‘I was definitely under-joyed by the prospect of that,’ said Dawn in her memoir Dear Fatty. ‘It wasn’t that we actively disliked each other, not at all, just that we had been on the same course and not really found each other, not really bothered, both assuming that the other wasn’t our type. I thought she might be the only one in the flat I wouldn’t be able to relate to.’
Yet there is nothing quite like the proximity of living under the same roof for getting to know someone quickly. Particularly since the new flat, in nearby Steele’s Road, was within walking distance of the college. And not long after they had moved in, as the two students walked together down Fellows Road en route to the college in Adamson Road, the assumptions they had made started to crumble. And there were a few surprises.
They did have things in common: Dawn too had spent time in Italy au pairing, and when they exchanged their experiences of living on RAF camps, their ‘always on the move’ childhoods, it turned out that they had even briefly had the same best friend, another RAF child.
‘When I was 11, I had a best friend, and very good fun. Then she left and I was heartbroken. Jen and I discovered that she went to another camp and there she was Jennifer’s best friend. We put out a call for her on the radio once but she never got in touch,’ recalled Dawn in an interview with the Daily Mail in December 1993.
But there was another, much bigger discovery in those walks: the two students, one short and effervescent, bubbling over with enthusiasm, the other slightly taller, seemingly cool and languid, shared the same surreal sense of humour. They could make each other laugh like drains. All the time. Both had a similar sense of the ridiculous – and they loved to act it out. Frequently.
Dawn soon realised that behind Jennifer’s rather mysterious façade was a bright, extremely attractive and intriguing person. Jennifer saw that behind Dawn’s super-organised, somewhat bossy front was an outrageously funny, warm individual. Both relished taking the mickey out of everything, especially the college course, puncturing its serious ‘actorly’ side. At times, they would find themselves laughing consistently from the minute they walked out of the Steele’s Road flat until they arrived at college.
They didn’t quite realise it but, at the end of the 1970s, the two young women, laughing themselves close to tears as they walked to college, perched on bar stools and taking the mickey out of the elderly male drinkers in the nearby pubs in Chalk Farm (they’ve never admitted it but this was surely their early inspiration for the legendary ‘Two Fat Old Men’ sketch) or just lolling around in their living room, making up more and more ridiculous situations, were shaping an incredibly close-knit relationship – and, of course, an exceptional showbiz career that neither could ever have dreamed of.
How could they? For a start, female comedy duos were unknown territory. At the time, no one could envisage the idea of a female double act on TV like Morecambe & Wise. Only their parents’ World War Two generation could remember the big BBC radio stars of the 1940s – Elsie and Doris Waters, or ‘Gert and Daisy’ as their immensely popular act was known. And while stand-up comedy was about to revolutionise the entertainment world, female stand-ups were still relatively unknown, especially on television.
Yet shared laughter, day in, day out, creates something special, unbreakable. And it stimulates sparky, creative minds. These two would always share this wonderful bond of laughter; they still have it to this day. The old saying ‘two heads are better than one’ springs to mind, though in this case it was more like ‘two minds that can constantly spot the comic potential of nearly everything around them’.
‘Once we moved in, we broke down our prejudices about each other and realised we had a similarly bizarre sense of humour,’ Jennifer recalled in an interview with the Daily Mail in June 2000.
‘Dawn made me laugh so much. We used to play the cruellest practical jokes on everybody in the flat. They were very juvenile. We used to hide in the laundry basket and pop out. Or try to make severed head things out of a cabbage and bang them on windows. We shared the flat with people who worked for a living. It was tragic – and it became my career. The joy of our relationship is you never quite grow up.’
Such was the hilarity of those times sharing the Steele’s Road flat that their experiences would eventually inspire the riotous 1985 ITV series Girls on Top, penned by Jennifer, Dawn and Ruby Wax. The location of the fictional flat was changed from north-west London to Chelsea, but there was a wealth of fantastic comic material from those flat-sharing Central days to draw on.
Like chaotic young sharers almost everywhere, living with five or six other people meant a ‘cleaning’ rota that never functioned (other than as a precursor to rows), an abundance of extremely stale food in a messy kitchen, frequently consumed at strange hours – and, of course, party after party.
Dawn and Jennifer would sit in the front room at Steele’s Road, inventing over-the-top characters, messing around and generally creating mayhem, performing in the house for the benefit of some of their more tolerant flatmates.
Jennifer, whose bedroom was right at the top of the house, was known to have really untidy quarters. At one point, the flat was broken into.
‘The police said: “Well, it is quite bad but the worst is that room at the top.” And, of course, nobody had been in there,’ recalled Dawn. ‘She used to be up to her knees in old pants.’
Childish as it may sound now, the girls would enjoy dressing up, punk style. Sometimes they’d wear chamber pots on their heads, accompanied by long black plastic macs. Then they’d go out on the street or jump onto the Tube to see if people were frightened of their somewhat bizarre appearance.
‘We’d hang tampons on our ears and have safety pins stuck in various places. It was a perfect time to have no money – you could go to Swiss Cottage market, pick up great clothes and just wear them.’ Jennifer told The Sunday Times in November 1993.
The duo would often go to other people’s parties clad in these outrageous outfits; they got to like doing it so much, they dressed up like this all the time.
‘Then we made up a punk song to perform at someone’s party. I knew about three chords on the guitar; Dawn knew about two. We called ourselves the Menopatzi [translation: less mad] Sisters. And the song was a little number about a gerbil,’ Jennifer recalled.
The Menopatzi Sisters, the girls decided, were middle-aged performers in black leotards and red Latex swimming hats, who were the last in a long line of an Italian circus family: they were a circus mime act. They were also useless.
In the girls’ last year at Central, in an end-of-term cabaret act – after some initial hesitation but egged on by their friends – they performed two comic sketches they had written for the other students: the Menopatzi Sisters and another sketch called ‘Psychodrama’, involving two American women who were obsessed with their spiritual well-being.
‘It was at the time when anything “alternative” was coming in, things like people having therapy. Even the word “muesli” was funny. It was a kind of therapy/muesli-based act,’ said Jennifer.
The humour in their sketches didn’t come from telling a series of jokes. It was more in the girls’ performance and character study. And their cabaret act went down really well. People laughed a lot. Both girls went to bed that night knowing the evening had been a success. They could make other people laugh, not just each other. Yet neither had any intention, at that stage, of developing their act into some sort of career.
‘I remember thinking how easy it was. We seemed to pick up
