Читать книгу Jennifer Saunders - The Unauthorised Biography of the Absolutely Fabulous Star - Jacky Hyams - Страница 6

Cheshire, in the north of England, is one of the country’s most beautiful counties. Tiny, picturesque, ‘blink and you might miss it’ rural villages where time seems to have stood still. Small communities taking pride in maintaining their annual ‘best-kept village in Cheshire’ status. Big landowners. Farms. True blue Conservative – and likely to stay that way.

On the north Cheshire boundary lie small rural areas just outside the town of Northwich; villages such as Hartford, Weaverham, Cuddington, Acton Bridge and Crowton; pretty, mostly flat country just a short drive away from Cheshire’s biggest woodland area, Delamere Forest, popular with horse riders and cyclists and a haven for wildlife. The area around here is not as flashy or bling as the money-belt Cheshire suburbs of Prestbury or Wilmslow with their expensive footballers’ homes, but, nonetheless, this is a desirable place for anyone to grow up in.

This rural, bucolic area, around Crowton and Acton Bridge, is where Jennifer Saunders spent her early teenage years. Until the age of 11, she would lead a peripatetic life with her parents and three brothers. Her father’s career as an officer in the RAF took the Saunders family all over the country, and, at one point, overseas to Cyprus and Turkey for short periods of time.

Jennifer’s mother, Jane, like all the other RAF officers’ wives bringing up their children on RAF bases or stations, would have become accustomed to having to move frequently and to swapping one family home for another, the usual upheavals and changes involved in a post-war RAF life of two-year, or even shorter, postings.

Nowadays, provision is frequently made for officers’ children to be sent off to boarding school. Back then, however, it was often the case that children lived on or around the base and had to make the best of the ‘chopping and changing’ situation, adjusting to each new move and set of faces as they came along, yet always armed with the knowledge that they would be moving on again soon anyway.

So as a Forces child, Jennifer went to many different primary schools. And over time she developed her own coping mechanism for always being ‘the new girl’, often arriving at the new school just a little bit later than the others.

‘It was never at the beginning of term, always midway,’ she recalled in an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine in August 2007. ‘So you’d work out where to sit. You’d think: “Oh that’s that kind of gang, that’s that one. Why is there a place left next to this person?” You learn to observe and fit in without being noticed. Odd, as I’ve chosen this career.’

Jennifer Jane Saunders was born in Sleaford Maternity Hospital, Lincolnshire, in July 1958. Her family was based in the area during her father’s posting to nearby RAF Cranwell, one of the RAF’s largest officer training units.

Each step up the RAF career ladder for Jennifer’s father meant another posting, a fresh move. And he had a very successful career until 1970, when Group Captain Robert Thomas Saunders (known to friends as ‘Tom’) left the RAF for good to step back into civilian life and a job with British Aerospace. Only then could Jennifer’s family settle down permanently into life in a rambling Victorian house in rural Acton Bridge. And her mother, Jane, began working as a teacher at The Grange, a private day school in the nearby village of Hartford.

Curiously enough, this background as an Air Force child is something Jennifer has in common with some of the most significant people in her adult life: Dawn French’s father was an RAF sergeant; Absolutely Fabulous close cohort Joanna Lumley’s father, a major in the Gurkha Rifles, was posted to Kashmir in India, where Joanna was born; and, perhaps most significantly, the father of her future husband, Adrian Edmondson, was a teacher working for the British Army and the RAF.

Sheer coincidence or a bond shared with those who had also known a childhood constantly on the move? It’s difficult to be certain. But Jennifer has never denied the fact that moving around all the time as a child did help with her powers of observation as a comic writer and actor.

‘You do learn how to fit in quite well. A lot of that is just watching. And actually not having much of a personality,’ she told the Guardian in June 2004.

‘I think you develop a knack, so you become quite self-contained. I had a very happy home life; I don’t remember anything being traumatic,’ she revealed to the Liverpool Daily Post in an interview a few years later.

In 1969, with the family settled in the Cheshire countryside, Jennifer was sent to a local grammar school, Northwich County Grammar School for Girls in Leftwich, just south of the town of Northwich.

At the time, many people in the Northwich area worked for the former ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), which had offices and industrial plants nearby. Some of Jennifer’s classmates were the children of ICI staff, bright working-class kids who had passed the 11-plus exam. Even in the late 1960s, Northwich County was a very strictly-run girls’ school, a 1950s-style educational establishment governed on old-fashioned, super-strict lines. The peace and love revolution might have started elsewhere, but at Northwich County, with 1,000 girls completing their secondary education, revolution and rebellion were definitely not running amok.

‘You had to wear gym shorts six inches above the knee,’ recollected one former pupil of the time.

The schoolgirls’ navy blue uniform included a maroon beret. ‘If you were caught without it, you had to wear it in school all day. The head and her associate would drive around the local bus station spotting beret-less heads.’

Girls attending Northwich County at the time recall a disciplinarian running the school: a headmistress with a scary reputation. There were rumours of corporal punishment. And there were frequent stories of teachers being seen leaving the head’s office in floods of tears.

‘Whatever you did, you were in the wrong as far as she was concerned,’ remembered another ex-pupil.

Oh dear. You can picture a 13-year-old Jennifer in her school uniform: navy pinafore dress to the knee with white shirt and red tie, sitting in class, staring out of the window, bored out of her mind with it all – but not daring to react against the day-to-day discipline with rebellion or cheek. Definitely not a wild child.

‘I was an apathetic, quiet kid – that’s how I’d have described myself,’ recalled Jennifer of those early years to More magazine.

‘I wasn’t interested in much at school – except biology. I liked dissecting! It was an all-girls school so the only flirtations with boys were on the bus. And they were just embarrassing.’

‘I used to be very shy which exhibited itself in morose, non-communicative behaviour,’ she admitted to the Sunday Express. ‘I grew up thinking whatever I said would sound stupid. So you end up saying nothing.’

‘I was into horses and the occasional disco,’ she told Tatler. ‘It wasn’t like I had lots of friends around. I would love to have been wild, but I could never do it. I never got into drugs or anything. I could never lose control.

‘I hardly raised my eyes. I was endlessly blushing. It was biological. I just didn’t want the attention, but I daydreamed a lot.’

‘I was mad on horses. Completely,’ she revealed in a BBC Radio 4 interview with Sue Lawley for Desert Island Discs in December 1996.

‘My big ambition was to become a three-day eventer until I was about l6.

I got my first pony in Wiltshire – I had a friend who had a farm.’

Her school reports tended to be of the ‘could try harder’ variety. Yet there was one area where Jennifer’s teenage shyness was somehow put aside and she ended up attracting a bit of attention: as a performer, though a somewhat low-key one.

‘She didn’t have much of a profile at the school,’ recollected another former Northwich County pupil, who also claimed that Jennifer didn’t make a great impression on many of the pupils.

‘She was ordinary, really, she never stuck out in any way. And she wasn’t always in all the shows – there were other people in her year who were the “acting” ones.’

The school was divided into houses – each one named after a different area in Cheshire. Jennifer was in Farndon House. And it was in a Farndon House comic sketch one afternoon during a Northwich County three-day arts festival, rather than in formal drama classes, where the 16-year-old Jennifer’s talent for comic acting and improvisation surfaced.

‘The house stuff was self-initiated – the staff weren’t involved in it at all. Jennifer played the part of a fortune teller and the material in the sketch had been written by the girls. And she was really, really funny. She was a year above me but I can still remember sitting there, laughing, looking at her makeup – which made her look like an old hag. She was definitely not one of the “stars” of the school as far as the general perception of her was concerned. But that day we all realised that this girl was actually really funny.

‘That someone came through that Colditz place and achieved what she’s done in comedy… well, it’s amazing.’

Rosalind Fifield has lived in the Acton Bridge/Crowton area for most of her life and was a neighbour of the Saunders family for many years.

‘My two boys went to The Grange and Jennifer’s mother, Jane, taught them. She was a very good teacher,’ she recalled.

‘Jennifer and her family lived about two and a half miles away from us. At one point, when she was about 16, Jennifer would babysit for me and my sister Diana. Jennifer rode a lot – there’s lots of riding around here. My sister and I knew her parents through the local Conservative fundraisers. They were a very nice family, very unassuming. And Jennifer was very quiet and well mannered – a good babysitter.

‘But she wasn’t at all outgoing. You’d never have believed that this girl would end up playing someone like Edina in Absolutely Fabulous.’

Rosalind’s sister, Diana Mather, a former BBC TV presenter, remembered Jennifer’s father Tom as ‘a very witty, charming man’.

‘Maybe the sense of humour comes from her father. The family were very close – and very private. That’s probably given her a very good “rock” on which to build her own family life and career.’

It’s often at university that talented performers or writers start to really spread their wings. Not surprisingly, given her solidly middle-class background, Jennifer’s parents were keen for her to head off to university after leaving Northwich County with three A-levels. One brother won a place at Cambridge, but Jennifer didn’t seem to be destined towards heading in the same direction.

Approaches were made to various universities, including an application for a course in combined sciences at Leicester. But Jennifer, while intelligent, just didn’t shine in the university interview rounds. In today’s language, the shy girl, who until that point had been mostly interested in horse riding, had poor presentation skills.

‘It was a cause of some frustration all round,’ Jennifer told the Daily Mail in November 1992. ‘The problem was always the same. I wasn’t really interested in any interview. I would sit there, apathetic and morose, not caring either way.’

‘I got turned down by every university I went to interview with,’ she told the Liverpool Daily Post in 2012. ‘I sort of wish I had gone to university but your life is what happens as you live it. So much else wouldn’t have happened.’

After a fairly brief period working as an au pair in Italy: ‘They were horrible, rich brat English children,’ she recalled to OK Magazine in 1996, she returned home to Cheshire to find that her mother, Jane, determined to get her daughter’s further education resolved somehow, had a list of degree courses waiting for Jennifer on the kitchen table.

Jennifer opted for a BEd drama teaching course at London’s Central School of Speech & Drama in Swiss Cottage, north London. Not because she had an overwhelming desire to teach, far from it.

‘I thought it would be cool to go to London,’ she recalled.

So the application went off and she got her interview at Central, even though she had little real experience – or knowledge – of drama itself. Writing a comic sketch with other girls was one thing. Serious theatre was another.

‘I think they were desperate for people on this course. I hadn’t done any plays at school. At the interview I had to lie and I said I’d seen Dostoevsky’s The Rivals as I remembered seeing a poster at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.’

Then the interviewers asked what she thought of the play. (Little did they know that Jennifer had only ever seen one play in her entire life, and that was Charley’s Aunt).

‘Oh, very good,’ she said, deadpan, not realising that Dostoevsky had not written The Rivals – the author of the play was Sheridan.

Perhaps her examiners saw through the bluff – this was the Central School of Speech & Drama, after all, the UK’s most prestigious drama school, so they probably would have realised that Jennifer was winging it. But they were sufficiently impressed by her exam results – you needed only one A-level to get in – and her improvisation routine – with a broom – to accept Jennifer. She was in.

Many of theatre’s and television’s greatest names have trained at Central. Judi Dench, Sir Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave, Lindsay Duncan, Rupert Everett and Kristin Scott Thomas all studied their craft there. So she was following in the footsteps of the great and the good.

But there was no grand plan, no ambition, no overwhelming desire to forge a career in show business or to act on the stage. The three-year drama teaching course just seemed like a good idea at the time and a chance to live in London – far more exciting to a 19-year-old girl than the prospect of quiet rural life in Cheshire. And it would turn out to be exciting. But not in any way Jennifer or anyone who knew her would ever have imagined…

The Central School of Speech & Drama is located on the border of Swiss Cottage and Belsize Park, north London, just off the traffic-clogged streets of Finchley Road and on the site of the old Embassy Theatre.

Today, it directly faces a streamlined, ultra-modern, sprawling community area complete with library, gym complex and the prestigious Hampstead Theatre. The houses in the surrounding streets are expensive and very upmarket: not much change from half a million pounds just for a small flat.

But back then, in 1977, the area itself was totally different: quite scruffy, large but very shabby and rundown nineteenth-century villas and houses alongside post-war blocks of local authority flats and concrete high rises.

Students at Central who shared the mostly grotty flats in the peeling stucco houses in the area were likely to be living with mice, ever-complaining ancient landladies, toilets on the landing and kitchens boasting a bath – with a lid on it. The Thatcherite property renovation frenzy that took over London in the 1980s was still in the future.

And those students, like Jennifer, who were starting their drama teaching course that year, in the class called T80, were a mixed bag: mostly quite young, out to have fun above all else, all sorts of backgrounds.

The course itself was quite new. And the drama teaching students were very much seen as the ‘poor relations’ to the more exalted drama students on the acting course, who mostly ignored the teaching students’ very existence. Boys wore tights and ballet shoes. Girls were issued with a regulation black leotard, thick black tights and a full-length practice skirt to wear in rehearsals and dance classes.

The routine at T80 was 9am to 5pm five days a week, something that Jennifer initially struggled to keep up with.

‘Some days I would cycle to school, get there too late and then just ride home again. I couldn’t quite get into gear for about a year,’ she said of those Central days.

For the drama teaching students, there was a busy schedule. Each day consisted of classes for voice, movement, teaching of drama and poetry, and regular sessions where students learned more about stagecraft, skills such as building sets or making costumes. And, of course, there was teaching practice. And this bit came as a huge surprise to Jennifer, who, for some reason, hadn’t actually taken on board the fact that the course was aimed at… training teachers of drama.

‘It was a shock when I discovered I’d been put on a teaching course. It never occurred to me they’d eventually throw me into a school with real children,’ she recalled.

But it was in the daily movement class, in the autumn of 1977, in the school’s big training room-cum-studio with its huge mirrors and barres along the walls, when fate stepped in for Jennifer in that first year at college.

The new teaching students, all shapes and sizes, clad in the most unforgiving garment known to man – the black leotard – were reluctantly going through their paces doing warm-ups, exercises, swinging their legs, when a new 19-year-old girl stepped into the class, a couple of days late and, unlike Jennifer, desperately keen on the idea of learning how to be a drama teacher.

Enter Dawn French, nervous that she had missed the all-important first bit, the initial ‘bonding’ sessions that usually take place at the beginning of a study course.

In the time-honoured fashion, Jennifer and Dawn checked each other out while struggling to bend, stretch and follow the warm-up exercises. Jennifer, always swift to spot comic potential, seemed rather amused at the ridiculousness of all this ‘movement’ and didn’t manage to hide her feelings. No grins were exchanged or serious eye contact made directly between the two girls. They didn’t ‘connect’ instantly. Not at all. And certain assumptions were made when they chatted briefly afterwards. These assumptions proved to be totally incorrect, of course. But it definitely wasn’t love at first sight.

According to Dawn French, this mutual disinterest was mostly down to her own insecurities – and their shared RAF childhoods.

‘I liked the look of Jennifer. But she seemed far too confident and intimidating for me,’ remembered Dawn in an interview with the Daily Mail.

‘I arrived after term had started because my dad had just died. People had already started to get their little groups together and Jen was part of quite a confident group of posh girls and it was difficult for me to fit in.

‘Both our fathers were in the RAF but Jen’s dad was an officer and my dad wasn’t. Jen was the epitome of the upper-middle-class girl whereas I was upper working-class. I was slightly intimidated by posh people – and I thought that officers and their children were posh people. Now I recognise that’s a foolish thing. Rank delineates in the Forces and it takes you a lifetime to get over it. It ultimately doesn’t matter but it was a big part of my childhood: you were constantly told where you belonged.’

To Jennifer, Dawn French was a stout, bossy person, horribly keen on being a drama teacher: ‘I didn’t take the course seriously and she did. I think she was the only person on the course who really wanted to be one, so that was a bit of a barrier between us.

‘And she annoyed me greatly: she was very outgoing and popular, just back from a year in New York. And I was quite quiet and introverted. I was probably considered a bit laid-back – or sullen,’ Jennifer told More magazine.

‘She wore a Yale sweatshirt, baseball boots and a baseball cap at a slanty angle – all quite nauseating. We looked completely different. She thought I was snotty. I wasn’t – I was really shy and quiet.

‘Dawn seemed very grown-up and settled. And I felt a bit junior to her. She was very organised and I felt useless beside her.

‘I think when you’re at a certain age you’re in a sort of vacuum, not quite a real person yet. I was very rigid and introverted. I had a very stiff lip – from flute playing, not inbreeding – and Dawn was terribly bouncy. But also in a sort of vacuum, like me.’

For the first couple of years of the teaching course, the pair remained distinctly unimpressed by each other. No real bonds of friendship or camaraderie developed. It wasn’t until 1979 and the start of their third year on the course when things really changed.

One of the students in their year had a boyfriend who owned a nearby property that had recently been converted. It was up for rent – and eight people could share it. Dawn French was certainly up for the new conversion as she was fed up with sharing a tiny flat somewhat inconveniently situated in scruffy Kensal Rise. Then she heard that Jennifer Saunders was also interested.

‘I was definitely under-joyed by the prospect of that,’ said Dawn in her memoir Dear Fatty. ‘It wasn’t that we actively disliked each other, not at all, just that we had been on the same course and not really found each other, not really bothered, both assuming that the other wasn’t our type. I thought she might be the only one in the flat I wouldn’t be able to relate to.’

Yet there is nothing quite like the proximity of living under the same roof for getting to know someone quickly. Particularly since the new flat, in nearby Steele’s Road, was within walking distance of the college. And not long after they had moved in, as the two students walked together down Fellows Road en route to the college in Adamson Road, the assumptions they had made started to crumble. And there were a few surprises.

They did have things in common: Dawn too had spent time in Italy au pairing, and when they exchanged their experiences of living on RAF camps, their ‘always on the move’ childhoods, it turned out that they had even briefly had the same best friend, another RAF child.

‘When I was 11, I had a best friend, and very good fun. Then she left and I was heartbroken. Jen and I discovered that she went to another camp and there she was Jennifer’s best friend. We put out a call for her on the radio once but she never got in touch,’ recalled Dawn in an interview with the Daily Mail in December 1993.

But there was another, much bigger discovery in those walks: the two students, one short and effervescent, bubbling over with enthusiasm, the other slightly taller, seemingly cool and languid, shared the same surreal sense of humour. They could make each other laugh like drains. All the time. Both had a similar sense of the ridiculous – and they loved to act it out. Frequently.

Dawn soon realised that behind Jennifer’s rather mysterious façade was a bright, extremely attractive and intriguing person. Jennifer saw that behind Dawn’s super-organised, somewhat bossy front was an outrageously funny, warm individual. Both relished taking the mickey out of everything, especially the college course, puncturing its serious ‘actorly’ side. At times, they would find themselves laughing consistently from the minute they walked out of the Steele’s Road flat until they arrived at college.

They didn’t quite realise it but, at the end of the 1970s, the two young women, laughing themselves close to tears as they walked to college, perched on bar stools and taking the mickey out of the elderly male drinkers in the nearby pubs in Chalk Farm (they’ve never admitted it but this was surely their early inspiration for the legendary ‘Two Fat Old Men’ sketch) or just lolling around in their living room, making up more and more ridiculous situations, were shaping an incredibly close-knit relationship – and, of course, an exceptional showbiz career that neither could ever have dreamed of.

How could they? For a start, female comedy duos were unknown territory. At the time, no one could envisage the idea of a female double act on TV like Morecambe & Wise. Only their parents’ World War Two generation could remember the big BBC radio stars of the 1940s – Elsie and Doris Waters, or ‘Gert and Daisy’ as their immensely popular act was known. And while stand-up comedy was about to revolutionise the entertainment world, female stand-ups were still relatively unknown, especially on television.

Yet shared laughter, day in, day out, creates something special, unbreakable. And it stimulates sparky, creative minds. These two would always share this wonderful bond of laughter; they still have it to this day. The old saying ‘two heads are better than one’ springs to mind, though in this case it was more like ‘two minds that can constantly spot the comic potential of nearly everything around them’.

‘Once we moved in, we broke down our prejudices about each other and realised we had a similarly bizarre sense of humour,’ Jennifer recalled in an interview with the Daily Mail in June 2000.

‘Dawn made me laugh so much. We used to play the cruellest practical jokes on everybody in the flat. They were very juvenile. We used to hide in the laundry basket and pop out. Or try to make severed head things out of a cabbage and bang them on windows. We shared the flat with people who worked for a living. It was tragic – and it became my career. The joy of our relationship is you never quite grow up.’

Such was the hilarity of those times sharing the Steele’s Road flat that their experiences would eventually inspire the riotous 1985 ITV series Girls on Top, penned by Jennifer, Dawn and Ruby Wax. The location of the fictional flat was changed from north-west London to Chelsea, but there was a wealth of fantastic comic material from those flat-sharing Central days to draw on.

Like chaotic young sharers almost everywhere, living with five or six other people meant a ‘cleaning’ rota that never functioned (other than as a precursor to rows), an abundance of extremely stale food in a messy kitchen, frequently consumed at strange hours – and, of course, party after party.

Dawn and Jennifer would sit in the front room at Steele’s Road, inventing over-the-top characters, messing around and generally creating mayhem, performing in the house for the benefit of some of their more tolerant flatmates.

Jennifer, whose bedroom was right at the top of the house, was known to have really untidy quarters. At one point, the flat was broken into.

‘The police said: “Well, it is quite bad but the worst is that room at the top.” And, of course, nobody had been in there,’ recalled Dawn. ‘She used to be up to her knees in old pants.’

Childish as it may sound now, the girls would enjoy dressing up, punk style. Sometimes they’d wear chamber pots on their heads, accompanied by long black plastic macs. Then they’d go out on the street or jump onto the Tube to see if people were frightened of their somewhat bizarre appearance.

‘We’d hang tampons on our ears and have safety pins stuck in various places. It was a perfect time to have no money – you could go to Swiss Cottage market, pick up great clothes and just wear them.’ Jennifer told The Sunday Times in November 1993.

The duo would often go to other people’s parties clad in these outrageous outfits; they got to like doing it so much, they dressed up like this all the time.

‘Then we made up a punk song to perform at someone’s party. I knew about three chords on the guitar; Dawn knew about two. We called ourselves the Menopatzi [translation: less mad] Sisters. And the song was a little number about a gerbil,’ Jennifer recalled.

The Menopatzi Sisters, the girls decided, were middle-aged performers in black leotards and red Latex swimming hats, who were the last in a long line of an Italian circus family: they were a circus mime act. They were also useless.

In the girls’ last year at Central, in an end-of-term cabaret act – after some initial hesitation but egged on by their friends – they performed two comic sketches they had written for the other students: the Menopatzi Sisters and another sketch called ‘Psychodrama’, involving two American women who were obsessed with their spiritual well-being.

‘It was at the time when anything “alternative” was coming in, things like people having therapy. Even the word “muesli” was funny. It was a kind of therapy/muesli-based act,’ said Jennifer.

The humour in their sketches didn’t come from telling a series of jokes. It was more in the girls’ performance and character study. And their cabaret act went down really well. People laughed a lot. Both girls went to bed that night knowing the evening had been a success. They could make other people laugh, not just each other. Yet neither had any intention, at that stage, of developing their act into some sort of career.

‘I remember thinking how easy it was. We seemed to pick up on each other’s humour and absolutely clicked,’ recalled Jennifer.

By 1980, the girls had graduated and gone off in different directions: Dawn to teach drama at Parliament Hill School for Girls, a comprehensive in north London, her long-held ambition now reaching fulfilment. Jennifer moved to a shared flat in a shabby house in far-off (and posh) Chelsea. There was the odd menial job occasionally. But teaching, she had already decided at Central, definitely wasn’t going to play any part in her future. She had had a taste of it as a student – and she was adamant that it wasn’t right for her.

‘I had no enthusiasm for teaching. I’d spent some time in an Ursuline convent in Wimbledon and then taught for 10 weeks at a high school in Peckham. I was popular. But no good,’ she told Woman’s Own magazine in February 1993.

‘I could never see it being my career just because I liked the kids. I couldn’t take the staffroom politics.’

‘I thought that when Dawn and I left college that would be the end of the relationship,’ said Jennifer in an interview with the Daily Mail in June 2000. ‘And I was quite content to be on the dole. I did nothing for months on end. I was never desperately ambitious. I had a feeling that something might float along eventually, whereas Dawn has a capacity for work I just don’t have.’

Yet whatever their feelings after graduation, the two girls did take something very important away with them from their time at Central, a crucial factor in the life of any successful actor or performer: the ‘P’ word – professionalism.

‘You were taught to be professional and respect others. Central took the prima donna out of you,’ remembered one former graduate of the Central drama teaching course in the late 1970s. ‘Professionalism was the overriding thing you took from the course; you did the very best you could. And you can see that in Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French – it’s all about being equal.’

Time passed. Dawn was enjoying her new life, discovering the many challenges involved in teaching, relishing the chance to connect with inner-city kids, whose lives could only benefit from learning more about drama.

Jennifer, however, spent most of her day doing The Times crossword, drinking coffee and generally having a laid-back existence. Plan? Career? Who needed those things? Wasn’t it enough to be young and carefree?

She has freely admitted that she had no plans or goals whatsoever. In an interview with The New York Times in July 1995, she said: ‘I was just sitting about and getting the dole, if I could be bothered. We went off the dole because we were never up in time. We used to live on these mattresses and there was actually a path worn in the dust on the carpet from our bed to the door.’

But their lives were about to change permanently. And the instrument of change was a small theatre located inside a Soho strip joint, right in the heart of London’s West End, in an area full of porno cinemas and sex shops selling hardcore magazines, an insalubrious backdrop for the launch of a group of hugely talented male comic performers – whose fates would be very closely intertwined with those of the two ex-Central graduates.

And it was Jennifer, lounging around in her flat one day, flicking through a paper, who started it all.

‘I saw an advert in The Stage [the entertainment industry trade paper] looking for new acts to perform at a comedy/cabaret venue called The Comic Strip in Soho.

‘I remember thinking: “I wonder if Dawn would be interested.” I don’t think anybody else would have touched me with a bargepole, but it just seemed totally natural to do it with Dawn.’

A phone call to an enthusiastic Dawn resulted in the pair heading off to their first ever audition at the Comic Strip’s home, the 200-seater Boulevard Theatre above the Raymond Revue Bar in Walker’s Court. (The Raymond Revue Bar was a popular Soho strip joint owned by Paul Raymond, the celebrated club owner and entrepreneur.) Undaunted by the louche surroundings, once up in the theatre the pair waited their turn, watching a man on stage juggling lobster pots.

Then they were on, performing their old college sketch about the neurotic Americans. And, amazingly, they got in!

‘We weren’t very good,’ said Jennifer. ‘But they were desperate for women, to make it more politically correct, and we were the first living beings with boobs to come through the door.

‘I don’t know why it didn’t seem strange, working above a strip club, but it didn’t.

‘We got hired for the bum nights, which were Tuesday and Wednesday, when there were few people in the theatre. Sometimes we outnumbered the audience.

‘Such blind, blind panic. We just used to make anything up, silly stuff that made us laugh. I used to look through the crack in the door, praying nobody would be there.’

Arnold Brown is a Scottish comedian who was working as a stand-up comic at The Comic Strip at that time. He witnessed the girls’ memorable first audition.

‘Their parody of American tourists in London was clever. It was funny, but it didn’t give any hint of how wonderful they were going to be in the future. It wasn’t a sensational sketch, but it was well written, very skillful.’

Brown’s immediate enthusiasm for the girls’ double act led to him encouraging them to listen to tapes of the female double act of yesteryear, Gert and Daisy. Today, he remembers the youthful Jennifer as ‘quite an English rose, very good-looking, good bone structure. And there was obviously something special between the two girls that really connected.

‘They fitted into The Comic Strip perfectly; the boys at The Comic Strip were over the top, a very testosterone line-up. I fitted into it because I was a laid-back contrast to the boys. And they fitted in because it was nice to see two girls doing their stuff.’

Today, we take female comic performers for granted, yet in 1980 they were a novelty: performers on the newly emerging cabaret/stand-up circuit were almost exclusively male. And overtly political stand-up comedy itself was relatively new too, though the arrival of a Tory government and Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was starting to be a strong focus for comedy. Although female performers such as Jenny Lecoat and Jenny Eclair (who went on to a successful career as a comedy writer) were poised to launch careers in the new comedy/cabaret circuit in the early 1980s, their early work involved a more ‘punk’ sensibility than Jennifer and Dawn, whose sketch-based comedy was essentially two women engaged in chatty dialogue, without any heavy emphasis on political issues or feminism and the war between the sexes.

This difference proved to be helpful, too. ‘There were a lot of pro-feminist hard-hitting acts about. But we didn’t do that, which was to our advantage,’ recalled Jennifer.

You can be at the right place at the right time, yet burgeoning creativity needs to be free-flowing and without limits. Because they had hardly any external direction and total freedom to experiment with their material and shape their sketches however they chose, the era was a wonderfully free outlet for their talents. Before long, they were on stage, performing their sketches, several nights a week.

Jennifer has always had great affection for those early attempts at comedy.

‘I loved those days. No responsibilities. We went where we liked, stayed out as long as we wanted and if the audience didn’t laugh, we didn’t care. London itself just felt great – you had nothing to care about, no property, nothing. We didn’t think of it as a job, it was just a bit of fun.’

The pair earned £5 each for an evening’s work. The act was quite basic: sometimes they would just find a prop and work around that, find something to do with it.

‘We had one sketch where we dressed like Thunderbirds puppets and one of us said: “What’s the time, Brains?” The other said: “Six o’clock, Mr Tracy.” That was it. God knows how anyone thought it was funny.’

And so in this small theatre with its lingering haze of stale cigarette smoke, audiences who were often drunk – or had drifted in from outside as an antidote to being hassled on the street by overeager sex touts – the two women launched their careers in comedy.

It was bottom-of-the-ladder, hit-and-miss stuff, still a tad daunting for an essentially shy person like Jennifer, who had only started to overcome her performer’s nerves during her time at Central, but it was a real beginning, an incredibly lucky break to be caught up in performing in something as radically new as The Comic Strip – which eventually proved to be unique in the history of British comedy. Their talents definitely didn’t develop overnight, but they couldn’t have found a better place to launch them.

Dawn continued to teach by day, heading for the bright lights of Soho by night, enjoying the contrast between the two very different worlds while fervently hoping that no one from her school would rumble her other life.

Initially, they tried to create a new sketch each night – until it dawned on them that the audience changed every night anyway so they had more time to produce different material, sometimes working on the scripts at Dawn’s studio in the school after hours.

‘We didn’t know anything about it really. Because we thought you had to change your costumes and material every night at first, by Saturday it got pretty bad,’ Jennifer remembered.

Yet soon, as the girls began to also perform at The Comedy Store, another Soho strip joint hosting a popular late-night comedy venue that had started to attract a great deal of attention even before The Comic Strip’s launch as a venue, their shows in the two Soho venues, just a short walk apart from each other, kick-started a series of events that would transform everything.

The Comedy Store, located in the Gargoyle Club in Soho’s Dean Street (and modelled on the successful, similarly named Comedy Store in Los Angeles), was a venue where new stand-up comedy acts performed each night. It had also been drawing the West End crowds, mostly thanks to the talents of a group of anarchic male comic performers, all young and very much poised to take Brit comedy by storm.

At one point, not long before Jennifer and Dawn got their break at The Comic Strip, this male group had ‘defected’ from The Comedy Store and taken their talents to The Comic Strip, the brainchild of their unofficial gang leader Peter Richardson and a rival venue for their new type of anarchic, character-based comedy performance.

In fact, both venues would eventually go down in comedy history as the birthplace of what came to be called ‘alternative comedy’: young, hip, aggressive, rude, sometimes political stand-up that eschewed the more traditional form of comedy, i.e. telling jokes, and came to be the comic motif of the times. It was usually angry, sometimes ranting, but it was also very, very funny.

The names of these comic actors are essentially a roll call of Brit TV’s late twentieth-century laughtermeisters: driven by the talents of The Comic Strip’s founder, Peter Richardson – with star turn Alexei Sayle acting as compère or MC – the core Comic Strip performers were Ade Edmondson and Rik Mayall (who had formed a double act, 20th Century Coyote, during their days together at Manchester University) and Nigel Planer (one half of another double act with Peter Richardson called The Outer Limits), with occasional guest turns from performers such as Ben Elton, Keith Allen, Chris Langham and Robbie Coltrane.

This was a comic potpourri like no other: a revolutionary group dubbed ‘alternative comedians’ at the time, but essentially the fast-rising generation of TV comic entertainers of the 1980s, riding a new wave of anarchic comedy that was about to sweep the country, first on stage and then on television. And Jennifer and Dawn were now working alongside them. Regularly.

Initially, it was all a bit intimidating.

Jennifer recalled: ‘We were in awe of the boys at first, because they’d been at it six months ahead of us. Dawn and I shared a little dressing room. The boys were next door in a horrible sweaty room. They performed in a hot theatre, night after night, and they never cleaned their suits. It was fairly evil in there, but it was like being part of a family, growing up together.

‘The boys would never tell us what to do; they didn’t give us hints. But just by looking at them, we picked up an idea of what we might be aiming towards.’

Essentially, the girls’ relationship with the boys was like having a large group of older brothers, lots of teasing and joshing – they would all have to go through the strip club each night to reach their dressing rooms.

It was distinctly edgy and fun – the strip club audiences, mostly ageing businessmen, watched the strip shows in another theatre, but they would sometimes have to rub shoulders at The Comic Strip with the younger, fashionable, alternative comedy audience in their trendy New Romantic gear simply because there was only one bar.

Despite their relative inexperience, Jennifer and Dawn held their own, writing and experimenting with new material. Sometimes they got the laughs and cheers, at other times they would fall flat. Encouraged by the good nights, they soon learned to tough out the bad.

‘Rik and Ade had a very aggressive stage act so they could punch their way through any negative feedback from the audience,’ recollected Jennifer, ‘but we’d be the first act and weren’t right in the audience’s faces. So the crowd had plenty of opportunities to shout “Get off! Get off!” We were complete novices. We’d come straight from college and had never done anything like this before.’

They were on a real learning curve. And they still, for the life of them, couldn’t come up with the right name for their double act.

They had spent ages trying to think of something amusing. Names like Kitch ‘n’ Tiles were debated. And discarded. Until one night, Alexei Sayle, fed up with their indecision, took the initiative in typical style. ‘Please welcome French and Saunders,’ he told the audience. And that was it.

At The Comedy Store, the atmosphere was much more frenetic than at The Comic Strip. It was a bit of a bear pit. There was a gong and the general idea was that performers could stay on stage for a short period before being ‘gonged’ off. Sometimes the noisy, boisterous crowd wanted people gonged off straight away. It was confrontational, competitive and very much a male environment. Someone would shout out a racist remark and fights would break out.

‘We were like the early days of motoring: a crazy ride,’ is how Alexei Sayle described it.

At the girls’ first night at The Comedy Store, the act before them was interrupted by a racist heckler. Bottles and chairs flew; total mayhem. The police even turned up to deal with the miscreant. On another occasion a group of boozy men on a stag night yelled out to the girls: ‘Show us your tits!’ At which point, Dawn, in teacher fashion, walked to the edge of the stage and ordered the yobs to shut up and be quiet. It worked. As for the gong, the girls soon discovered that even if they got gonged off quite quickly, they still got paid.

Don Ward, co-founder of The Comedy Store, viewed them very much as comedy actresses rather than stand-up comediennes.

‘There was no star quality about them at all. They might last five minutes or they might even get to eight minutes, but sooner or later the audience would have them off. They didn’t seem to give a damn. They’d shrug their shoulders, pick up their money and say: “Right, Don, see you next week.”

‘And off they’d go.’

Although the girls were gradually being absorbed into The Comic Strip/Richardson ensemble, which was essentially three double acts: the girls, Ade and Rik, and Nigel and Peter, with Alexei Sayle as the MC, they continued to perform in both. Such was the buzz around The Comedy Store that big names started dropping in to watch the acts. Robin Williams leapt up onto the stage to everyone’s delight one night. Bianca Jagger was spotted in the audience. And Jack Nicholson turned up to look – and laugh. Yet equally, the Comic Strip was drawing the attention of influential people in the entertainment world.

As former Head of BBC Entertainment, Paul Jackson recalled: ‘In a way, The Comic Strip became the new punk because there was an anger. Keith Allen once threw beer over an Evening Standard critic.’

Then, at the end of the summer of 1981, Peter Richardson’s Comic Strip group were offered their breakthrough gig: a national tour around the UK. This was scheduled to be followed by a tour of Australia, with a stint at the prestigious Adelaide Festival in South Australia in March 1982. It was decision time: should Dawn ditch her safe teaching career in north London for a chance to expand both girls’ horizons as comic performers?

Dawn felt torn. She deliberated until her boss at the school pointed out that, much as they didn’t want to lose her, the chance to go on tour to Australia was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When a real chance beckons, you recognise it, and grab it with both hands. And anyway, Jennifer and Dawn were having a really good time.

You only have to watch clips of those far-off days in Soho to see just how much fun they were having: Jennifer as the neurotic American Diana (complete with 1980s hairdo and shiny white top) while her friend from back home, Muriel (Dawn sporting an equally odd 1980s streaky mullet hairdo), pops up from the audience to share her delight at meeting another American – and going to the ‘Towerr of Lundin – and all the little beef burgers there’. It’s not that funny, not by the standards of what came afterwards, but with those two nervy tourists, you can spot the genesis, the beginnings of the satirical comic style that was to propel them towards popularity.

‘We decided to have a go. If it was awful, we had each other. And we’d buy a bottle of Blue Nun and go home,’ recalled Jennifer.

But from that point on, from when The Comic Strip tour started out, cheap plonk like Blue Nun (a big favourite of the late 1970s) was on its way out. Within a few years they would be quaffing Bolly, sweetie – from the finest crystal glasses, of course.