puppets and one of us said: “What’s the time, Brains?” The other said: “Six o’clock, Mr Tracy.” That was it. God knows how anyone thought it was funny.’
And so in this small theatre with its lingering haze of stale cigarette smoke, audiences who were often drunk – or had drifted in from outside as an antidote to being hassled on the street by overeager sex touts – the two women launched their careers in comedy.
It was bottom-of-the-ladder, hit-and-miss stuff, still a tad daunting for an essentially shy person like Jennifer, who had only started to overcome her performer’s nerves during her time at Central, but it was a real beginning, an incredibly lucky break to be caught up in performing in something as radically new as The Comic Strip – which eventually proved to be unique in the history of British comedy. Their talents definitely didn’t develop overnight, but they couldn’t have found a better place to launch them.
Dawn continued to teach by day, heading for the bright lights of Soho by night, enjoying the contrast between the two very different worlds while fervently hoping that no one from her school would rumble her other life.
Initially, they tried to create a new sketch each night – until it dawned on them that the audience changed every night anyway so they had more time to produce different material, sometimes working on the scripts at Dawn’s studio in the school after hours.
‘We didn’t know anything about it really. Because we thought you had to change your costumes and material every night at first, by Saturday it got pretty bad,’ Jennifer remembered.
Yet soon, as the girls began to also perform at The Comedy Store, another Soho strip joint hosting a popular late-night comedy venue that had started to attract a great deal of attention even before The Comic Strip’s launch as a venue, their shows in the two Soho venues, just a short walk apart from each other, kick-started a series of events that would transform everything.
The Comedy Store, located in the Gargoyle Club in Soho’s Dean Street (and modelled on the successful, similarly named Comedy Store in Los Angeles), was a venue where new stand-up comedy acts performed each night. It had also been drawing the West End crowds, mostly thanks to the talents of a group of anarchic male comic performers, all young and very much poised to take Brit comedy by storm.
At one point, not long before Jennifer and Dawn got their break at The Comic Strip, this male group had ‘defected’ from The Comedy Store and taken their talents to The Comic Strip, the brainchild of their unofficial gang leader Peter Richardson and a rival venue for their new type of anarchic, character-based comedy performance.
In fact, both venues would eventually go down in comedy history as the birthplace of what came to be called ‘alternative comedy’: young, hip, aggressive, rude, sometimes political stand-up that eschewed the more traditional form of comedy, i.e. telling jokes, and came to be the comic motif of the times. It was usually angry, sometimes ranting, but it was also very, very funny.
The names of these comic actors are essentially a roll call of Brit TV’s late twentieth-century laughtermeisters: driven by the talents of The Comic Strip’s founder, Peter Richardson – with star turn Alexei Sayle acting as compère or MC – the core Comic Strip performers were Ade Edmondson and Rik Mayall (who had formed a double act, 20th Century Coyote, during their days together at Manchester University) and Nigel Planer (one half of another double act with Peter Richardson called The Outer Limits), with occasional guest turns from performers such as Ben Elton, Keith Allen, Chris Langham and Robbie Coltrane.
This was a comic potpourri like no other: a revolutionary group dubbed ‘alternative comedians’ at the time, but essentially the fast-rising generation of TV comic entertainers of the 1980s, riding a new wave of anarchic comedy that was about to sweep the country, first on stage and then on television. And Jennifer and Dawn were now working alongside them. Regularly.
Initially, it was all a bit intimidating.
Jennifer recalled: ‘We were in awe of the boys at first, because they’d been at it six months ahead of us. Dawn and I shared a little dressing room. The boys were next door in a horrible sweaty room. They performed in a hot theatre, night after night, and they never cleaned their suits. It was fairly evil in there, but it was like being part of a family, growing up together.
‘The boys would never tell us what to do; they didn’t give us hints. But just by looking at them, we picked up an idea of what we might be aiming towards.’
Essentially, the girls’ relationship with the boys was like having a large group of older brothers, lots of teasing and joshing – they would all have to go through the strip club each night to reach their dressing rooms.
It was distinctly edgy and fun – the strip club audiences, mostly ageing businessmen, watched the strip shows in another theatre, but they would sometimes have to rub shoulders at The Comic Strip with the younger, fashionable, alternative comedy audience in their trendy New Romantic gear simply because there was only one bar.
Despite their relative inexperience, Jennifer and Dawn held their own, writing and experimenting with new material. Sometimes they got the laughs and cheers, at other times they would fall flat. Encouraged by the good nights, they soon learned to tough out the bad.
‘Rik and Ade had a very aggressive stage act so they could punch their way through any negative feedback from the audience,’ recollected Jennifer, ‘but we’d be the first act and weren’t right in the audience’s faces. So the crowd had plenty of opportunities to shout “Get off! Get off!” We were complete novices. We’d come straight from college and had never done anything like this before.’
They were on a real learning curve. And they still, for the life of them, couldn’t come up with the right name for their double act.
They had spent ages trying to think of something amusing. Names like Kitch ‘n’ Tiles were debated. And discarded. Until one night, Alexei Sayle, fed up with their indecision, took the initiative in typical style. ‘Please welcome French and Saunders,’ he told the audience. And that was it.
At The Comedy Store, the atmosphere was much more frenetic than at The Comic Strip. It was a bit of a bear pit. There was a gong and the general idea was that performers could stay on stage for a short period before being ‘gonged’ off. Sometimes the noisy, boisterous crowd wanted people gonged off straight away. It was confrontational, competitive and very much a male environment. Someone would shout out a racist remark and fights would break out.
‘We were like the early days of motoring: a crazy ride,’ is how Alexei Sayle described it.
At the girls’ first night at The Comedy Store, the act before them was interrupted by a racist heckler. Bottles and chairs flew; total mayhem. The police even turned up to deal with the miscreant. On another occasion a group of boozy men on a stag night yelled out to the girls: ‘Show us your tits!’ At which point, Dawn, in teacher fashion, walked to the edge of the stage and ordered the yobs to shut up and be quiet. It worked. As for the gong, the girls soon discovered that even if they got gonged off quite quickly, they still got paid.
Don Ward, co-founder of The Comedy Store, viewed them very much as comedy actresses rather than stand-up comediennes.
‘There was no star quality about them at all. They might last five minutes or they might even get to eight minutes, but sooner or later the audience would have them off. They didn’t seem to give a damn. They’d shrug their shoulders, pick up their money and say: “Right, Don, see you next week.”
‘And off they’d go.’
Although
