To the viewers it was Absolutely Fabulous, a television sitcom about Edina, Patsy and their new age antics; to Josh Howie it was Absolutely Real – he is the son of Lynne Franks, the PR guru who inspired the Edina character played by Jennifer Saunders.

Now Howie, a stand-up comedian, has described what life was like growing up in the world of Ab Fab.

He claims he had to convert to Buddhism while still at primary school and to chant whenever he wanted something.

At 16, he lived with North American Indians and was renamed “Blackhawk” by his mother. At another point, Franks, who was going through a hip-hop phase, convinced her son he was black. He was then treated by a “psychic therapist” to rid him of this misconception.

He also claims that at 18 he was made to join his mother and a “midwife” in a spa bath, all of them naked, for a “rebirthing” ritual.

Howie recalled last week: “It [Absolutely Fabulous] was quite painful to watch. This was her [my mother’s] life. It was like watching a documentary.”

Even the kitchen was the same, said Howie, whose experiences form the basis of a stand-up show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

According to Howie, his mother’s London mansion was permanently populated with eccentric characters, new age hangers-on and celebrities. Visitors included the fashion designers Jasper Conran, Jean Paul Gaultier, Donna Karan and Katharine Hamnett.

Ruby Wax, Lenny Henry, Sinead O’Connor and Sting were also among the guests who joined Franks in her “chanting room”.

Howie, 32, compares himself to Saffy, Edina’s strait-laced daughter, played by Julia Sawalha in the BBC sitcom.

“I was very cynical, always dissing the hippies hanging around and just being a grumpy teenager,” he said. “Mum and Jessica [Howie’s sister] would be off at Grateful Dead concerts doing their thing and I was the voice of reason.

“My grandma is just like the June Whitfield character, very prim and proper and slightly oblivious to what was going on.

“Patsy [played by Joanna Lumley] was an amalgamation of a number of Mum’s friends. It was pretty trippy to see our lives up there on the screen.”

The Bafta and Emmy award-winning sitcom, written by Saunders, ran from 1992 to 2005, with a break of five years, and Edina was seen as the embodiment of celebrity excess.

The home in which Howie grew up had a maid, a macrobiotic cook cum nanny and a chauffeur; there was also a luxurious pad in Mallorca, which has just gone on the market for more than £4.5m. It did not occur to him at the time that his childhood or his mother was odd.

“All her clients were also her friends. They all came on holiday so it was quite an adult environment. But I didn’t really know who any of these people were, apart from maybe Seal [the singer], who used to play tennis with us,” he said.

When Howie was seven, Franks, the self-made daughter of a butcher, announced that henceforth the children were to be Buddhists.

“It’s very easy to become a Buddhist. You just learn the chant . . . You’d chant for whatever you wanted,” he said. “It was all very materialistic. All the people at her company were chanting for promotions. Mum would chant for her clients or to win work. I’d chant for a bike.

“If I didn’t get a bike, I’d say, ‘Mum, I don’t think this chanting thing works,’ and the next day I’d get a bike.

“There was five minutes at the end of the hour when we’d chant for world peace and that was meant to make up for the materialism.”

When Franks, 60, appeared on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here, the ITV reality show, last year she taught some of her fellow contestants in the jungle to chant, although others found it annoying.

The Buddhism lasted until Howie was 16, when the marriage of Franks to Paul Howie, an Australian fashion designer, broke down. At the same time, Franks sold her PR company for a reputed £6m and began a 10-year voyage of “personal discovery”, accompanied at various points by a poet, a Rastafarian drummer, a 22-year-old fire-eater and a self-help guru.

It was at this time that the family went to live with American Indians.

“The culmination was the ‘vision quest’, where we were each abandoned for 24 hours without food or water in the wilderness and told to find our animal spirit,” said Howie.

An even greater test was to come. When he was 18, Franks told him she wanted to undergo rebirth and insisted on him joining her with the nude “midwife”. Howie, who has since converted to Judaism, said: “It was the most excruciating experience of my life.”

Absolutely Fabulous upset Franks, who believed Saunders observed her and her children in detail after joining them on a family holiday. Howie said: “Mum was upset because one of her best friends had taken the piss out of her in a TV show.”

However, Franks, who attended the opening night of her son’s show last night, said: “Josh is a comedian and like all comedians he uses things from his own life. Of course, I’m his proud mother, but I think he’s funny; brilliant.”

THE CURSE OF INSPIRATION

For children, inspiring a fictional character can be a mixed blessing

— A A Milne’s son, Christopher Robin, was the inspiration for Winnie-the-Pooh’s friend. He wrote: “It seemed to me almost that my father . . . had filched my good name and left me nothing but empty fame.”

— Sophie Dahl inspired the heroine Sophie in The BFG, written by her grandfather Roald Dahl. It did the model no harm. She published her first novel last year.

— Peter Llewelyn Davies and his four brothers were the inspiration for J M Barrie’s Peter Pan. Peter later committed suicide.

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