Although Ab Fab was broad and brash, its message filtered down to female comics who would go on to change the post-millennial media landscape. Six years after Ab Fab’s heroines had begun to talk frankly about the fallout of sex and periods )and later menopause), Sex And The City rocked its way onto the small screen. The HBO series took a step backwards in its genuflection to chi-chi urban lifestyle fads, but it opened up a new seam of sexual openness between women.

Then came Girls (2012), whose creator Lena Dunham is on record stating: “Ab Fab was a hugely formative influence on me because I always say my favourite characters are ones where there’s this massive gap between how they view themselves and how the world views them. For me, Edina Monsoon was sort of the platonic ideal of that, and a starting-off point – seeing a woman on screen behaving madly and badly and tearing things up.”

Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey and Amy Poehler also took a leaf out of the Ab Fab playbook, In her memoir, Bossypants, Fey recalls a writer’s room moment when Jimmy Fallon recoiled at Poehler making an “unladylike” joke. “Stop that!” he said. “It’s not cute! I don’t like it!” To which Poehler crisply retorted: “I don’t fucking care if you like it.”

Growing up, Phoebe Waller-Bridge has said she was “obsessed” with Ab Fab. “That was the big TV thing that made a difference for me,” she said. “I was just like, ‘How are they doing that? They’re actually doing that.’ They were just hammered all the time! They were just doing exactly what they wanted to do. I hadn’t really seen it before.” Her Patsy and Edina epiphany gave her permission to write violent female-driven dramas like Killing Eve and vulnerable comedies like Fleabag.

So here’s to 30 years of Ab Fab. Not that the characters would want us to notice that so time has passed. And, as a trollied Patsy once observed: “Time is like a stretched elastic band. You can’t let it go or it’ll come back and take your eye out.” Whatever that means. The point is, we don’t have to care all that much. Cheers, sweetie!

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