LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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