So says Jennifer...

Jennifer Saunders says there won’t be another series of French & Saunders because of BBC budget cuts.

The pair last made a TV series in 2007 – but Saunders has ruled out a reunion because she says the corporation would no longer spend the money on making it look good.

She said: ‘When we first made the show there was a good budget. You could afford to make it look how you wanted it to look and you could do what you wanted.

‘Nowadays we wouldn’t have that and it wouldn’t look as good as the ones we’ve done before.’

It is not the first time she has made such comments... and even said the same thing before the 2007 series, complaining: ‘We could never make anything that looked so good now – we couldn’t afford the sets or the film stock.’

Speaking on Alan Carr’s Chatty Man show that airs tonight, Saunders also said that Absolutely Fabulous co-star Joanna Lumley was piling on the pressure to make a film version of the series.

She said: ‘She keeps going on about it. Why doesn’t she write it? I think she is trying to get more work out of me. I just feel we’re all too old.’

In 2011 Saunders said she was working on a movie script, in which Patsy and Edina wake up, hungover, on an oligarch’s yacht in the middle of the ocean, where they cannot get a mobile phone signal.

Published: 19 Apr 2013