Bring back Samantha! Can Sex and the City work without its greatest character?

Name: Samantha.

Age: 64. Not your 64. Hollywood 64. Call it 48.

Appearance: No.

What do you mean “no”? She’s not appearing.

In what? Also, who’s Samantha? O tempora! O mores! How quickly we forget and the cultural discourse moves on.

That doesn’t help me. There was a time when it would no more need explaining who “Samantha” was than that the sky is blue or grass is green, such was the fame of Sex and the City and its quartet of fast-living, quick-loving and heavily brunching heroines.

Oh, them! Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha! There you go.

So, what has happened to her? Please can it be the wiping of her line “Lawrence of my labia” in the second SATC movie from the global digital record? Alas, it is not. Rather, it has been announced that SATC is to return in a series called And Just Like That… It will be 10 half-hour episodes following the gals as they adventure through life, love and more brunches in their 50s – but without Samantha.

They think there’s a show without Samantha? There’s not even a decent brunch without Samantha. Where’s all the angst-free sex and non-neurotic light relief going to come from? Whose stupid idea was this? Take it up with Kim Cattrall. The actor declined to return to her role.

Don’t tell me – she left a Post-it note on Carrie’s laptop screen saying: “I’m sorry – I can’t. Don’t hate me.” That would – pause to spit on the memory of Berger – have been excellent, but no. She simply refused (apparently repeated) attempts to bring her back to the fold.

I assume the long-rumoured animosity between Cattrall and her co-star Sarah Jessica Parker is behind this decision. Or is it just the fear of being made to say something like “Lawrence of my labia” again? Most people are assuming the former, although I’m sure they would have just as much sympathy for the latter. We might, incidentally, do away with the “long-rumoured”, thanks to Cattrall’s 2018 Instagram post, aimed at Parker, about “how cruel you really were then and now”.

Yowch. Quite.

I suppose she doesn’t need the money, either. Or the work. Cattrall has been probably the busiest of the SATC stars since the show ended, carving out a second-act career primarily in the UK on television and on stage, appearing in some prestigious stuff.

I still cannot help but wonder if it’s a doomed venture without her. It’s 2021. It matters not a jot either way.

Do say: “I look forward to as complex, fresh, funny and fearless an examination of the sixth decade of womanhood as the original SatC provided for the fourth.”

Don’t say: “Sponsored by Vagisil.”