Bonkers: My Life in Laughs

by Saunders, Jennifer

  I should have met Mimo at 3 but couldn’t be bothered.

  Ironed some sheets, laid the table, shut the shutters.

  Signora arrived home and put herself to bed. She remained in bed the rest of the evening.

  At 8 I started to get ready to go out having arranged to meet Oscar outside at 8.30. It was a beautiful night and Milan looked like a painting against the blue-black sky. The Gallerie was especially beautiful. We had a panini and cappuccino in a bar and then went upstairs to the American Bar. I had a Gin Fizz with an umbrella stuck in it.

  I got quite tipsy on the Fizz and, coming back towards Via Cappuccio, started singing rather loudly, at first Led Zeppelin, then Amarillo. Got back. Signora opened the door. I did the kitchen. Went to bed.

  The Signora was always suspicious of me. Where had I been? Who was I with? I was never allowed a key to the house and never allowed to bring anyone into it. It was a time when the Brigate Rosse, a Marxist paramilitary gang, were kidnapping and murdering the children of the rich, so maybe she had good cause to worry. One of my many boyfriends was actually a policeman, so I told her this and it seemed to calm her.

  I did eventually escape.

  A friend of mine from school, Helen Newman, had got a job working with a family in Orbetello, on the coast above Rome, and I took a few days off from shutter shutting to go and visit her.

  She was working for a family called Von Rex. He was a Bavarian count in his sixties – tall and imposing. His wife, Adriana, was tall and imposing and in her forties. They were the most extraordinary couple, with two sons, and couldn’t have been more different from the Zucchis. They were eccentric and funny.

  He had built the house, a large sprawling bungalow surrounded by olive groves. The main rooms of the house were filled with the remains of the contents of a Bavarian castle that had once belonged to his family. They had dogs and horses and chickens, and I loved it.

  Adriana was quite wild. She had been Adriana Ivancich, daughter of a Venetian aristocrat, who in her youth had been Ernest Hemingway’s muse. He wrote Across the River and into the Trees about their relationship. ‘Then she came into the room, shining in her youth and tall, striding beauty. She had pale, almost olive-colored skin, a profile that could break your or anyone else’s heart, and her dark hair, of an alive texture, hung down over her shoulders.’ In a letter, written to her from Nairobi in 1954, Hemingway said, ‘I love you more than the moon and the sky and for as long as I live.’

  Adriana never got over this. She carried the air of the Disappointed Muse about her. The rest of her life could never quite live up to that moment in her youth. I became fascinated by her; she filled her days drinking and smoking and heading up an ‘antinucleare’ campaign, which allowed her to let off steam. Her husband filled his days with his olive groves and horses. The two would row fiercely with him ranting in German and her in Italian.

  They treated Helen as part of the family, and I was welcomed warmly. When I got there, I knew I never wanted to leave. I went to Milan and handed in my notice. Signora Zucchi expressed no disappointment or surprise. No emotion at all.

  For the next four months, I was in a kind of heaven. We rode horses, moved irrigation pipes for trees, learned to cook pasta, shopped in local markets and made olive oil. We were taken out in yachts and had trips to Rome. We went to the beach for picnics in a horse and trap. We sat in on wild dinner parties where Adriana had invited writers and artists from Milan and she would be in her element, holding court and getting drunker and wilder.

  Once, on a shopping trip to the local town, we were all squashed into her 2CV when she realized she had just passed someone driving in the opposite direction that she needed to talk to immediately. She swung the car round without warning, mounting the pavement and crossing two flower beds, and drove after them at speed, only to be stopped by the police. They eventually let her go because they couldn’t stop her talking. This was not unusual. She was erratic, and this made life interesting.

  I see now that Edina in Absolutely Fabulous owes a lot to Adriana; certainly the sense that life has not lived up to her expectations, and authority is an irritant.

  When I got home, my mother didn’t recognize me. I had grown up. In truth I think I had just got a tan and lost weight, but perhaps she could detect a new-found confidence. She had the UCCA forms waiting, and what followed has led me to this step.

  JoBo has arrived with the papers. Before doing the crossword, we flick through the jobs section at the back of The Stage. There are no jobs going on cruises, but there is an ad wanting comedy acts for a new club. Specifically, they want female comedy acts. I think there is a possibility that Dawn and I could be a comedy act.

  She is doing her probationary year teaching, but if we took the job in the club, they would only want us in the evening, so there shouldn’t be a problem. I call her that night. Please remember, young people, these are the days before mobile telephones, when you had to wait till the person was home in order to get them. Or you had to use pigeon post. I call her.

  ‘Dawn?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Jennifer. Do you remember me from college?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, the thing is …’

  ‘Oh, do get on, I’ve got books to mark.’

  ‘Well, the thing is …’

  ‘And lesson plans to do.’

  ‘Well, the thing is …’

  ‘Stop saying “the thing is” and get to the point.’

  ‘Well … blah blah blah … the thing is … Oh no, now I’ve said “the thing is”. I was trying to say “blah blah blah” instead of “the thing is”.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The thing?’

  ‘Oh, the thing is, could we be, do you think, a comedy act?’

  ‘But I’ve got books to mark.’

  ‘Could we, do you think?’

  ‘But I’ve got lesson plans. I’m a teacher, Jen.’

  ‘Just the odd evening. Shall we audition?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know. Send me something by pigeon and I’ll think about it.’

  THREE

  So onwards, dear reader. It’s 1981.

  My 23-year-old self is sitting in a small dressing room at the Comic Strip club with Dawn.

  After Dawn had agreed that we might indeed be described as a female comedy act, I’d rung the club and was told to come along and audition. Dawn and I had decided to do the Americans sketch that we had performed at the college cabaret. We hadn’t ever written it down, so we met after her school day to try to remember how it had gone. (I don’t think Dawn and I ever wrote any sketches down until we had to, which was when we started doing television and directors insisted on knowing what we were going to say. Even then, we gave them only a scant impression. As long as we both knew the order we were doing things in, we were fine. I still find that scripting over-formalizes things and you start waiting for each other to say the written line, rather than just acting out the funny.)

  The audition took place at the Boulevard Theatre in Raymond’s Revue Bar in Soho, a popular nudey-show venue. Neither of us thought that being called to perform in a strip club was strange at all. We just went.

  The Revue Bar was owned by the famous Paul Raymond, property magnate and porn king. It was one of the few legal venues in London that could show full-frontal nudity. Luckily, as it turned out, not Dawn’s or mine.

  Sometimes, we were taken to meet Paul Raymond in the bar and he bought us a drink. Dawn and I never quite knew what to say to him. I don’t think he looked at us as if we were real women. We were a new breed. He was a strange-looking man, slightly built, and wore tinted glasses and often a long, waisted mink coat. But we have to thank him, because he was the one who eventually got us an Equity card.

  The Boulevard was a 200-seater theatre. In 1980, Peter Richardson – with assistance from theatre impresario Michael White – hired it as a new come
dy venue. The only other big comedy venue was the nearby Comedy Store, but Peter wanted his own place and brought with him the core group from the Store: Alexei Sayle (the compère), Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall (20th Century Coyote); himself and Nigel Planer (The Outer Limits); and a stand-up called Arnold Brown (‘I’m Scottish and Jewish – two stereotypes for the price of one’).

  Ade and Rik had been at Manchester University together. Their characters the Dangerous Brothers had a crazed energy; I asked Ade recently how he would describe the act and he said, ‘Bollocks done at 100 miles an hour. No jokes, just a huge amount of fear.’ It was in fact a brilliant combination of non-jokes, great comic timing and extreme physical violence. Rik also had his own act as Kevin Turvey and Rik the Poet, and was being seen as the golden boy of comedy. He was a superb performer. Offstage Ade was the quieter of the two and would often come into the girls’ dressing room. I remember liking him, but there was no bolt of lightning. He also wasn’t available: he was married to his first wife, Anna.

  All the boys were very civilized offstage. Alexei would storm on and off the stage in a blaze of screamed absurdities and ‘Fuck’s and ‘Hello John, got a new motor?’ and then be modest and shy. He and Pete and Nigel – and of course Arnold – were slightly older than the rest of us. Dawn and I got on best with the Coyotes initially.

  They were all great acts, but Pete knew, or I suspect had been told, that he needed some females on the bill. Women. Hence the ad in The Stage.

  We arrived, did our sketch and were hired. I have to admit, there didn’t seem to be a great deal of competition. The other acts auditioning were fire eaters and jugglers. There just weren’t many female acts around; most comedy clubs were bear pits. I think we got the gig by virtue of the fact that we were the first living, breathing people with bosoms to walk through the door. The ‘Alternative Comedy’ circuit was just taking off, and there weren’t yet many proper venues. Just pubs and vegetarian restaurants.

  Culturally there was a great sense of change. To be young was to be angry and resistant and to rail iconoclastically (not entirely sure what this means, but the dictionary suggests that it’s what I mean) against what had gone before. Music was angry, and comedy was angry. But, generally, Dawn and I represented those who were just quite cross.

  Dawn was more political than I was, because she was a teacher, I suspect, and had a real job. Whereas I was basically unemployed by choice. But neither of us could have been described as ‘right on’. We were not Right-Onners, though we would shout ‘Up Nicaragua!’ or ‘Down with Thatcher!’ when required, and that was quite a lot. And we all hated Bernard Manning.

  Now I had a job. Dawn had two jobs.

  To begin with, Pete put Dawn and me on the quiet nights – Tuesdays and Wednesdays – which was a good idea as we really didn’t know what we were doing. We were usually the first act on, presumably so that if we were very bad the audience would have forgotten about us by the end.

  At first, we were so inexperienced that we thought we had to change our act every evening. Then someone pointed out to us that it was in fact the audience who changed and that we didn’t have to. By this point, the pool of sketches that we could use had been getting shallow. In desperation one night, this happened onstage:

  Dawn and Jennifer move around the stage attempting to look like Thunderbirds puppets. Eventually …

  SAUNDERS: What’s the time, Brains?

  Dawn raises arm as if to look at watch, but wrist hits forehead.

  FRENCH: Four o’clock, Mr Tracy.

  Silence from audience.

  SAUNDERS/FRENCH (to audience): Thank you.

  They bow and leave the stage.

  Every night, sick with nerves, we would stand side-stage waiting to go on and I would look out at the audience through a little window in the door and wish they weren’t there, wish that they would all go home. We were only just getting away with it at that point.

  Occasionally a man would make his way into the audience by accident. This wasn’t the show he had come to see at all. They were easy to spot, men like these, sitting on their own in large macs looking confused when Alexei Sayle leaped on to the stage and opened the show with his loud Marxist-inspired sweary rant, before introducing me and Dawn. And then, to their total shock, we would come onstage fully dressed and remain so throughout the act.

  The best thing about going on first was finishing first. We would make our way around to the back of the auditorium to watch the other acts. This is how we learned how to do it. They had been at it longer than we had, and were incredibly confident and funny.

  One of our favourite guest acts was called Hermine. She was a French performance artist and beautifully weird and funny. She was accompanied in her act by a musician who was tall, softly spoken and smelt better than any other boy. This was her act:

  Music starts.

  Hermine enters slowly.

  She is entirely covered by a cone of newspapers that have been glued together. It is the pink Financial Times. All you can see is her feet. She gingerly makes her way over to the microphone.

  Inside the cone, she starts to sing the theme to Valley of the Dolls in a low French drawl:

  ‘Got to get off, gonna get

  Have to get off from zis ride …’

  Then, very slowly, she starts to pick a hole in the paper (evoking our memories of the egg) and, while singing, gradually emerges from the cone.

  It was mesmerizing. Her expression never changed. When she was totally out of the paper, she just leaned into the microphone.

  ‘Sank you.’

  And left the stage.

  At this point we didn’t have a name for our own act. We were just ‘The first act this evening …’ It was Alexei who eventually came up with French and Saunders, out of sheer frustration. We had knocked about a few names and our favourite was Kitsch ’n’ Tiles. We thought anything with ’n’ in it was cool. Luckily, Alexei disagreed and we have him to thank for that to this day.

  So, backstage there are two small dressing rooms, as well as the fire escape where Peter and Nigel go out every night after coming offstage to have a shouty boys’ row. I don’t know what has happened between them, because the act had always appeared to go well and been fairly similar every night. The shoutings and fights, however, are regular. We think the problem is that Peter is a bit of a wild man and Nigel is a proper actor, and the mix is explosive.

  Pete had spent a lot of his adult life travelling around Europe in a converted horsebox, and Nigel was currently understudying Che in Evita, which was the big new musical. My favourite musical, in fact. When I was in Italy, I had asked my mother to get hold of the cassettes and send them to me. It wasn’t the stage version – Elaine Paige hadn’t been invented then – and the part of Evita was sung by Julie Covington, whom I worshipped. She had given me hope when I learned that she hadn’t actually become famous until she was twenty-seven, so I still had time …

  My wanting to be famous started when I was at college and I wanted to be in a band. I wanted to be Patti Smith (not look like her, just have her life). I wanted to read Rilke and Rimbaud, and write crazy poems that didn’t require punctuation or form, and sing to thousands of people. Popular, but cool and dangerous. It was a good daydream.

  Truth is, I would have been scared to death of Patti Smith and all her friends. There is a line in Joni Mitchell’s ‘Case of You’: ‘I’m frightened by the devil, and I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid.’ That’s close to my truth. I love crazy people, eccentric people, people who are brave and ‘out there’, but I am always just quite safe myself.

  Dawn and I have the smaller of the dressing rooms, which we generally have to ourselves, there being a lack of comedy females. All the boys are squashed into the other one, next door. We do go in and hang with them sometimes, but, to be honest, it stinks. They are always dripping with sweat when they come offstage, and the only facility to wash in is a sink which is always filled with bottles of beer. Their stage suits are
hung up, wet with sweat, and left to dry out before being worn the next night. The funk of BO and fags is heavy in the air, spiced up with a whiff of old doner kebab, chips from the night before and the odd fart. It hums.

  Occasionally, at various intervals, the boys come and see us in our nice, un-smelly dressing room. Including Ade. Quite often.

  In our nice, un-smelly dressing room, we have a mirror with lights around it and a good shelf in front, where we can put a hairbrush and some make-up. We have only recently learned about make-up and its effects. Last week, we got into our dressing room to find another woman in it. Pauline Melville was slightly older than us and had a very funny act. She seemed to have lots of things laid out on the shelf, and we watched as she applied them to her face. She was putting on make-up! The effect was good, and it got us thinking that perhaps we should put on make-up too. We bought a light foundation and some brown mascara, and didn’t look back.

  Whenever Dawn and I have done a show together – in a studio or on tour – we always share a dressing room and, if possible, sit next to one another. It is comforting, and we chat and run lines and check each other’s make-up before putting on our costumes.

  Once, during a French and Saunders show, our make-up designer tried to have us separated. We were about to have a very long, tricky make-up session to become the Fat Men, involving prosthetics (moulded bits of latex that change your face shape) and bald caps. The designer had decided that it would be quicker if we were apart, because we wouldn’t talk and interfere with the gluing process. It never happened. Within minutes, we were back sitting next to each other again, talking and laughing, sometimes to the point of tears, as we became the characters. This made the poor designer’s job really difficult.

  All dressing rooms in theatres have their differences, but they are invariably all shit-holes with poor facilities, bad plumbing and nowhere to be comfortable. But you make do. By the time we were doing big tours and large venues, we had a ‘rider’, a list of things we would like to see in the room when we arrived – not just a bowl of waxy, inedible fruit and some peanuts. We like Marks & Spencer sandwiches, lemons and honey (for Dawn’s vocal-cord drinks), nice coffee, chocolate (preferably Crunchie bars), and a bottle of good Sauvignon Blanc for after (eat yer heart out, Mariah Carey!).