LONDON — In the interim, Patsy has been promoted and Edina has gone even more bonkers. And as was true five years ago, Edina's daughter, Saffy, remains the sanest one of all.

        You guessed it, sweetie: Absolutely Fabulous, one of the defining British comedy shows of the last decade, is back.

        Comedy Central launches six new episodes starting at 9 p.m. today with Jennifer Saunders once again playing the frizzy-haired, eternally panicky Edina and Joanna Lumley returning as Patsy, Edina's sleek, chic and seriously loopy best friend.

        Expect lots of smoking and drinking and sharing notes on sex alongside a fearless comic assault on the facts of female aging. When these women are in full, take-no-prisoners flow, there's simply no such thing as a sacred cow.

        Does that mean that sin and decadence, perhaps, are in?

        “At the Ab Fab level,” says Ms. Lumley, “Patsy and Edina's brand of sin will always be in, because they exist on a different level — they're both as real and as unreal as possible.”

        This series, says Ms. Saunders, who also writes the show, is slightly less about drinking and cigarettes “because that's all a bit passe.”

        The program now, she believes, “is more about a life panic — about staying on top, keeping yourself together.”

        That was the order of the day when a reporter traveled to west London's BBC Television Center last summer to watch the women tape “Menopause,” the last of the six episodes. Fending off the advancing years fueled the comedy that particular show, presenting the leads as you've never seen them — and as the performers, some decades away from being geriatric, have never seen themselves.

        “I kept saying to the makeup artist, "We can do this with acting,' ” says Ms. Saunders, chuckling at the memory of the scene that catapults the women into an old age, the most debilitating kind, “though of course it's a makeup artist's dream to have you in a chair for seven hours when you can't move.” (Their day on that occasion began at 5 a.m.)

        Before long, the pair had been covered in fake teeth, fake hands, fake forehead, fake hair. “An eyeball,” says Ms. Saunders, “was the only real bit of us that eventually showed.”

        Later the two talked about why they resumed the series after a five-year break. It had started in 1992.

        “I hadn't done it for five years, and it just seemed there was some scope for it and that the world had changed — that there were enough other things to write about again,” says Ms. Saunders, who, at 43, is 12 years younger than Ms. Lumley.

        Those include Patsy's largely inexplicable rise to editorship of her magazine. (“She probably just changed the signs on the office doors,” laughs Ms. Lumley.)

        PR maven Edina risks the ruin of both her new production company and, far worse, of her own face, the latter courtesy of some Botox injections gone wrong.

        “If Edina is anything in this series, she's a desperate woman,” says Jon Plowman, the BBC's head of comedy entertainment. “Desperate for fame, desperate for celebrity and for being around celebrity.”

        “It's a funny word,” muses Ms. Saunders. “People used to be well-known or famous; now, they're just a celebrity. All there are now are celebrity magazines, with this kind of media frenzy about creating them that then feeds on itself. It's all very odd.”

        In the six new episodes — in England, a TV season is six shows, not 22 — Jane Horrocks doubles as the dimwitted Bubble, and as Katy, her fiercely ambitious cousin, a new character.

        “Katy was a conglomerate of all those kind of girlie TV presenters,” explains Ms. Saunders, referring to a particularly British species of talent. “They're so many; they just sort of hatch.”

        Will she and Ms. Lumley hatch further series of Ab Fab?

        “They're lots of ideas we didn't get to do,” says Ms. Saunders, aware that she might perhaps now prefer “to just write one,” possibly as a screenplay.

        Five years ago, says Ms. Lumley, “we were all sent to bed and put back in our boxes, so I can predict nothing with confidence.”

        What she will say is that “I give this one a big kiss and send it over (to the U.S.) for people to laugh and enjoy, because that's one of the escapes we have. We can escape into lunacy for a bit.”

        Football replay: Saturday's St. Xavier-Princeton football game from Paul Brown Stadium will be telecast on Time Warner's public access Channel 24 at 9 p.m. today in most of Hamilton County. The game was taped by Waycross Community Media, which serves Forest Park, Greenhills and Springfield Township.

        The Colerain-Elder playoff game will air at 11 a.m. Saturday on Time Warner public access Channel 24 in most communities — but not Colerain Township.

        Time Warner subscribers in Colerain Township do not receive public access programming because the township doesn't fund public access centers.

        John Kiesewetter contributed to this report.

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