When Eddy and Patsy burst onto our screens 20 years ago, they changed television for good.

I remember falling off my sofa with hysterical laughter – for the first time a pair of strong women (albeit drunks, liars and appalling role models) ruled the roost. Before then, popular comedy always had men in leading roles (Fawlty Towers, The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin, Yes Minister, Blackadder, The Likely Lads, Porridge, Dad’s Army… the list is endless). In Absolutely Fabulous, though, men were completely redundant to the action. The central characters are a pair of middle-aged women so vile and excessive that no man in his right mind would have anything to do with them.

Eddy and Patsy are monsters with warped values and extraordinarily self-centred lives, a pair who’d rather be fashionable than anything else. Their binge-fuelled escapades allow them to live out our secret fantasies – they behave badly on our behalf, and sod everyone else. Children, mums, ex-husbands and secretaries are all nuisances and inconveniences. Normal moral values are completely turned upside-down. They swear, puke, trash the furniture and rarely eat. They would kill for an invite to a top party.

Girls On Top

I was working at the BBC as an executive when Ab Fab – as it became known by millions of devotees – was created and witnessed first hand how a collection of ideas and anecdotes gave birth to a hit show. A bit earlier, I’d produced a series with Ruby Wax, when she had the brilliant idea of filming a couple of sketches with Joanna Lumley, in which she broke into Joanna’s flat and discovered Joanna was a drunken sex fiend. I couldn’t believe that Joanna (who I’d met in the late Sixties when I was a junior fashion editor for a national newspaper and she was a top model and former Bond girl) would allow herself to be sent up like this. But she was brilliant.

Lynne Franks, on whom Eddy was loosely based, had worked with me on Petticoat, a teenage magazine, when I started out in journalism. Soon, Lynne left to start her own PR company and was hugely successful. Ruby, Lynne and I all hung out together in 1991, and one day we went to lunch in a Japanese restaurant near BBC Television Centre with Dawn French. That long boozy lunch, surely provided Jennifer and Dawn with loads of material as we competed with stories of our outrageous behaviour. Initially a sketch about Eddy and her daughter Saffy was aired in Dawn and Jennifer’s comedy series – it was this that grew into Ab Fab, with Joanna playing Patsy, the woman who never ate, smoked continuously and allegedly held down a top job as a fashion editor.

The genius of Ab Fab