spotting beret-less heads.’
Girls attending Northwich County at the time recall a disciplinarian running the school: a headmistress with a scary reputation. There were rumours of corporal punishment. And there were frequent stories of teachers being seen leaving the head’s office in floods of tears.
‘Whatever you did, you were in the wrong as far as she was concerned,’ remembered another ex-pupil.
Oh dear. You can picture a 13-year-old Jennifer in her school uniform: navy pinafore dress to the knee with white shirt and red tie, sitting in class, staring out of the window, bored out of her mind with it all – but not daring to react against the day-to-day discipline with rebellion or cheek. Definitely not a wild child.
‘I was an apathetic, quiet kid – that’s how I’d have described myself,’ recalled Jennifer of those early years to More magazine.
‘I wasn’t interested in much at school – except biology. I liked dissecting! It was an all-girls school so the only flirtations with boys were on the bus. And they were just embarrassing.’
‘I used to be very shy which exhibited itself in morose, non-communicative behaviour,’ she admitted to the Sunday Express. ‘I grew up thinking whatever I said would sound stupid. So you end up saying nothing.’
‘I was into horses and the occasional disco,’ she told Tatler. ‘It wasn’t like I had lots of friends around. I would love to have been wild, but I could never do it. I never got into drugs or anything. I could never lose control.
‘I hardly raised my eyes. I was endlessly blushing. It was biological. I just didn’t want the attention, but I daydreamed a lot.’
‘I was mad on horses. Completely,’ she revealed in a BBC Radio 4 interview with Sue Lawley for Desert Island Discs in December 1996.
‘My big ambition was to become a three-day eventer until I was about l6.
I got my first pony in Wiltshire – I had a friend who had a farm.’
Her school reports tended to be of the ‘could try harder’ variety. Yet there was one area where Jennifer’s teenage shyness was somehow put aside and she ended up attracting a bit of attention: as a performer, though a somewhat low-key one.
‘She didn’t have much of a profile at the school,’ recollected another former Northwich County pupil, who also claimed that Jennifer didn’t make a great impression on many of the pupils.
‘She was ordinary, really, she never stuck out in any way. And she wasn’t always in all the shows – there were other people in her year who were the “acting” ones.’
The school was divided into houses – each one named after a different area in Cheshire. Jennifer was in Farndon House. And it was in a Farndon House comic sketch one afternoon during a Northwich County three-day arts festival, rather than in formal drama classes, where the 16-year-old Jennifer’s talent for comic acting and improvisation surfaced.
‘The house stuff was self-initiated – the staff weren’t involved in it at all. Jennifer played the part of a fortune teller and the material in the sketch had been written by the girls. And she was really, really funny. She was a year above me but I can still remember sitting there, laughing, looking at her makeup – which made her look like an old hag. She was definitely not one of the “stars” of the school as far as the general perception of her was concerned. But that day we all realised that this girl was actually really funny.
‘That someone came through that Colditz place and achieved what she’s done in comedy… well, it’s amazing.’
Rosalind Fifield has lived in the Acton Bridge/Crowton area for most of her life and was a neighbour of the Saunders family for many years.
‘My two boys went to The Grange and Jennifer’s mother, Jane, taught them. She was a very good teacher,’ she recalled.
‘Jennifer and her family lived about two and a half miles away from us. At one point, when she was about 16, Jennifer would babysit for me and my sister Diana. Jennifer rode a lot – there’s lots of riding around here. My sister and I knew her parents through the local Conservative fundraisers. They were a very nice family, very unassuming. And Jennifer was very quiet and well mannered – a good babysitter.
‘But she wasn’t at all outgoing. You’d never have believed that this girl would end up playing someone like Edina in Absolutely Fabulous.’
Rosalind’s sister, Diana Mather, a former BBC TV presenter, remembered Jennifer’s father Tom as ‘a very witty, charming man’.
‘Maybe the sense of humour comes from her father. The family were very close – and very private. That’s probably given her a very good “rock” on which to build her own family life and career.’
It’s often at university that talented performers or writers start to really spread their wings. Not surprisingly, given her solidly middle-class background, Jennifer’s parents were keen for her to head off to university after leaving Northwich County with three A-levels. One brother won a place at Cambridge, but Jennifer didn’t seem to be destined towards heading in the same direction.
Approaches were made to various universities, including an application for a course in combined sciences at Leicester. But Jennifer, while intelligent, just didn’t shine in the university interview rounds. In today’s language, the shy girl, who until that point had been mostly interested in horse riding, had poor presentation skills.
‘It was a cause of some frustration all round,’ Jennifer told the Daily Mail in November 1992. ‘The problem was always the same. I wasn’t really interested in any interview. I would sit there, apathetic and morose, not caring either way.’
‘I got turned down by every university I went to interview with,’ she told the Liverpool Daily Post in 2012. ‘I sort of wish I had gone to university but your life is what happens as you live it. So much else wouldn’t have happened.’
After a fairly brief period working as an au pair in Italy: ‘They were horrible, rich brat English children,’ she recalled to OK Magazine in 1996, she returned home to Cheshire to find that her mother, Jane, determined to get her daughter’s further education resolved somehow, had a list of degree courses waiting for Jennifer on the kitchen table.
Jennifer opted for a BEd drama teaching course at London’s Central School of Speech & Drama in Swiss Cottage, north London. Not because she had an overwhelming desire to teach, far from it.
‘I thought it would be cool to go to London,’ she recalled.
So the application went off and she got her interview at Central, even though she had little real experience – or knowledge – of drama itself. Writing a comic sketch with other girls was one thing. Serious theatre was another.
‘I think they were desperate for people on this course. I hadn’t done any plays at school. At the interview I had to lie and I said I’d seen Dostoevsky’s The Rivals as I remembered seeing a poster at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.’
Then the interviewers asked what she thought of the play. (Little did they know that Jennifer had only ever seen one play in her entire life, and that was Charley’s Aunt).
‘Oh,
