutely Fabulous (or AbFab for short) was a BBC sitcom about an aging hipster-turned-PR agent named Edina Monsoon, played by Saunders, and her best friend Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) who gleefully continue to get drunk and stoned and chase the latest trends (and younger men) well into their forties and beyond. The main cast was rounded out by Julia Sawalha, who played Edina’s disappointingly conservative daughter Saffy, and June Whitfield who played Edina’s perpetually clueless mum.

The series originally aired for three seasons on BBC from 1992-95, was revived for a fourth season in 2001, and then aired a fifth in 2004. For the show’s twentieth anniversary in 2012, Saunders and Lumley teamed up again for a couple of special episodes. Episodes of the series aired in the United States first on Comedy Central, and now air on Logo, the cable network aimed at an LGBT audience (AbFab has always had a very gay sensibility and the LGBT audience has kept the cult of Absolutely Fabulous alive for years). Now it seems that plans for the big screen version, which had been rumored for years, are finally coming to fruition in 2015.

So just what would the AbFab movie be about? Saunders joked that she would like to see “Angelina Jolie replacing Lumley as Patsy and an orangutan playing her part.” But earlier rumors have suggested that the movie would begin with Edina and Patsy waking up hungover in the empty drifting yacht of an oligarch in the middle of the ocean, with no cell phone signal and no idea how they got there. Yup, sounds about right to me.

[HT: Daily Mirror]