Joanna Lumley's plea to her agent after tense scene with co-star Jennifer Saunders

Joanna Lumley has revealed the desperate phone call she made to her agent during the pilot episode of Absolutely Fabulous.

Patsy Stone was a career-defining role for Joanna Lumley - but Joanna, 78, nearly quit the show before it even got started.

Writing in the Daily Mail's Weekend supplement, Vicki Power revealed that during the making of the pilot episode in 1991, Joanna was unnerved and unhappy acting opposite Jennifer Saunders, who created the show and starred alongside her as Edina Monsoon.

In her interview with Vicki, Joanna said: "As there was no description of what Patsy was like in the script, I didn’t know. And because Jennifer was not at her most communicative in those days, she gave me no hint, except she looked sadder and crosser at every word I uttered.

"I thought, “This is a dead loss.” I didn’t know what she wanted. I rang my agent and said, 'I don’t think Jennifer wants me, but she’s too polite to say anything. Do you think you can get me out of this?' My agent said, 'It’s a pilot. Just do it. It might not take off.' So I nearly wasn’t Patsy!"

But Jennifer and Joanna would become great friends during their time as co-stars, despite a shaky start.

Joanna Lumley has previously revealed said Jennifer planned to kill off their Absolutely Fabulous characters until she intervened to stop her.

Speaking to My Weekly, Joanna recalled how Jennifer wrote to her and asked, “Shall we just kill them off and bury them?” in reference to Patsy and Eddie’s fate.

“I wrote back the fastest email return I’ve ever written. I said, ‘No, we’ve promised the world we will never die!’” she said. “‘And to be honest, if all that vodka and champagne they’ve necked over the years hasn’t done the job, then why on earth would their creator be able to do it?’"

Elsewhere in the interview, Lumley recalled filming episodes of the TV series that included flash forwards of their characters in old age.

“We had all kinds of prosthetics made to make us look really old,” she said. “Scraggly necks and bald caps under very thinning hair, awful hands, badly fitting false teeth, little humps on our backs and our bosoms looked like empty sandbags.”

“We could hardly walk because we were laughing so much. We went out on location dressed like that. We drove there in a bus with the crew and the make-up people. Jennifer and I were sat near the front and I was by the window.

“We stopped at a traffic light and an open-topped car pulled up next to us. I grinned at the man who was driving and I heard him say to the woman who was sitting next to him, ‘Oh look, it’s Joanna Lumley!’ It was so funny.”