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After a six-year break the outrageous Britcom Absolutely Fabulous is back with a new six-part series. The "Donkey" episode airing on the Comedy Channel on Monday, December 3 at 9 pm ET (and many repeats thereafter) features the two outrageous Stones molls, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg in their symbolic roles as, respectively, God and the Devil. The idea for the episode came about during a casual conversation between one of the show’s creators, Jennifer Saunders, who plays Edina, and Joanna Lumley who plays Patsy. Marianne Faithfull, who played God in an earlier Ab Fab episode, tells us the plot of the opera so far:
Faithfull: One day Joanna Lumley happened to mention to Jennifer Saunders that she’d heard that at racing stables they always put a donkey in with a race horse as a friend—to keep it cool and Jennifer took this image and applied it to Edina. She wrote it up into a story where Edina decides she's the donkey and Patsy is the racehorse—you actually see Edina in the show with donkey ears. After coming to this realization, Edina decides she's got to lose weight and goes to a very expensive clinic where she is put on drugs to lose weight. In the grip of starvation Edina starts having hallucinations and this is where God enters—that's me—singing "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan." (I changed the lyrics for the occasion from "at the age of thirty-seven" in the original to "forty-seven.") As God, I'm very serene and very saintly and then suddenly there's this fiendish laugh and a puff of smoke and guess who appears? Anita with ten-inch long nails like Kabuki theater, dressed as the Black Queen [the role she played in Barbarella]. The Anita Devil challenges me: "These diets you keep putting them on, why do you do keep doing that?" And God answers, "In the land of self-hatred, the Barbie doll reigns supreme." Then the Devil says, "Ah, self-hatred, I gave them that." They have a bit of a set-to, God and the Devil, and the Devil claims, "Ah, yes, Patsy, she's one of mine." Edina is just floating on the matt-moss having this dream the whole time. And then we get bored and walk off in the distance, God and the Devil, and say, "Shall we have a drink, then?"
Dalton: How did this dynamic duo come about?
Faithfull: Anita and I were on Ruby Wax’s talk show and we were a bit cruel to her, I’m afraid. Anita, as you know, can be quite daunting. And unintentionally grand. She’ll come out with a line like, "I went in Brian's silver Gray Ghost Rolls Royce to pick him up at the airport in Milan wearing my red fox fur." Ruby, who’d been a plain fat little girl in the sixties, was blown away by this opulent life-style. "You must’ve been so glamorous and beautiful…" she coos to Anita, trying to draw her out and, of course, instead, hits the Pallenberg brick wall: "Yeah, it's true we were. Next question." What she got out of us was the true glory of the sixties—aside from all those recorded masterpieces, of course—Anita and I getting dressed up to go to the studio, chatting, gossiping in the royal manner. And that's how Ruby came to see that Anita and I are this fabulous double act. Anita thinks we should go on the road with it. Perhaps, in a few years. Ruby is a friend of Jennifer’s and the next thing I know, Jennifer and Ruby show up at my Weimar Cabaret at the Jazz Cafe in Camden Town in London—this was six years ago. They came backstage and they stood there and said, "How about it then?" I said, "I'll do it but only if you write me a real part that is not me." Jennifer looked at Ruby and there was a beat and then she said, "Okay, well we sort of have. Would God do?" And I said, "Okay." That was the first one where I did God. The second one I just did with La Pallenberg as the Devil where Anita delivers the line, done in inimitable La Pallenberg fashion, "Well, you know in China they put out girl babies overnight to die as a matter of course. Put them in the dustbins." Really cruel TV. Jennifer had to fight like a demon with the BBC to keep that line in. The new series is much more intelligent, radical, and out there. It would be silly to say that Jennifer and Dawn [French, the show’s co-creator] remind me of Terry Southern but they’re similar in their way of taking things further than anyone else would.
Dalton: How did Anita come to play the Devil?
Faithfull: Jennifer said, "God was good, but we need the Devil, too, because just God is really boring." Jennifer is a huge Barbarella fan. Anita as the Black Queen is one of her favorite roles. And Anita is sort of dressed as the Black Queen in this episode. She has a tail and monkey skin like the Black Queen—or a BBC approximation thereof. This really made Anita furious because the BBC is not really up to Cinecittà [where Barbarella was filmed]. Not quite up to standard. I had to keep hissing at Anita, "Put up with it! Put up with it! Please don't make a scene—we could do another one." And she got that, so she's pretty good I suppose. Lots of muttering. They made her wear a wig. If I'd had to wear everything she had to wear I would've died.
Pallenberg: I didn't have a costume at all really. I had a tuxedo and a t-shirt and a black wig with the horns on top and a little tail and gloves.
Dalton: Since you’re a designer yourself, I would have thought the BBC would’ve got you to design your own costume.
Pallenberg: There wasn't any time and no money. No budget at all. I thought I was going to get some groovy clothes as well from it, but the BBC, well, you see…
Dalton: Anita, you haven’t done much acting in a very long time. How did you feel about it?
Pallenberg: No, this was one of my first. I enjoyed it. A lot of fun and games. But I was amazed at how many cameras there are on a TV set. You can't really hide there. It's not like when you do movies, you get a couple of angles. But there they are all around you and they come at the same time. Then they pick the best. Ten cameras. So it was a bit daunting, actually. I was used to being able to give my good side, you know.
Dalton: How did you feel about playing the Devil?
Pallenberg: On the set Marianne kept saying, "Oh, the Black Queen is back! It’s just like Barbarella!" And it did feel like the Black Queen really. A bit of a déjà-vu, actually. But it was the Devil in name only. Not a real Devil type of thing. A watered down comedy Devil.
Dalton: Let me ask you, Marianne, do you believe in God?
Faithfull: Not really. I believe God is in us. I'm a bit Alan-Wattsish that way. This Is It or whatever that book was called. We're little chips of God and some of us remember this and some of us don't. It's a great concept, though, you have to give them credit for that.
Dalton: Well, people will be thrilled at the idea of you two playing the roles you played or we imagined you played in the sixties. Marianne as an angelic innocent and you with a darker, more ferocious persona.
Pallenberg: I don't know why. Maybe it should have been the opposite. But acting is acting, you know.
Faithfull: Well, we’re stuck with those roles whether we like it or not. And I'm stuck with Anita and she’s stuck with me. We're like a pair of sixties salt and pepper shakers.
For other episodes check the Absolutely Fabulous link here.
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