Bonkers: My Life in Laughs

by Saunders, Jennifer

  Dawn doesn’t drink a great deal, but I do, given the opportunity. Never before a show though. If someone offers me a drink pre-curtain up, I hear her voice booming from a distance: ‘NOOOOOO!!!!’ You see I did it once, in the early days of the Comic Strip, and went a bit happy and woozy and lost any sense of timing. I have never been allowed to forget it.

  Back to the Comic Strip, 1981.

  Over the time we have been there, we have honed our act and written more substantial sketches. We have even found a way of getting into and out of them better. At first, we came onstage, went straight into character, and the audience only knew we had ended when we said ‘Thank you’ and took a bow. There was no real French and Saunders. But then we started going on in the second half of the show, and Dawn insisted we got equal pay with the boys, which took it up to about £15 a night, so that, instead of just being able to afford the bus fare home, I could have a doner kebab as well.

  We were now part of the gang, and the reputation of the Comic Strip had grown. Through Michael White’s connections, the audience had almost become more watchable than the show. It had become trendy, with famous (the word ‘celebrities’ hadn’t been invented yet) Jack Nicholson and Bianca Jagger types watching. There was even a Sun headline: ‘Bianca’s 4-letter night out’. Lenny Henry came in one night and sat at the back. But most extraordinary was that Robin Williams came in, not only to watch, but to perform in the guest slot. We always had guests: Keith Allen, Tony Allen (the Guv’nor), Chris Langham, Ben Elton. But Robin Williams!

  Dawn and I insisted that Robin share our dressing room because the thought of him entering the funk next door was more than we could bear. He was wired and never stopped talking, a different voice coming out of him every other second, like machine-gun fire. So we never stopped staring. He did a brilliant set. (Although the audience were slightly confused by the fact that Chris Langham, not realizing who the acts were that night, had gone on in the first half and done most of Robin Williams’ material.)

  But Robin Williams! Robin Williams on the stage where Dawn and I had performed our (very popular) rebirthing sketch – the one where Dawn is trying to rebirth me and I can’t find my way out of a red duvet cover. Robin Williams! I had four comedy heroes at this time – Robin, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Joan Rivers – and throughout my life since have managed to meet them all. I’ve never been disappointed. All are, or were, geniuses and took risks. Mr Pastry took a back seat for a while.

  When he came offstage, Robin was sweaty and didn’t have a spare T-shirt, so I gave him mine. A blue striped T-shirt. I gave my T-shirt to Robin Williams. I told him he could keep it, hoping that one day, when our paths crossed again, I would strike up a conversation.

  ‘Hey, Robin! Still got that blue stripey T-shirt with the red bit round the collar?’

  ‘Why, I sure do. Let me buy you a drink …’

  ‘Jennifer.’

  But a week later it was returned, unfortunately washed and ironed. Heigh-ho.

  Soho was a great place to work, and in 1981 it was very different from today. There was the sex industry and the film industry, but not yet the sprawl of bars and restaurants. And the Groucho Club hadn’t been invented then. That didn’t happen until 1985. It is now a much busier but, I think, less interesting area. There were some good cheap restaurants, a few bars, but mainly strip joints, clip joints, porn cinemas and sex shops. As you walked down the street, most of the door buzzers stated that there were prostitutes living there, should you feel inclined to visit them. Often they would be standing by the door, just advertising themselves. It was a beautifully scruffy place full of degenerates and generates, transvestites and vestites, comedians, artists and addicts. The streets smelt of rubbish from the market, smashed bottles of vodka and marijuana.

  As I walked to get the bus late at night, I never got any hassle. I just wasn’t the sort of girl that the men on the streets were after and – not supplyin’ or requirin’ drugs, or indeed carrying any more than £5 in my bag at any time – I probably wasn’t a target. And there were enough heavies standing outside the venues to make you feel protected.

  Back in the dressing room. We have all decided that, after the late show tonight, we are going to see some kind of sex show. We suspect that most of the boys have already seen one, but do not let on. Dawn and I are conflicted by our confused and largely non-existent feminist politics. We are just going to see what all the fuss was about.

  SORRY, FEMINISTS, THIS IS A LONG TIME AGO AND I AM NOW MUCH CLEARER ABOUT IT ALL.

  Back in the early days of the Comic Strip, Dawn and I played a couple of very scary gigs. One was at the Drill Hall, which we were told was largely a feminist venue. And it was. We were hissed throughout our set for showing women in a negative light.

  The other scary one was the Comedy Store. The boys had played there a lot, but we had never had the nerve. Basically, you just had to play onstage and hope that the audience liked you. If they started booing, the compère would hoick you off. It was competitive. The level of booing depended on how drunk the audience were, how fast you could get through your act. I realize that this is why the boys’ acts were fast and aggressive: you just couldn’t allow the audience any thinking time.

  We went onstage to the inevitable shouts of ‘Show us yer tits!’, which we ignored, and proceeded at speed with our sketch. But the shouts got worse and were coming mainly from a large group of men in the corner. ‘Get yer tits out!’ We tried to keep going, but just when I was happy to leave the stage, Dawn marched to the front and looked hard at these men.

  ‘Will you just shut up! Do you realize how rude you are being? There are people in this audience who actually like to listen. Stop it! Just shut up!’

  The whole audience went quiet and so did the shouters. We finished our act and left the stage, to mild applause. Dawn had frightened them. Dawn was not only brave but she was also a teacher and she was having none of it.

  Later, as we were about to leave, one of the group came up to us. He apologized profusely and explained that it was a stag do that had got a bit out of hand. Surprisingly, they were from the River Police.

  Right, so now we are in the sex-show building. We have paid some money for a session. There appears to be a line of velvet-curtained booths. We are told that there is only one booth available and no more than two are allowed in at once. We say we will take it in turns. Which we don’t. We all pile into a tiny booth and draw the curtain. It is totally dark.

  Suddenly, a shutter goes up in front of us and we are looking at a near-naked woman on a bed (at least she has her pants on). She is playing up sexily to all the booth windows, stroking herself and pointing her bottom at them suggestively.

  When she comes across to our booth, I see that she is not happy. All eight of us have our faces pressed to the glass, laughing. She isn’t doing any of the stroking or bottom pointing for our benefit and, before we know it, the shutter is coming down and we are being asked to leave.

  We can’t even get our money back.

  We think we’ll go to Jimmy’s in Frith Street for some chips.

  FOUR

  It is May 1985 and I have just woken up in a huge bed in a huge hotel in the Lake District. Waking up next to me is a lovely man. I have married Adrian Edmondson.

  We had a fantastic wedding at my home in Cheshire, which my mother managed to organize in six weeks. That was all the notice we gave her. In my 26-year-old mind, that seemed like ages. We told my parents that we were engaged just before we disappeared on a three-week holiday to St Lucia, the Iles des Saintes and Antigua, and left them to get on with it. Looking back on this – and having organized my own daughter’s wedding – I can’t believe we had the nerve. However, we did look gorgeous and tanned on the day.

  Somehow, with help from our friends and some unseasonably good weather, they gave us a beautiful day.

  My outfit was made by the costume designers we were working with on The Supergrass, a Comic Strip film we had just finished making.
I absolutely didn’t want a fluffy dress, so they made me an Edwardian-style outfit from cream silk. On my feet I wore very early Emma Hope shoes. Ade wore a dress coat that had been worn by Simon Ward in Young Winston, and looked very handsome. His best man was Rik Mayall.

  I had two tiny bridesmaids. Tiny because they were children, not midgets. In fact, they were barely children. They were toddlers. One was JoBo’s daughter, my god-daughter Cordelia, who was eighteen months old. The other was Peter and Marta Richardson’s daughter, Alice, who was slightly older but had only just learned to walk. They were very beautiful and made a very good attempt at following me down the aisle and only fell over twice. I didn’t fall over at all, which was a miracle. But then I had a sensible heel.

  Can I just say (it’s me now, dear reader, in 2013), what is it with the height of shoes nowadays? Shoe stilts that women are forced into? Six-inch heels? Really? I know, yes, they probably have a platform, which means they only have a five-inch heel – but very few women can actually walk in these things. Once a heel is that high, you are basically just walking on tippy toes. You would be better off just painting shoes on your feet and actually walking on tippy toes. It would be less painful.

  A few years ago, Dawn and I were offered a BAFTA Fellowship. I managed to persuade Dawn (who loathes awards and prizes) to accept it, and to attend the ceremony. (I dealt a low blow by telling her not to think about it as an award for herself but as something that would make her mother very proud. So low.) And besides, there would be no pressure that evening because we had already won the award and so didn’t have to be nervous or cross and could spend our time having a nice party and meeting people we admired. I really wanted to meet Harry Hill and hoped he would be there. Very few things have induced hysterical, pee-making, someone-may-have-to-slap-me-because-I-can’t-stop laughter, but Victoria Wood’s Acorn Antiques is one and Harry Hill’s TV Burp the other.

  Because we had a lot of notice and knew we were going to have to walk the dreaded red carpet (though Dawn always seems to manage to find a back door and avoid the whole shebang), I decided, for the first time in my life, to prepare in advance what I was going to wear. Usually I leave it too late, convinced that I will shed a stone in a week, and then rush out and buy something I don’t like, just because it fits and I’m desperate.

  There are too many clothes in the world and a lot of them are fairly spiteful. If I take a wander down Bond Street, there are clothes in the windows that really don’t want to be worn at all. They dare you to walk in the shop. They dare you to finger an item on the rail. They dare you to tell the spiky assistant that you’re just browsing.

  Shall I put it in the changing room for you?

  No.

  Why?

  Because I haven’t been able to look at the price ticket yet and I’m almost 100 per cent sure you won’t have it in my size. And because you will try and make it fit and tell me it looks great and I will be forced to buy it out of embarrassment.

  Then the evil clothes dare you not to leave the shop immediately, so you wander aimlessly towards the door, still fingering the rails, and then turn and say ‘Thank you’ before hitting the street and vowing never ever to go back.

  I asked Betty Jackson to make me a dress.

  Betty and I had been introduced by a brown tasselled leather jacket during the filming of a series of French and Saunders. Alison Moyet, a friend of Dawn’s, had worn the jacket on one of our shows and I had fallen in love with it. I wanted it. I wanted it bad. It fitted in with everything that I liked. It was just a bit cowboy, with shoulder pads.

  Dawn somehow arranged this, with one catch: I had to go to Betty’s shop and pick the jacket up myself. My idea of living hell. She was a famous designer; I was just a lumpy comedienne who didn’t really have any nice clothes. But I really wanted the jacket and went to Betty’s shop, looked at the floor a lot and mumbled. Betty was slightly braver and attempted to look me in the eye before I left, which resulted in us both getting quite embarrassed. However, the jacket was such a success that I went back for more clothes, and over the next few visits we even managed conversation and then laughter. It turned out that Betty and I had children much the same age and, gradually, we became friends, and our husbands became friends. As our kids grew up, we spent many happy and completely drunken Sundays together. The children would perform plays and fashion shows and sometimes weddings for us, while we disappeared into the bleary, happy world of eau de vie.

  Anyway, back to the BAFTAs. I had lost a lot of weight on a detox diet, and didn’t even have to ask Betty to make the dress quite tight, because on the day I actually was going to be a stone lighter than usual.

  All I needed was to find some shoes.

  I found a pair of black satin Louboutins. They were beautiful. A small platform and a cope-able heel. They fitted perfectly. Not too tight anywhere. Just snug and remarkably comfortable. I bought the matching clutch bag too.

  For the first time in my life, I had got a whole proper outfit a week ahead of an event. I got a fake tan and a manicure and, by the time my make-up and hair were done on the night, I felt very swish. I felt comfortable and confident – a feeling I had never experienced before when dressed up. I was ready on time, not in a panic, and not running up- and downstairs in different dresses trying to drag an opinion out of Ade.

  ‘Does this look mad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think it does.’

  ‘It doesn’t. The car’s here.’

  ‘If you saw me, what would you think?’

  ‘I’d think …’

  ‘Look at me from behind. You don’t think it looks mad? That I look mad?’

  ‘No. The car’s here.’

  ‘I think it looks mad. I’m going to wear the other dress. FUCK, why can’t I just wear jeans?! Do you think we have to go?’

  ‘Car’s here. I’ll wait for you in the car.’

  Ade was probably pleased to be busy on the evening of the Awards, so I took my friend, the set designer Lez Brotherston, and we set off for the Royal Festival Hall. Then the driver said he wasn’t allowed to drive up the side of the Hall to the entrance and we would have to get out and walk. Walk? It was a long way. By the time we actually hit the red carpet, I was in agony; the shoes were rubbing at the back of my heel and the balls of my feet were burning. As I reached the end of the red carpet, I was beginning to hobble. So I rushed into the Hall and took the shoes off, stood barefoot on the marble floor, cooled my feet until they felt comfortable and then slid them back into the shoes. But a strange thing had happened. They didn’t fit. My toes were squished into the toe space, as before, but now there was a centimetre gap between my heel and the back of the shoe. They had become Louboutin flip-flops.

  Pain in toes now greater. Body trying to pipe itself through the peep toes. I found a toilet and attempted to pad the shoes with toilet paper. Nothing worked. I was in the grip of torture; Louboutin high-heely flippy-floppy body-piping torture. Lez guided me from then on, supporting me by the arm as if I had been recently shot.

  I sat through the ceremony, during which I could only think, How am I going to walk up the steps without embarrassing myself? Richard Curtis made a jolly and kind speech and then Helen Mirren came on and did the same. (What an honour. After all, she is, to all intents and purposes, the Queen.)

  The time came for us to collect the award. Dawn annoyingly skipped on to the stage in flat pumps. I walked, stiff-legged, with a slight scooping action to bear pain and stop shoes falling off (gap at heel had doubled by now), made it without incident, got given heavy BAFTA – ‘Thank you, Ma’am’ – and curtsied. As the evening progressed, the pain lessened but I lost all sensation in my toes (I imagine it’s a bit like frostbite). Got home and was frightened to take the shoes off in case my toes came off with them. Considered going to A&E to have them surgically removed. Never wore them again, but gave them to my daughter to wear to parties and trash.

  And did I meet Harry Hill? Oh yes. Met comedy hero Harry Hill.
During the walk into the auditorium I saw him. I let go of Lez’s arm and attempted to move towards him nonchalantly.

  ‘Harry Hill, how are you?’

  ‘Jennifer Saunders. Why are you walking so strangely?’

  I told my daughter to party in them, walk in mud in them, spill vodka on them. Kill the wicked evil shoes.

  Anyhow, I’ve taken us well off track. Let’s go back to 1985.

  Screen goes wobbly.

  Ade and I are getting married.

  The ceremony took place in our local church in Crowton. It’s a funny old church. On a Sunday morning, you would be amazed to hear the most beautiful bells ringing out across the fields. Amazed because the church itself didn’t have a bell tower and so had, very obviously, no bells at all. Not even a small tinkler. It all came from speakers rigged up by the vicar who was going to marry us and whom our next-door neighbour, Clara, an Italian Roman Catholic, refused to sit next to, not because of religious differences but because someone had told her that he had had an unexploded bullet lodged in his spine since the war and she was afraid it might go off at any time and hit her.

  He was generally a good vicar, but on that particular day he got very overexcited by some of the faces in the congregation. Jools Holland played the organ as I entered. I met Ade at the altar. And then the vicar took over.

  ‘I see we’ve got Lenny Henry in the audience.’

  That was his opener, and from that moment he veered off course into a small stand-up routine.

  There were two types of people as far as my father was concerned: funny, nice people and ‘stupid arses’. For most of the wedding, all I could hear was my father (who was an atheist) muttering loudly, ‘Stupid arse! What’s the stupid arse doing? Just get on with it, you stupid bloody arse!’