Absolutely Fabulous: The movie - bolly good show!

The jokes spring out at you from our crumpled old friends, sharp and fresh and pleasingly tasteless.

'Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie': Review

"All I ever wanted was not to be fat and old!" cries PR guru and bad gran Edina Monsoon, bewailing the time when "the zeitgeist used to run right through me". As her best friend Patsy injects herself with Botox, flips through Tinder and quaffs Chanel No 5 because they've run out of Bolly, it's clear that writer/star Jennifer Saunders hasn't lost her touch over the quarter century since these characters were first conceived for TV.

Absolutely Fabulous review

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is ridiculous, riotous and a bit of a mess but Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley save the day and raise our spirits when we need them the most.

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie - wearing its yeas well

The plotting is lazy, but this big-screen reboot of the much-loved sitcom gets by thanks to its stars and to the endless goodwill cameos.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's sitcom rewarded those who made it past a challenging premise (the protagonists live in a condemned hospital as property guardians) with dark LOLs as middle-class jobs met sub-student lifestyles, and Kathy Burke as you've never seen her before. The whole series is available to watch now on All4.

Kathy Burke hits back at 'small fry mugger'

Kathy Burke has hit out at a "small fry mugger", who set upon her in the street.

Kathy Burke is back as Magda in Ab Fab movie

It looks like Magda, Patsy Stone's Cockney-accented editor, will be making an appearance in the upcoming Absolutely Fabulous movie.

Brian Pern: A Life in Rock was very funny indeed, and featured great cameos from, among others, Martin Freeman, Kathy Burke and Tim Rice. It's splenetic, hilarious and just wrong. Can there be yet another urgent need to send up the pomp of the prog-rock years when it has already been spoofed so sublimely by Spinal Tap, and The Comic Strip's Bad News Tour?

Simon Day is behind this, and very good he is too, and you should watch it if you haven't watched any other satire on 70s musical vainglory. But if you have, you'll simply be asking yourself: why?

Anybody who saw the faux documentary presented by Brian Pern (Simon Day) on BBC4 knows that the frontman of Genesis-esque prog rock band Thotch is a great comedy creation.

Director Rhys Thomas, who co-wrote the series along with Day, brilliantly portrays the life of an ageing rocker as he tries to keep himself relevant with a modern audience. The stories of Pern refusing to be in a room with his former bandmates (played brilliantly by Paul Whitehouse and Nigel Havers) were perfectly pitched. The creation of a Thotch jukebox musical was an equally enjoyable subplot especially when the show's director Kathy Burke decided to cut all of the overly long Thotch songs from the show.

I personally enjoyed the final few moments of the comedy as Pern was dragged into the police station in a manner that would suggest he was part of a Yewtree-type investigation. But the punchline itself was brilliantly delivered as was the reaction from Pern's manager John Farrow (Michael Kitchen).

Part of the charm of Brian Pern is the fact that everyone is willing to go that extra mile and, in the case of those playing themselves, send up certain elements of their characters. Martin Freeman is a prime example of this as he tries to capture Pern's mannerisms in order to correctly portray him in the musical.

Meanwhile, a cameoing Tim Rice perfectly sums up his feelings about the Jukebox musical and how they've taken away from his type of musical theatre.

Although some of the jokes don't hit the mark, Brian Pern: A Life in Rock is a perfectly constructed mockumentary that owes a massive debt to the work of Christopher Guest. The fact that the sitcom is only three parts means that it won't outstay it's welcome and at the same time will leave the audience craving for more from Day's egotistical prog rocker.

Brian Pern: a Life in Rock, BBC2 - TV review

Brian Pern: a Life in Rock (BBC Two) also had the feel of a reunion, or perhaps the office Christmas party for British comedy's hardest workers - Martin Freeman, Jack Whitehall, Kathy Burke, Paul Whitehouse and Phil Cornwell all popped up in various roles.