IT is regarded as one of Britain’s classic comedies, but Absolutely Fabulous creator and star, Jennifer Saunders, has said the series could now not be made - and it would likely not be alone.

AbFab?

The award-winning comedy first aired in 1992, starring Saunders as champagne-loving, weight-loss obsessed PR guru Edina Monsoon, with Joanna Lumley playing her chain-smoking friend Patsy Stone, who hid drugs in her beehive. It ran for six series and was turned into a movie in 2016.

It couldn’t be made now?

Now 62, the star told the audience at "An Evening with Jennifer Saunders" at The Garrick Theatre in London earlier this week that the world is now too sensitive for some of the storylines. In comments reported in The Sun, she said: "If someone says something it always has to be, ‘Oh, but sorry, you can’t say that’. I say, 'Oh f*** off. I think it has changed comedy like what we used to make.”

It’s not the first show to fall under the ‘sensitivity’ spotlight?

Just last year, Ricky Gervais, who created mockumentary The Office and starred in it as hapless manager, David Brent - who regularly insulted staff as he failed to get a grip on political correctness - said he felt the series would not be made today.

Due to “cancel culture?”

Gervais, 59, said The Office “would suffer because people would take things literally. There are these outrage mobs who take things out of context. This was a show about everything — it was about difference, it was about sex, race, all the things that people fear to even be discussed or talked about now, in case they say the wrong thing and they are cancelled”.

What about Basil?

John Cleese's iconic hotelier Basil Fawlty was the main character of the classic BBC sitcom, Fawlty Towers. A snob who is desperate to be a part of high society, Fawlty was regularly rude and insulting. Last year, amid a furore over UKTV initially ditching The Germans episode of the series which features racist language, Cleese, now 81, said: “One of the things I've learned in the last 180 years is that people have very different senses of humour. Some of them understand that if you put nonsense words into the mouth of someone you want to make fun of you're not broadcasting their views, you're making fun of them.”

Friends?

When Friends reached new generations of viewers upon its arrival on streaming platforms, ‘millennial’ audiences took issue with “outdated attitudes” in the US 1990s sitcom. David Schwimmer, who played Ross, defended his show to The Telegraph, saying it came from “a different time”, adding: “There was an innocence about it, before social media.”

As for AbFab?

It’s unlikely there will be more episodes. Saunders added: “I think people do talk themselves out of stuff now because everything is sensitive. It stops a lot of the fun, maybe, like jokes. I remember jokes. Silly jokes.”