Читать книгу Jennifer Saunders - The Unauthorised Biography of the Absolutely Fabulous Star - Jacky Hyams - Страница 4

We’re watching a movie. It’s the opening shot. The words appear on the screen: London, autumn, 1980. Early evening. The camera is tracking down a narrow, dingy passageway in Soho in the heart of London’s West End, just a short stroll from theatreland’s Shaftesbury Avenue. A brightly lit sign at the entrance to the Raymond Revue Bar declaims: ‘World Centre of Erotic Entertainment’. This is an upmarket strip club, albeit the most famous and successful of its day.

A young woman, average height, early twenties, fairish hair gelled and scraped back, clad all in black, is climbing a narrow stairway inside the Revue Bar, followed by a slightly shorter friend, also in black. They’re laughing, wisecracking to each other as they negotiate the stairs, en route to a small theatre right at the top of the building. One girl works by day as a schoolteacher, the other is, in acting parlance, a ‘resting’ graduate, doing odd jobs between stints on the dole. What do they hope to find at the top of the stairs?

Welcome to showbiz, girls. It’s 15 years later and the camera reveals a posh west London street, lots of big white houses. A Rolls-Royce pulls up at the kerb. Out totters an overdressed 40-something woman in garish, expensive designer gear, big hair framing her face, teetering unsteadily on ridiculously perilous snakeskin stilettos, half-cut, mobile in one hand, ciggy in the other, screeching giddy nonsense at the top of her voice. A somewhat extreme parody of a middle-class, social-climbing PR woman turned daft fashion victim with a perennial hangover (and a sensible, sober daughter called Saffy in a state of permanent disgust), a batty PA called Bubble and an outrageous sidekick – a blonde, beehived, vampish maghag well past her sell-by date but as sozzled and predatory as any ageing party girl who ever hailed a cab outside Harvey Nicks.

Those two young women scaling the strip-club stairs are not, of course, wannabe strippers or performers of erotic entertainment. They are Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, heading for their first ever audition as a double act at what became the springboard for their respective glittering careers in comedy, Peter Richardson’s fabled Comic Strip, an early 1980s launch pad for so many other stars in the comic firmament. And, of course, the screeching harridan in the Roller barely needs any introduction: the whole world knows Edina Monsoon, star of TV’s Absolutely Fabulous, written, performed and created by Jennifer Saunders, now one of the planet’s most successful comic writers/performers.

Who can forget the shambolic adventures and riotous caricatures of Absolutely Fabulous, or Ab Fab as it became known? The seminal television series reshaped the face of British TV comedy, attained cult status globally and drew an enormous, loyal BBC following: an over-the-top celebration of Brit ladette culture, born in the early 1990s into a recession-bound Britain in desperate need of a laugh.

Such is Absolutely Fabulous’ legendary draw and massive following, the show lives on: brand-new special episodes were created for 2011 and 2012, timed to celebrate Ab Fab’s twentieth anniversary, certainly, but an opportunity for a new generation of Saffys to despair at their middleaged mums’ excesses.

Yet the genesis of Ab Fab came from another world, from a far-off time.

When Edina exploded into British lives, a man called John Major sat in Downing Street. Interest rates were shooting up to an alarming 15 per cent. The Prince and Princess of Wales had split up, the beginning of the unfolding tragedy that led to the death of Princess Diana. Fergie was sucking toes and garnering freebies. Even the Queen owned up to her first annus horribilis.

With superb timing, the 1992 antics of Patsy, Edina and co. lightened the British gloom – and became the first ever TV comedy series since Fawlty Towers to weave its way into everyday British life and water-cooler chatter.

Call it what you will – social satire, the baby boomer generation of older women behaving beyond badly, venomous parody – there’s no questioning its impact on the national psyche. And on the millions around the world who fell about laughing at Edina and associates. And incredibly… they’re still laughing.

But, if anything, the revisiting of the unforgettable Ab Fab only serves to focus on the enduring talents of Jennifer Saunders, who has, of course, written and created a whole host of comic characters before and since the Ab Fab era.

Since those early days as one half of Britain’s best-loved comic pairing, French and Saunders, Jennifer Saunders’ career, now spanning over 30 years, has taken her right to the very peak of the entertainment industry.

Very few British female performers, aside from Dawn French, can emulate her CV, mainly because Jennifer Saunders’ talents are so wide-ranging. She writes. She produces. She directs. She acts. She sings. She is the great parodist, a Sheridan for the times, sending up virtually everything: the glitterati of showbiz, the fame game itself, the ageing woman’s obsession with youth, the darker vices of the media world, the excesses of cinema, pop culture – you name it, she’s there, lampooning it, puncturing pretension, ridiculing pomposity.

Yet when we laugh at her creations, as is frequently the case with successful comedy, we’re often laughing at ourselves, our own foibles or weaknesses, too. And because so many performers and celebrities from Lulu, to Kate Moss, to The Spice Girls, adore what Jennifer does and love to perform alongside her in the slipstream of her wit and parody, we, the audience, might even start to feel that her comic genius is giving us an insider’s peek into the show business bubble.

That’s an amazingly clever feat in itself. But it’s even more incredible when you consider that Jennifer Saunders is an entertainer with a global audience who has flatly refused, from day one, to deploy her fame and celebrity for their own sake.

She works hard at her craft – though she has admitted, time and again, that it’s very much an eleventh-hour, seat-of-the-pants spurt of intense energy that is her working style, rather than a slow, careful, measured approach to the business of comedy – and she uses her amazingly forensic observational skills to this end. She attends the key events: the first nights, the fundraising dos. Intensely loyal to her close-knit group of friends, she’s always there to support them publicly if the occasion demands it. She allows herself to be photographed with her family around her. And that’s it.

The consummate professional, she will be interviewed by the press and submit to the endless rounds of questions when the time comes to promote her work because that is part of the entertainer’s job.

But she firmly refuses – and has done so right from the very beginning – to allow the personal, the private, the ‘this is me and my wonderful life’ type of exposure that so many other well known names use, with increasing fervour, to have any place in her world. It’s no secret that she’s an incredibly private individual. And such is the loyalty and esteem that her closest friends and colleagues, in and out of the business, feel for her that they effectively form a protective carapace around her.

And yet the fact that there is this tight, protective circle around her, preventing any intrusion, reveals something important about Jennifer Saunders: these protectors are people who know and love her, both the woman and the work.

We are not talking about a paid team of public relations people and self-important professional gatekeepers, clipboard Nazis attending to her every whim, Hollywood style. Even amongst the tightly-knit but often bitchy world of television programme makers, for instance, it is widely acknowledged that the off-camera Jennifer Saunders is a true, kind, loyal, warm (and very witty) friend to those working alongside her.

Dawn French, so closely connected with her for so long, says this at considerable length in her own book, Dear Fatty, lovingly addressed to Jennifer. Yet Jennifer would never attempt to tell us such things about herself. She might make dry cracks about it all in her impeccably accented drawl, but parade herself around the world as a high achiever? Never.

Her success has brought her considerable wealth – estimates vary but there are suggestions of millions in double figures – but you won’t hear her boasting about it. She openly loves the good things in life – fast cars and horse riding are her passions – the English countryside is an enduring love, and she’s generous with her time when it comes to deploying her celebrity to help the less advantaged. But she won’t be in our faces, endlessly telling us all about it. Ever.

It’s just not her style. Once you attempt to separate the private Jennifer Saunders from any of her hugely successful, outrageous comic creations, you find the very opposite of a larger-than-life, flamboyant or excessive person like Edina Monsoon or the aptly named Vivienne Vyle, two of the many characters she has created and portrayed so brilliantly. As a result, Jennifer Saunders remains very much an enigma. A role model to millions. And, it must be said, an alluring object of desire for the opposite sex: male interviewers consistently comment on her good looks. Men admire her, women want to emulate her; it’s been that way right from the start.

But the real Jennifer is resolutely obscure, hidden from view. Even that other much-loved actor and collaborator in the Ab Fab phenomenon Joanna Lumley has admitted that at their first meeting she thought Jennifer seemed ‘intimidatingly opaque’.

Yet the things we do know about Jennifer give us some sense of her true persona. Born in July, astrologers might say she is a true Cancerian – home and family life are close to her heart and usually take priority over everything else. This is a woman who prizes stability, continuity, the traditions of country life, and small, close-knit communities. Yet she’s equally at ease in a more urban, sophisticated setting: shopping for food in London’s ultra-fashionable Marylebone High Street, getting behind the wheel of a super-fast sports car, soaking up the sun in Italy’s most glamorous resorts.

She’s been happily married to the same man, another comic genius, Adrian Edmondson, for well over a quarter of a century, quite rare in a country where one marriage in three ends in divorce and in an industry where relationships often last as long as the cameras are rolling. The Edmondsons have three daughters: two have started to make their name as performers and one is heading for a career as a fashion designer – creativity and making people laugh are the family businesses.

Yet while the pair have raised their family comfortably, dividing their time between the demands of work in London and an idyllic country sprawl in Devon, there hasn’t been an excess of glitz surrounding their girls’ upbringing: it’s an oft-repeated legend that, at one point, one of their daughters came home from school and said accusingly to her mum: ‘Are you Jennifer Saunders?’

However, in a career that took off in the far-off days of punk and continues to thrive in the iPad era, Jennifer’s very obvious reluctance to self-promote and her low-key, wry approach to such a stellar, successful career are remarkable. Jennifer Saunders remains one of the funniest, most entertaining women in Britain. But she isn’t going to run around reminding us.

This might be extremely frustrating for the interviewer seeking a torrent of fresh personal revelations, but in the self-obsessed world we now live in, her sangfroid is admirable. Her philosophy, virtually since day one, seems to be: good work, family, loyalty and laughter are what matters, not fame or 24/7 exposure. If you have a good time at work – and there are good times galore, creating comedy and mayhem with a team of like-minded talents – and if what you create makes other people laugh too, you’re ahead of the game.

‘My job is wonderful and I don’t know where else I’d fit in. It’s all about having a good time, making the funniest programme you can and earning a living. It’s certainly not about being famous,’ she has admitted.

So where do they come from, the outward detachment and the ability to stand back from the brouhaha surrounding telly and showbiz? There are small but significant clues. Part of the skill of any comic performer or actor is their ability to observe and dissect the little nuances of human behaviour that most of us might miss or overlook.

In Jennifer’s case, this all started at a very early age. As a child, for instance, she has confessed to being a bit of a starer – a quiet kid who watched others and took mental notes.

‘My mother says I had to be taken away in restaurants because I’d be standing in front of tables just looking at people,’ Jennifer once revealed.

Dawn French, writing in her memoir Dear Fatty (‘Fatty’ is her nickname for Jennifer), has also paid tribute to Jennifer’s outward detachment or cool, which conceals the brilliance of her observation.

‘She is constantly running a cynical, internal parallel tape of her real life, what she sees, hears, reads, eats, loves and hates, and it never ceases to amuse her.

‘It’s this sharp skill of observation that gives her the comedy spurs she uses to jolt her mind on from a trot to a canter when she is improvising or writing. On the surface, though, all is calm.’

It is, of course, a traditional English trait to be reserved or self-effacing. Understatement is the name of the game, the hallmark of being… well, terribly British. The daughter of a former RAF Group Captain, she has her own take on this: ‘The big, overriding thing in our family was that any kind of taking yourself seriously was the biggest crime; you just didn’t do that. My dad said: “Be serious but never take yourself seriously.”’

So there it is: a very big showbiz career, a close-knit family life that means everything to her, and an inability to emote or show off in person, no matter how flamboyant her comic creations, and you start to have a sense of the somewhat reticent but outrageously gifted Jennifer Saunders.

Another important key to her real-life personality is that in times of adversity she refuses to make a big fuss: a recent bout of breast cancer was, typically, coped with quietly and as far from the public gaze as possible, until the time was appropriate to reveal what had happened. All conducted with total discretion.

‘How she managed to keep her illness under wraps in an industry that is so gossipy is massive,’ observed one seasoned TV writer.

The media thrives on gossip: ‘Every stylist, every makeup artist, every person working in the studio tells everyone else stuff, no matter who it is. The way she managed to keep it quiet until after her treatment and recovery is incredible, but she’s earned that kind of privacy. The fact that she has never used her fame in any way meant that, when the time came, everyone around her wanted to close ranks and protect her.’

Unknowable, cool, hugely attractive at every stage of her life and so very, very English, Jennifer Saunders continues to fascinate audiences of all ages around the world. It’s fair to say, too, that part of that fascination is probably derived from her enigmatic persona. Twenty-first-century celebrities who sign up for limited verbal exposure – Kate Moss is a very good example – create a mystique all their own, whether deliberately or not.

This book will pay tribute to Jennifer Saunders’ talents and tells her story right from the beginning. This is not a heartbreak tale of someone from the back streets who had to claw their way to the top – to discover, when they got there, that they couldn’t cope with the pressures of fame. Nor is it a story about overnight success.

Jennifer Saunders’ story is a tale of a shy, quiet middle-class English girl from a pleasant, rural background without any driving ambition to make herself known or forge a successful career as an entertainer. Until, by sheer chance, she spots an ad in a paper and finds herself climbing the narrow stairs of that strip club, in London’s Soho – the clichéd first step, if you like, on the ladder of success.

Those who deliberately seek out celebrity for its own sake are everywhere these days, popping up with alarming regularity. Some big show business names become so hooked on their own fame or image that they can’t help but rush to expose themselves to the public glare even if they don’t really need to, because… well, that’s what they do. Without it, they might feel their very identity is under question.

That’s never going to be the case for Jennifer Saunders. She loves what she does, she knows exactly who she is and she closely guards the world she truly values. And she has learned, over time, to maintain her balance on that paper-thin line between exposure and privacy; a pragmatic showbiz insider who has never been afraid to ridicule the entertainment world’s excesses, she will continue to be a private person in a very public setting. But she is a star – and she remains a star to her many millions of admirers.

What follows, in this book, is an attempt to look at her life and times – and learn something more about the woman behind the enigma.