names started dropping in to watch the acts. Robin Williams leapt up onto the stage to everyone’s delight one night. Bianca Jagger was spotted in the audience. And Jack Nicholson turned up to look – and laugh. Yet equally, the Comic Strip was drawing the attention of influential people in the entertainment world.
As former Head of BBC Entertainment, Paul Jackson recalled: ‘In a way, The Comic Strip became the new punk because there was an anger. Keith Allen once threw beer over an Evening Standard critic.’
Then, at the end of the summer of 1981, Peter Richardson’s Comic Strip group were offered their breakthrough gig: a national tour around the UK. This was scheduled to be followed by a tour of Australia, with a stint at the prestigious Adelaide Festival in South Australia in March 1982. It was decision time: should Dawn ditch her safe teaching career in north London for a chance to expand both girls’ horizons as comic performers?
Dawn felt torn. She deliberated until her boss at the school pointed out that, much as they didn’t want to lose her, the chance to go on tour to Australia was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When a real chance beckons, you recognise it, and grab it with both hands. And anyway, Jennifer and Dawn were having a really good time.
You only have to watch clips of those far-off days in Soho to see just how much fun they were having: Jennifer as the neurotic American Diana (complete with 1980s hairdo and shiny white top) while her friend from back home, Muriel (Dawn sporting an equally odd 1980s streaky mullet hairdo), pops up from the audience to share her delight at meeting another American – and going to the ‘Towerr of Lundin – and all the little beef burgers there’. It’s not that funny, not by the standards of what came afterwards, but with those two nervy tourists, you can spot the genesis, the beginnings of the satirical comic style that was to propel them towards popularity.
‘We decided to have a go. If it was awful, we had each other. And we’d buy a bottle of Blue Nun and go home,’ recalled Jennifer.
But from that point on, from when The Comic Strip tour started out, cheap plonk like Blue Nun (a big favourite of the late 1970s) was on its way out. Within a few years they would be quaffing Bolly, sweetie – from the finest crystal glasses, of course.
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