‘It’ll pass,” Hot Priest told Fleabag after she declared her love for him in the show’s finale. We will never know if she got over him – its creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, recently said she has no idea where the character is now and has ruled out making another series. Meanwhile, the Fleabag phenomenon has intensified like a desperately needy crush (very Fleabag) since the show concluded in April.

Except that wasn’t quite it. This is partly down to Waller-Bridge herself, who has kept her “vulnerable rascal” on life support throughout the year: spring brought an Off-Broadway run of the original one-woman show, followed by 30 performances in London this summer. Hopeful fans queuing for returns one Saturday were met by Waller-Bridge and her TV co-star Andrew Scott handing out cans of Marks & Spencer G&T, the “proper drink” their characters in the TV version share one night in church – a scene that led to a 24% sales spike the following week.

If, unlike Taylor Swift, you failed to score tickets, there was the National Theatre live broadcast: outside London, Letchworth Garden City’s Broadway cinema attracted the biggest audience, hosting 810 fans across three of its four screens. The cinema’s manager, Jason Valentine, can’t speculate on why Letchworth residents are so Fleabag-obsessed, but he did say that their subsidised ticket price includes a free glass of wine, which strikes me as a very Fleabag reason to go out.

To coincide with the publication of Fleabag: The Scriptures in November – a book collecting the original play and series scripts – Waterstones Piccadilly recreated the character’s guinea pig cafe. (The show’s US distributor, Amazon, staged a similar one in Los Angeles.) And if you had squeezed every nuance out of the show, play and scripts, an otherwise faithful French TV adaptation, Mouche, added some Gallic wrinkles, such as its heroine masturbating to socialist politician Benoît Hamon instead of Barack Obama.

And those were just the official extensions. Baffling as it is that a failing businesswoman with self-destructive tendencies would become a lifestyle brand, she did: the retailer SilkFred sold more than 5,000 (and counting) of Fleabag’s infamous jumpsuit, billing it as perfect for “date night”, “night out”, and “cocktails with friends”, but mysteriously not “punching your awful brother-in-law on the nose”. I wore mine once, and it proved such a conversation-starting liability that I haven’t dared put it on since. That hasn’t stopped other people: a spokesperson for John Lewis says jumpsuit sales are up 29% on this time last year, a trend it attributes to the show. You can buy a Fleabag Christmas jumper and all manner of DIY tat on Etsy, items you might wear while “Fleabagging”, a term that the dating site Plenty of Fish defines as repeatedly dating people who are wrong for you (ie, dating).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Was Andrew Scott’s character really responsible for a surge in young people attending church? Photograph: AP

The programme’s influence seeped further into public life: while it is unlikely that Fleabag influenced Pope Francis’s intimation that he might let priests marry, it was almost certainly responsible for the uptick in a) young worshippers, b) fans sending nudes to “vicar influencer” the Rev Chris Lee of west London. PornHub said searches for “religious” increased by 162% immediately after the Hot Priest’s debut in the season two premiere, while Google Trends reports a peak of interest for the search term “sex with priest” around the following episode.

The Quakers made hay of Fleabag’s visit to a meeting in season two, and even the Catholic church is keen to get in on the phenomenon. “The big questions of faith and the real-life evidence that people can love God to the extent that they dedicate their lives to his service in apostolic celibacy, forgoing marriage and family, are of perennial interest,” says Brenden Thompson, the CEO of Catholic Voices. “Fleabag knows about this hunger in the human heart and soul, which yearns for a perfect, infinite love. This knowledge contributes to her success.”

But the more pressing question in this heathen age was whether Fleabag was problematic: was the priest abusive? Was it just for posh girls? Did Waller-Bridge, descended from barons, actually understand privilege? Was she classist to spoof Love Island on Saturday Night Live and wear designer duds on public transport in a Vogue photoshoot? Actually, the more pressing question was the enraged scream of “ANOTHER ARTICLE ABOUT THIS?” from beneath every Guardian article on Fleabag, second only to Beyoncé when it comes to riling commenters.

But there was no escape elsewhere: everything was Fleabag now. The BBC drama Back to Life, Tim Minchin’s Upright, the plays Me and My and Narcissist in the Mirror were all apparently “the new Fleabag”; This Way Up and GameFace were absolutely not the new Fleabag.

Any time Waller-Bridge has expressed the faintest regret about ending the show, as she did after it won three Emmys in September, fans reacted as if a beloved boyband had teased a reunion. So you can perhaps understand why she has decided to move on: she co-wrote the new Bond film, No Time to Die, and is executive-producing and starring in Run, the forthcoming HBO series from the Fleabag theatre director Vicky Jones. But will the public move on with her? First, we have Christmas to get through, a season for which Fleabag might be the ultimate patron saint.

Bring on the drunken bad decisions and awkward family get-togethers.