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Jennifer Saunders - The Unauthorised Biography of the Absolutely Fabulous Star. Jacky Hyams
Читать онлайн.Название Jennifer Saunders - The Unauthorised Biography of the Absolutely Fabulous Star
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isbn 9781782190844
Автор произведения Jacky Hyams
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
‘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.
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