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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

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