The best TV episodes are often the ones with a scene or line you cannot stop referencing. Well. The Absolutely Fabulous episode, “Poor” (season 2, ep 5) is pretty much non-stop things of that nature. It’s from 1994 and should feel dated but it is truth on a level few things are. Rather than attempt to explain it, I will simply go through the items in question:
-“Haven’t Harrods been yet?” A plot point driving the episode is that Edina and Patsy have no idea how grocery-shopping works. All they know as a humble alternative to dining at chic restaurants is getting groceries delivered from an upscale department store. Which, look, they are not wrong. While I don’t know what’s up with Harrods food halls specifically, I do know that (cue “Fiddler”) if I had all the money in the world, I would shop that way, and indeed, even with not that situation, I still try to make the occasional trip to Eataly, which is as close as Toronto has to that sort of thing. (The Pusateri’s food hall, if it’s even still there, is technically in the basement of a department store, but is nothing special.) The best objectively are in Tokyo but if I had to pick one for life it would be the Bon Marché in Paris. The store itself is lovely as well but the food hall is perfection. It is a crime against humanity that I’m not there right now. Point being, Patsy and Eddy are entirely correct in believing the good life means never going to a regular supermarket.
-Edina asks her accountant, “Am I… poor?” and sort of spits the word out, horrified. I always misremember the line as, “Are we poor?,” because Patsy is very much implicated here, living off Edina, who is herself, we learn, living off alimony from two ex-husbands, all the while playing at having various glamorous businesses. (The accountant uses scare quotes with his hands in reference to Edina’s “shop,” and says something like, “We were wondering about that in the office.”)
-The accountant makes Edina go through her list of expenses. It’s every trendy specialist known to man, plus a barely euphemized cocaine dealer, plus nose-hair plucking, which she adamantly defends as a legitimate business expense. (She’s in PR, sort of.)
-Upon arrival at the regular supermarket, which unsurprisingly looks very like a dingy North American supermarket, Patsy and Edina have no idea what awaits them. Edina looks in vain for the greeter, assuming that one is welcomed into a supermarket as to an upscale department store. But Patsy! Patsy is all business, taking a shopping cart… but instead of the one, the whole line of interconnected carts, which she assumes are the cart, some sort of shopping cart stretch limousine. It is impossible to see the man at No Frills whose job is bringing the carts back into the store from the parking lot, pushing all the connected carts, and not think of Patsy.
-At the checkout, with the entire contents of the supermarket in multiple carts, plus some stolen champagne, and Edina says, all folksy, to the cashier, of herself, “Working mum!”
-Edina serving as her own defense lawyer at the trial for all the many kinds of recklessness she and Patsy got up to en route to and from the supermarket. (Terrible driving and road rage, culminating in parking on the sidewalk in front of a preferred high-end department store, for a spot of post-supermarket shopping, the budget by that point drunkenly forgotten. They return and see the clamps police had put on the tires and try to remember if those were just part of the car’s design. Maybe that should have been its own item…) Edina really holds forth, praising “the Continent” where, she claims, behavior like hers and Patsy’s that afternoon would be normal, and asking, as if this would help her case, “Why oh why do we pay taxes?”