Jennifer Saunders: Still fabulous. Photo: Ian Gavan/GettyCrack open the bolly darling, Eddie and Patsy are back with a Christmas catch-up special. Jennifer Saunders reflects on the
sheer joy of reuniting the Ab Fab team after her recovery from cancer.
Olive, out of the way! No! Get down! There’s a good girl.” Jennifer Saunders is laying down the law to her pet whippet, who seems impish by nature and determined to jump up and snatch the chocolate digestive out of my hand. While an admonished Olive skulks, head lowered, back to her designated spot (on top of a fluffy sheepskin rug), on the sofa opposite, Saunders plumps up a Union Jack cushion behind her and reaches for her mug of tea.
We are above an inconspicuous bathroom shop just off the fashionable Portobello Road in her cosy London office-cum-flat – it’s all wooden floors, chunky cream sofas and generally shabby chic.
Looking around you are left in no doubt as to whose property this is – propped up on top of the kitchen units are huge canvases of the owner in full on Ab Fab mode alongside Joanna Lumley, while down the corridor, the loo is dedicated to snaps with her comedy partner, Dawn French.
Across the wall of the main room there’s a substantial collage of pictures cut from magazines, photographs of old friends (a young Stephen Fry and an almost unrecognisably baby-faced Ben Elton) combined with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Lotte Lenya (in a headscarf, looking a dead-ringer for Hilda Ogden). “A moment of madness,” says Saunders, grinning, when asked.
I’d guess there isn’t a whiff of this kind of memorabilia at her main residence – the 400-year-old Devon farmhouse where she lives with her husband of 26 years, comedian Adrian Edmondson. The couple have three daughters – singer-songwriter Ella, 25, Beattie, 24, and Freya, 21– several cows, horses and rare-breed sheep.
Our conversation is barely underway before Olive, clearly unhappy at being ignored, begins yapping. But Saunders is stern: “Oi! Shush please. You are not the point of attention here – I am!” On that note, I put it to her she’s someone who doesn’t seem to enjoy the glare of self-promotion, pointing out that she’s done relatively few interviews considering she’s had such a long and successful career.
“Me just being myself in public or on TV is the biggest nightmare in the world,” she says. “If you are in the public eye you need to have a front, a person you are. There was a scene that we did in Vivienne Vyle [her 2007 BBC comedy about a celebrity talk-show host] where she has to open a supermarket and she really doesn’t want to do it and I can totally relate to that. I have sat in cars going, why am I doing this? Why have I got to meet these people I don’t know? If I could just pay someone to get out of it, then I would get out of it.”
She kept her breast cancer, which was diagnosed in October 2009, secret until she was spotted wearing a wig at a party – and even then she mentioned it only in passing on her (occasional) Radio 2 show alongside Dawn French. She recently stated: “People have much worse times, so it would feel ghastly to want to evoke any sort of sympathy or something.”
She completed her treatment last year but says the experience hasn’t particularly changed her outlook.
“I think I’ve always been a chilled person actually, because the kids keep you pretty chilled. I’d do writing in the day and then you go home and family life would take over. I don’t really know if it has affected my outlook on work much actually. I think what I realised was that it took me a long time to get back to where I was before I was ill. I thought I was there but I really wasn’t, because you physically get tired very quickly and mentally it takes you longer to get up to speed. I think it was just that kind of getting back up to speed that took me by surprise.”
Today her hair is a tousled golden crop, she’s dressed in a rust-coloured wrap-around cardigan, with stylish denims and expensive-looking black boots. Her banter is self-deprecating, and as conversation flows easily she appears unperturbed to find herself in one of her supposedly dreaded interview situations.
We’re here to discuss the return of Absolutely Fabulous, which is making a festive comeback seven years after Edina and the gang last appeared on our screens in a sketch for Comic Relief. “I just missed everyone so much and I missed doing a sitcom.” This year also marks 20 years since the multi award-winning comedy’s pilot episode and she suggests the weight of anticipation surrounding the new episodes almost made her think twice about the anniversary comeback. “I was worried bringing the characters back would feel too ridiculous somehow, that was my worry, but I don’t think it did or at least I hope it didn’t. Luckily everyone was up for it and the next thing was to work out how the characters had moved on or not moved on and to make sure that everyone was happy with that.”
In the Christmas specials (a third Olympic-themed episode is also in the bag for next year), ham-fisted PR Edina (Saunders) is still a walking fashion disaster and pill-popping, ageing mag-slag Patsy (Joanna Lumley) remains as inebriated as ever, much to the despair of long-suffering Saffy (Julia Sawalha). There is a guest appearance from Sofie Grabol, the cult Danish star of The Killing, meanwhile loopy, technologically challenged PA, Bubble (Jane Horrocks), is struggling to come to terms with the fact she can’t write on her iPad with a felt-tip pen.
Saunders enjoyed the Ab Fab reunion so much there’s now a potential big screen version in the pipeline, however she claims to be mystified by the continuing appetite for the show.
“I have no idea why, other than the characters aren’t trying to be anything they’re not and they aren’t politically correct. I think also it’s because the show is just panto. It’s gags, the characters are larger than life and it’s not pretending to be sophisticated in any way. I hope that everyone who is looking forward to it is pleased with it and isn’t disappointed. But ultimately you can’t be constantly worrying about people’s expectations, you’ve just got to do what you think is funny.”
The daughter of an RAF captain and a biology teacher, Saunders was born into a family of high-achieving Oxbridge types – her mother’s father was South African and her maternal grandmother a Scot.
“When I was a child, a lot of my time was spent in Scotland because my mother’s Scottish and we used to go up to Ayrshire and visit relations in a place called Dalry. So there were a lot of Scottish holidays climbing mountains and fishing for trout in very small streams. I absolutely love Scotland.
I’m always happy there. Dawn and I had a bloody brilliant audience in Aberdeen when we did our farewell tour a few years ago. We played in a place that was like a covered cattle market and people were leaning forward against the wind to get in and were sat in their coats with a thermos flask on their knee watching our show, which I thought was bloody fantastic.”
Saunders failed to live up to her parents’ achievements academically – her careers officer suggested she could end up as a dental assistant, meanwhile she wanted to work with horses. Having failed to get into university, “because I was slightly sullen and failed to engage back then”, she spent a year in Italy as an au pair. She was then persuaded by her mother to go to the Central School of Speech and Drama and train as a drama teacher. It was there that she met Dawn French, whom she hated on sight.
“She had gone to drama classes as a child. I thought she was cocky and she thought I was snotty.” By their final year, though, they were sharing a flat together and in 1980, the pair answered an ad in showbiz trade paper The Stage for female acts to join alternative comedy revue The Comic Strip. At the time, French was working as a drama teacher and Saunders was on the dole and spending much of her time in bed.
They were paid £5 a night to perform their routine, but it was well worth it. It was there she met Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, Nigel Planer and, of course, Adrian Edmondson – they were both seeing other people and it took them six years to get it together. The Comic Strip was signed up by Channel 4, and soon French and Saunders were stars in their own right with their eponymous series.
It was French’s decision to adopt a baby that gave rise to Ab Fab. The pair were seven weeks from recording another French & Saunders series when French was told that a baby had become available.
She had to pull out, so Saunders turned to another idea she’d had for a sitcom based on a sketch the pair had once done. And so, in 1991, a pilot was made and the Bolly-guzzling fashion faux-pas phenomenon was born. Saunders certainly didn’t expect to still be at it 20 years later.
“I don’t think I ever had a concept of where it would go, I think it’s extraordinary that it’s still going on,” says the 53-year-old. “Because at that time there was a sort of Fawlty Towers theory which was, you do two series and get out. And that was it. And if you pushed for more you were really milking it. Whereas now, nobody thinks like that. Now you’re just grateful to get a programme made.”
These days, she’s focused on doing what she can to help give younger comedy stars a leg up – it was Saunders and French who spotted the true potential of the biggest female comedy talent in the country at the moment, Miranda Hart.
“I just thought she was too funny to slip through the net. I could feel her slipping through the net because she wasn’t getting anywhere and she was getting frustrated. So I’d turn up to all her readings and meetings and clap loudly and say, this is a very funny woman. There are so many great people out there but companies only want to sign a name for their shows, so unless you are Caroline Quentin – nothing against Caroline Quentin – you won’t get the gig. Which is so dull on television. Not enough people get opportunities these days because the casting and the commissioning is so narrow.”
It turns out that there’s one subject guaranteed to make Saunders’ blood boil and that’s interfering TV executives. She doesn’t hold back: “I think some of them are idiots. I’ve been very lucky, actually, and have managed to sidestep most of them. I had a bit of interference on Jam & Jerusalem. Not script-wise but format-wise. Just idiots. Actual idiots. People who don’t understand the creative process, who have never been programme makers yet are suddenly sticking their oar in. Someone rang up and asked me if we could put the Ab Fabs on pre-watershed and I was like, have you ever seen the show? Could we put Ab Fab before the watershed? Are you an idiot? Yes you are, you’re an idiot!” She’s on a roll now and leans forward.
“Why are there so many idiots?” she asks, exasperated. “They don’t understand how television works, that’s what I can’t bear. It’s that kind of management theory that if you can manage a chain of shops then you can manage a television company and you want to go, no you can’t, actually. They are just IDIOTS,” she exclaims with such gusto it wakes the dog, who immediately starts whining. “Olive, you are going to have to shush,” she chides. “This isn’t about you Olive, it’s about me.”
Perhaps, despite herself, Jennifer Saunders is now mellowing to the idea of being the centre of attention after all.
• Absolutely Fabulous returns to BBC1 at 10pm on Christmas Day and 9:40pm on New Year’s Day
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