cool, hugely attractive at every stage of her life and so very, very English, Jennifer Saunders continues to fascinate audiences of all ages around the world. It’s fair to say, too, that part of that fascination is probably derived from her enigmatic persona. Twenty-first-century celebrities who sign up for limited verbal exposure – Kate Moss is a very good example – create a mystique all their own, whether deliberately or not.
This book will pay tribute to Jennifer Saunders’ talents and tells her story right from the beginning. This is not a heartbreak tale of someone from the back streets who had to claw their way to the top – to discover, when they got there, that they couldn’t cope with the pressures of fame. Nor is it a story about overnight success.
Jennifer Saunders’ story is a tale of a shy, quiet middle-class English girl from a pleasant, rural background without any driving ambition to make herself known or forge a successful career as an entertainer. Until, by sheer chance, she spots an ad in a paper and finds herself climbing the narrow stairs of that strip club, in London’s Soho – the clichéd first step, if you like, on the ladder of success.
Those who deliberately seek out celebrity for its own sake are everywhere these days, popping up with alarming regularity. Some big show business names become so hooked on their own fame or image that they can’t help but rush to expose themselves to the public glare even if they don’t really need to, because… well, that’s what they do. Without it, they might feel their very identity is under question.
That’s never going to be the case for Jennifer Saunders. She loves what she does, she knows exactly who she is and she closely guards the world she truly values. And she has learned, over time, to maintain her balance on that paper-thin line between exposure and privacy; a pragmatic showbiz insider who has never been afraid to ridicule the entertainment world’s excesses, she will continue to be a private person in a very public setting. But she is a star – and she remains a star to her many millions of admirers.
What follows, in this book, is an attempt to look at her life and times – and learn something more about the woman behind the enigma.
Cheshire, in the north of England, is one of the country’s most beautiful counties. Tiny, picturesque, ‘blink and you might miss it’ rural villages where time seems to have stood still. Small communities taking pride in maintaining their annual ‘best-kept village in Cheshire’ status. Big landowners. Farms. True blue Conservative – and likely to stay that way.
On the north Cheshire boundary lie small rural areas just outside the town of Northwich; villages such as Hartford, Weaverham, Cuddington, Acton Bridge and Crowton; pretty, mostly flat country just a short drive away from Cheshire’s biggest woodland area, Delamere Forest, popular with horse riders and cyclists and a haven for wildlife. The area around here is not as flashy or bling as the money-belt Cheshire suburbs of Prestbury or Wilmslow with their expensive footballers’ homes, but, nonetheless, this is a desirable place for anyone to grow up in.
This rural, bucolic area, around Crowton and Acton Bridge, is where Jennifer Saunders spent her early teenage years. Until the age of 11, she would lead a peripatetic life with her parents and three brothers. Her father’s career as an officer in the RAF took the Saunders family all over the country, and, at one point, overseas to Cyprus and Turkey for short periods of time.
Jennifer’s mother, Jane, like all the other RAF officers’ wives bringing up their children on RAF bases or stations, would have become accustomed to having to move frequently and to swapping one family home for another, the usual upheavals and changes involved in a post-war RAF life of two-year, or even shorter, postings.
Nowadays, provision is frequently made for officers’ children to be sent off to boarding school. Back then, however, it was often the case that children lived on or around the base and had to make the best of the ‘chopping and changing’ situation, adjusting to each new move and set of faces as they came along, yet always armed with the knowledge that they would be moving on again soon anyway.
So as a Forces child, Jennifer went to many different primary schools. And over time she developed her own coping mechanism for always being ‘the new girl’, often arriving at the new school just a little bit later than the others.
‘It was never at the beginning of term, always midway,’ she recalled in an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine in August 2007. ‘So you’d work out where to sit. You’d think: “Oh that’s that kind of gang, that’s that one. Why is there a place left next to this person?” You learn to observe and fit in without being noticed. Odd, as I’ve chosen this career.’
Jennifer Jane Saunders was born in Sleaford Maternity Hospital, Lincolnshire, in July 1958. Her family was based in the area during her father’s posting to nearby RAF Cranwell, one of the RAF’s largest officer training units.
Each step up the RAF career ladder for Jennifer’s father meant another posting, a fresh move. And he had a very successful career until 1970, when Group Captain Robert Thomas Saunders (known to friends as ‘Tom’) left the RAF for good to step back into civilian life and a job with British Aerospace. Only then could Jennifer’s family settle down permanently into life in a rambling Victorian house in rural Acton Bridge. And her mother, Jane, began working as a teacher at The Grange, a private day school in the nearby village of Hartford.
Curiously enough, this background as an Air Force child is something Jennifer has in common with some of the most significant people in her adult life: Dawn French’s father was an RAF sergeant; Absolutely Fabulous close cohort Joanna Lumley’s father, a major in the Gurkha Rifles, was posted to Kashmir in India, where Joanna was born; and, perhaps most significantly, the father of her future husband, Adrian Edmondson, was a teacher working for the British Army and the RAF.
Sheer coincidence or a bond shared with those who had also known a childhood constantly on the move? It’s difficult to be certain. But Jennifer has never denied the fact that moving around all the time as a child did help with her powers of observation as a comic writer and actor.
‘You do learn how to fit in quite well. A lot of that is just watching. And actually not having much of a personality,’ she told the Guardian in June 2004.
‘I think you develop a knack, so you become quite self-contained. I had a very happy home life; I don’t remember anything being traumatic,’ she revealed to the Liverpool Daily Post in an interview a few years later.
In 1969, with the family settled in the Cheshire countryside, Jennifer was sent to a local grammar school, Northwich County Grammar School for Girls in Leftwich, just south of the town of Northwich.
At the time, many people in the Northwich area worked for the former ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), which had offices and industrial plants nearby. Some of Jennifer’s classmates were the children of ICI staff, bright working-class kids who had passed the 11-plus exam. Even in the late 1960s, Northwich County was a very strictly-run girls’ school, a 1950s-style educational establishment governed on old-fashioned, super-strict lines. The peace and love revolution might have started elsewhere, but at Northwich County, with 1,000 girls completing their secondary education, revolution and rebellion were definitely not running amok.
‘You had to wear gym shorts six inches above the knee,’ recollected one former pupil of the time.
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