When the Pulitzer prize-winning author Jennifer Egan was interviewed recently, she noted: "When you try to write satire in America the reality catches up with you and takes over. By the time the book comes out it's already naturalism."
The same could be applied in Britain to the reprisal of that tour de force comedy and searing satire on the rise of the 90s media elite, Absolutely Fabulous. News that Jennifer Saunders is reviving the show for three episodes to mark its 20th anniversary next year could not be timelier. Two decades later, could the series seem any more prophetic?
Edina, the hard-boiled, label-hungry PR guru, and Patsy, her addiction-fuelled magazine editor sidekick, now look like prescient visions of the future. When they first emerged on screen they endeared through preposterousness. With their minute-long obsessions and faux-ethical bandwagons, the pair cascaded from one catastrophe to the next. Yet what was once recognisably absurd has become absurdly recognisable.
A preponderance of Ab Fab-type figures now clog the cultural landscape. It is almost as if there is nothing left to ironise. Simon Cowell, Mary Portas, the Beckhams, Gok Wan, Nigella Lawson and any number of Premier League footballers all come replete with their own free-floating relationship with comic cliche.
We are treated to tales that sound as if they were plucked straight from an Absolutely Fabulous storyboarding meeting. There's Alex James, the former coke-addled rock star who opened a cheese farm in his countryside pile. Here's Angelina Jolie, displaying her global awareness one adopted baby at a time.
There's Gwyneth Paltrow's commercial repositioning with a holistic self-help website. Sex and the City has built an entire franchise out of repeating Patsy's mantra: that nothing cannot be solved by the purchase of a fancy pair of shoes. The Financial Times's How To Spend It magazine has become a latter-day Ab Fab manual.
What started as a sly poke at ridiculous figures of fun has become a new aspirational model. Patsy's cries of "Bolly!" and "Lacroix!" in response to any impending crisis predated the late 90s snowballing of branding culture, from smart phones to handbags.
In order to make a new series of Absolutely Fabulous work, Jennifer Saunders is going to have to work extra hard when the country already provides her with a former PR as prime minister, his wife with a creative directorship of a luxury goods company and his sister-in-law on the masthead at Vogue. In 2011, Britain is led by a family whose prime motor skill is fabulising stuff, absolutely.
And TV itself is driven by an engine of all-consuming self-improvement. Good taste and ceaseless acquisition have become indivisible. In straitened economic times, the audience is even more captive than usual. Pimp your home, improve your dress sense, cook fancy food. Since you can't afford to leave your sofa, these opulent diversions from the hamster's wheel become more, not less exciting.
So the Ab Fab generation has come of age. It will be marvellous to see how Patsy, Edina and the rest of the cast have progressed since they last graced the screen. And it will be fascinating to observe how they cope with recession. "Austerity chic" was surely a gift catchphrase coined at the first script meeting.
Saunders may choose to refrain from making any implicit reference to recent comments made by Jane Horrocks – the actress who brought to life Edina's ditzy assistant, Bubble – in a case of life imitating art. Horrocks claimed that she'd named her north London mansion Tesco Towers, after paying for it with the proceeds of the numerous advertising campaigns she'd fronted for the supermarket goliath, then bemoaned the fact that it was "full of chavs". The tipping point from Absolutely Fabulous to absolutely fatuous is upon us. Ms Saunders's work may be cut out for her.