1980, the girls had graduated and gone off in different directions: Dawn to teach drama at Parliament Hill School for Girls, a comprehensive in north London, her long-held ambition now reaching fulfilment. Jennifer moved to a shared flat in a shabby house in far-off (and posh) Chelsea. There was the odd menial job occasionally. But teaching, she had already decided at Central, definitely wasn’t going to play any part in her future. She had had a taste of it as a student – and she was adamant that it wasn’t right for her.
‘I had no enthusiasm for teaching. I’d spent some time in an Ursuline convent in Wimbledon and then taught for 10 weeks at a high school in Peckham. I was popular. But no good,’ she told Woman’s Own magazine in February 1993.
‘I could never see it being my career just because I liked the kids. I couldn’t take the staffroom politics.’
‘I thought that when Dawn and I left college that would be the end of the relationship,’ said Jennifer in an interview with the Daily Mail in June 2000. ‘And I was quite content to be on the dole. I did nothing for months on end. I was never desperately ambitious. I had a feeling that something might float along eventually, whereas Dawn has a capacity for work I just don’t have.’
Yet whatever their feelings after graduation, the two girls did take something very important away with them from their time at Central, a crucial factor in the life of any successful actor or performer: the ‘P’ word – professionalism.
‘You were taught to be professional and respect others. Central took the prima donna out of you,’ remembered one former graduate of the Central drama teaching course in the late 1970s. ‘Professionalism was the overriding thing you took from the course; you did the very best you could. And you can see that in Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French – it’s all about being equal.’
Time passed. Dawn was enjoying her new life, discovering the many challenges involved in teaching, relishing the chance to connect with inner-city kids, whose lives could only benefit from learning more about drama.
Jennifer, however, spent most of her day doing The Times crossword, drinking coffee and generally having a laid-back existence. Plan? Career? Who needed those things? Wasn’t it enough to be young and carefree?
She has freely admitted that she had no plans or goals whatsoever. In an interview with The New York Times in July 1995, she said: ‘I was just sitting about and getting the dole, if I could be bothered. We went off the dole because we were never up in time. We used to live on these mattresses and there was actually a path worn in the dust on the carpet from our bed to the door.’
But their lives were about to change permanently. And the instrument of change was a small theatre located inside a Soho strip joint, right in the heart of London’s West End, in an area full of porno cinemas and sex shops selling hardcore magazines, an insalubrious backdrop for the launch of a group of hugely talented male comic performers – whose fates would be very closely intertwined with those of the two ex-Central graduates.
And it was Jennifer, lounging around in her flat one day, flicking through a paper, who started it all.
‘I saw an advert in The Stage [the entertainment industry trade paper] looking for new acts to perform at a comedy/cabaret venue called The Comic Strip in Soho.
‘I remember thinking: “I wonder if Dawn would be interested.” I don’t think anybody else would have touched me with a bargepole, but it just seemed totally natural to do it with Dawn.’
A phone call to an enthusiastic Dawn resulted in the pair heading off to their first ever audition at the Comic Strip’s home, the 200-seater Boulevard Theatre above the Raymond Revue Bar in Walker’s Court. (The Raymond Revue Bar was a popular Soho strip joint owned by Paul Raymond, the celebrated club owner and entrepreneur.) Undaunted by the louche surroundings, once up in the theatre the pair waited their turn, watching a man on stage juggling lobster pots.
Then they were on, performing their old college sketch about the neurotic Americans. And, amazingly, they got in!
‘We weren’t very good,’ said Jennifer. ‘But they were desperate for women, to make it more politically correct, and we were the first living beings with boobs to come through the door.
‘I don’t know why it didn’t seem strange, working above a strip club, but it didn’t.
‘We got hired for the bum nights, which were Tuesday and Wednesday, when there were few people in the theatre. Sometimes we outnumbered the audience.
‘Such blind, blind panic. We just used to make anything up, silly stuff that made us laugh. I used to look through the crack in the door, praying nobody would be there.’
Arnold Brown is a Scottish comedian who was working as a stand-up comic at The Comic Strip at that time. He witnessed the girls’ memorable first audition.
‘Their parody of American tourists in London was clever. It was funny, but it didn’t give any hint of how wonderful they were going to be in the future. It wasn’t a sensational sketch, but it was well written, very skillful.’
Brown’s immediate enthusiasm for the girls’ double act led to him encouraging them to listen to tapes of the female double act of yesteryear, Gert and Daisy. Today, he remembers the youthful Jennifer as ‘quite an English rose, very good-looking, good bone structure. And there was obviously something special between the two girls that really connected.
‘They fitted into The Comic Strip perfectly; the boys at The Comic Strip were over the top, a very testosterone line-up. I fitted into it because I was a laid-back contrast to the boys. And they fitted in because it was nice to see two girls doing their stuff.’
Today, we take female comic performers for granted, yet in 1980 they were a novelty: performers on the newly emerging cabaret/stand-up circuit were almost exclusively male. And overtly political stand-up comedy itself was relatively new too, though the arrival of a Tory government and Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was starting to be a strong focus for comedy. Although female performers such as Jenny Lecoat and Jenny Eclair (who went on to a successful career as a comedy writer) were poised to launch careers in the new comedy/cabaret circuit in the early 1980s, their early work involved a more ‘punk’ sensibility than Jennifer and Dawn, whose sketch-based comedy was essentially two women engaged in chatty dialogue, without any heavy emphasis on political issues or feminism and the war between the sexes.
This difference proved to be helpful, too. ‘There were a lot of pro-feminist hard-hitting acts about. But we didn’t do that, which was to our advantage,’ recalled Jennifer.
You can be at the right place at the right time, yet burgeoning creativity needs to be free-flowing and without limits. Because they had hardly any external direction and total freedom to experiment with their material and shape their sketches however they chose, the era was a wonderfully free outlet for their talents. Before long, they were on stage, performing their sketches, several nights a week.
Jennifer has always had great affection for those early attempts at comedy.
‘I loved those days. No responsibilities. We went where we liked, stayed out as long as we wanted and if the audience didn’t laugh, we didn’t care. London itself just felt great – you had nothing to care about, no property, nothing. We didn’t think of it as a job, it was just a bit of fun.’
The pair earned £5 each for an evening’s work. The act was quite basic: sometimes they would just find a prop and work around that, find something to do with
