Imagine… French & Saunders, review: honesty, agony and hilarity with our greatest double act
At the heart of the sketch parodies of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders was anarchy. They’d stay in character until one or the other would break cover, and in revealing themselves they would rip stuff to shreds. Those selves were very different: French was sparky and eager, Saunders shy and reluctant.
In Imagine… French & Saunders: Pointed, Bitchy, Bitter (BBC One), it emerged that these differences were built in from the start. When they met at a drama-teacher training college, to Saunders French “looked ready”, while French thought Saunders “was out of my league”. One was already a hyperactive pro, the other a doubting dilettante. After they qualified, French got a job teaching, Saunders sat unemployed in their flatshare, waiting.
That energy distribution persists. Filmed recording their podcast in Plymouth, where Alan Yentob travelled to interview them, French bet her less motivated friend an eye-watering 50 grand she couldn’t finish an Ab Fab draft by the end of the year.
This extended profile of a fertile and enduring partnership was a lovely thing. Consistent with the pattern exaggerated in those sketches, French was the cheerier and chattier while Saunders exuded a cooler aura of not wanting to give much away. You can’t imagine her ever copying French and doing a one-woman stage memoir.
Her honesties thus felt more hard won. Trying a new joke on someone, she said, “you have to be sure that that person isn’t going to turn round and laugh at you”. From the start, they had the same sense of humour but also, she added, “the same sense of boredom”. The most surprising discovery was to find that they keep things from each other. When French talked about the visceral discomfort that prompted her to terminate their sketch show, it came as a genuine revelation to Saunders.
This was a portrait of their marriage but, because both guard so watchfully against intrusion, not of their marriages. After a frank recollection from Adrian Edmondson, Yentob had to remind himself and the audience that this was in fact Saunders’s husband speaking.
With nothing to sell, but 40 years to sprint through, including big sidebars on the solo projects, vast subjects were dealt with at pace (saliently, the suicide of French’s father). Perhaps this explains the odd failure to acknowledge Victoria Wood as the path-cutter for all female comedians. I don’t just say this as an over-sensitive biographer. Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins remembered their thrill at receiving encouraging notes from French and Saunders when starting at the Edinburgh Fringe. The omitted truth is that Wood did exactly the same for French and Saunders.
Still, the funniest vignette took place on a glassed-in gantry at the old Comedy Strip in Soho where Yentob’s subjects were joking about being GILFs (be warned if you decide to look up that acronym). “This could be the next French and Saunders sketch!” enthused Yentob. Both ignored him. Hats off to him for keeping it in.
