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French and Saunders on the end of their partnership
Britain's best loved comedy duo, who are bowing out with their London stage show, explain why it has to end
Dominic Maxwell[/align]
French and Saunders are retiring - but, true to discursive form, they're not in a great rush about it. There was the farewell tour in the spring, a break for summer hols, and now the farewell London run. But that, they insist, will be that. Britain's most popular double act of the past two decades are done. Finito. Kaput. Unless, that is, they accept an offer for a last lap of honour, a tour of Australia. But then that really will be it. Well, unless...
“I'd do something for Comic Relief, wouldn't you?” French breezes to her comedy partner of 30 years. “We're already thinking that Mamma Mia! is a bit of a good one for a parody,” Saunders agrees, with a guilty chuckle. “But that's about it,” French says. “And they might be begging us not to.” “They might be,” Saunders says. “We've got to remember how old we are.” “We are elderly. We're 100! We're both 50. This is the last chance to see us nearly die, I'd say, of exhaustion onstage.”
Well, they might be shutting up shop, but anyone looking for the French-and-Saunders-in-bitter-bust-up story is going to have to dig with a JCB. Courteous yet uncontained, they are a chatty and charming pair. Sometimes they finish each other's sentences. Sometimes they talk at the same time, in and around each other, like a pair of lead guitarists soloing at the same time. And if they show off, they are doing it for each other's amusement - and reward each other with generous laughs. They are clearly both buoyed and anchored by each other's support. So why make this tour their last?
“We didn't have that awkward situation,” French says, “where one of us rang the other one going: ‘I think it's time to stop,' and the other one went: ‘Please let's keep going for another 20 years.' There was just this gradual realisation that maybe there are other things we'd like to do, maybe it's a young person's game.” Each show ends with a musical farewell. “It's quite therapeutic, actually,”French says. “You say goodbye so many times that you start thinking eventually: ‘Well, come on then, leave the building!'”
They decided that the double act was done, Saunders says, because they felt that their television act was done. “You can't do the shows we used to do. We came through at a time when the BBC did everything in-house, so everything was available: costumes, wigs, special effects. Now, everything is put out to tender, so everything costs an amazing amount. And we don't want it to look like a slightly sub version of what we used to do.”
So while they will still work together, such as on Saunders's sitcom Jam and Jerusalem, they won't be playing characters called Dawn and Jen any more. Parody has an expiry date. “There comes an age where you can't do it any more,” French says. “I remember we were strapping our tits down one time, two series ago, trying to get into some school uniforms and thinking, actually, this is hideous.” “Taking the piss out of people is a young person's thing,” Saunders agrees. “It gets to be unseemly. It can start to look a bit tragic and bitter.”
Time to appear on Grumpy Old Women? “We've been asked,” Saunders says. “But we're too grumpy to do it.” “Too grumpy to turn up!” French says. And they burst out laughing, unselfconsciously joyful as a pair of kids sitting at the back of the school bus.
They met in 1978, when they were training to become drama teachers in London. Both came from itinerant backgrounds, but the ebullient French and the watchful Saunders were very different characters. They have never had a straight-man, funny-man relationship but they have had an introvert-extrovert relationship, haven't they?
“As far as characters called French and Saunders, yes,” French says. “But we're not the people we were when we first met - we were very opposite. I used to be a massive party-thrower, I could hardly go a month without throwing a party. I can't stand them now.”
Yet Dawn is daffier than Jen - isn't that at the heart of many of their routines? “That developed out of how we were naturally on stage at the beginning,” Saunders says. “I was less extrovert." "But then you completely shocked me,” French says, “when you did Ab Fab and you were falling over all the time and being completely physical, which is not something you did in the double act. So it's easy for us to swap.”
They were, they admit, in several right places at several right times. They made their mark as alternative comedy was coming into being at the Comic Strip club in Soho, alongside fellow rookies such as Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton, Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson. “We were the token women,” French says. They soon became famous faces when the Comic Strip Presents... became the key comedy show on the new Channel 4 in 1982. They were making half-hour comedy films, without interference, only later realising their luck. “Incredible luck,” Saunders says. “It's all been gloriously accidental.”
French married the comedian Lenny Henry in 1984, then Saunders married Adrian Edmonson a year later. Soon afterwards they got 16 million viewers for their own ITV series, Girls on Top, with Ruby Wax and Tracey Ullman, then in 1987 their own BBC Two sketch show. “In those days only one executive needed to make the decision,” Saunders says. “The BBC was looking for women, it really was,” French adds. “It was a PC thing.”
But they became increasingly popular as they honed their act over the next couple of series, reaching a peak with their third series in 1991. Saunders moved to Devon and had three children - Eleanor, Beatrice and Freya - while French adopted a child, Billie, in 1992. In fact, Billie arrived just as they were starting on a new series. With a crew and studio time already paid for, but French retreating to look after Billie, Saunders expanded on a sketch from their previous series - the result was Absolutely Fabulous.
“Jen completely covered for me,” French says. “No, no, thank you very much,” Saunders says, “that show has been very good to me.” “And I've done very nicely out of it too.” “She has a stake in it,” Saunders says. “She gets something out of the back end.” And they're back on the bus.
But how about rivalry? Some comedians can't watch other people's work because they feel threatened by it. That's a male thing, French responds - yet the new show, as well as collecting favourite old sketches, has a running rivalry between the two about who has been more successful, each whipping out viewing figures for Absolutely Fabulous or French's The Vicar of Dibley. They're playing with a preconception, they both insist, not defusing a real-life tension. “Jen is like a sister,” French says. “I take huge pride in things she does well.”
Comedy has made them rich but they insist that making each other laugh has always been their motivation. “It is such an enjoyable thing, being funny,” Saunders says. “The show that we do is like having the best dinner party.” “We were friends first,” French says, “so really the audience are slightly eavesdropping on us.”
Even so, there was another motivation for the show. Peter Kay did his Mum Wants a Bungalow Tour to house his mum; French and Saunders have their farewell tour to house Dawn French. Last year she saw a house in Cornwall and knew she wanted to move there, but she couldn't afford it. So she suggested a tour.
“Oh yes,” she says, “but we've always done things like that. We haven't been very businesslike along the way. So if you see a place you want to move to, you think: ‘Oh God, I haven't got any money. Hey, do you want to do a tour and earn a bit of money and also that'd be perfect wouldn't it, we could end it there?' You are not doing it just to earn the money. But it all fits in.”
And while reports of French and Saunders's demise are about right, reports of French's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Their show is called Still Alive - inspired by the fallout from an interview that she gave in which she said she was moving to Cornwall and didn't expect to move again. This, allied to some comments she made about not expecting to live to a ripe old age, was taken to be a warning of imminent death.
“It was announced to the world that I was going to die quite soon,” she says, “so I had to spend the following year reassuring people. The fact is that I'm moving house, and I said I don't want to move again after that, and the interviewer took that to mean I am never going to...”
“‘I am going to die in Cornwall',” intervenes Saunders.
“Yes,” French says. “Eventually.”
