The first episode of Absolutely Fabulous, Jennifer Saunders’s sitcom about a hedonistic PR guru and her stick-in-the-mud daughter, went out on BBC2 in November 1992. The timing for a show about women behaving badly (and refusing to take into account how this would make men feel) could not have been better. The punk-feminist riot grrrl movement was well under way. In March, P J Harvey had released her debut album, Dry; Elvis Costello observed primly that all her songs seemed to be “about blood and fucking”. Madonna had published Sex, a coffee-table book for the bedroom featuring images of the singer hitchhiking in the nude, and being seen without embarrassment alongside Vanilla Ice.
Preceding Absolutely Fabulous by a month was Sinéad O’Connor’s appearance on the US TV show Saturday Night Live, during which she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II to protest against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. In 1990 Frank Sinatra had threatened to “kick her ass” when she refused to have the American national anthem played before one of her shows. The Goodfellas actor Joe Pesci turned up on SNL a week after O’Connor with the pope’s picture taped back together. “If it was my show, I would have gave her such a smack,” he said, miming a whack with the back of his hand. The audience applauded wildly.
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