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Imagine…French and Saunders: spiky, malicious, bitter
Repair shop
Physicists call it the Yentob effect: a gravitational field of super-serious art that compresses anything light and fun into a dense, humorless mass.
Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders battled it out for about eight minutes in an hour-and-a-half career retrospective. They even tried to give it a mocking title, Imagine… French And Saunders: Pointed, Bitchy, Bitter (BBC1).
Friends lined up at the beginning to wryly declare how horrible they are and how difficult they are to work with. “Narcissists,” agreed Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins. “He hated his job,” Kathy Burke said.
But the Yentob effect swallows all the jokes and does not let any trace of levity escape. French and Saunders knew this and satirized it 20 years ago in a sketch where they played ‘free-runners’ or urban gymnasts, showing off their jumps and leaps in front of Alan Yentob himself.
Alan sent himself that time, but now he was determined to force the duo to take themselves and him seriously.
Friends lined up at the beginning to ironically declare how bad the people are and how difficult they are to work with.
His former comic colleague, Alexei Sayle, fell into Yentob’s trap, pontificating on the importance of alternative comedy in the 1980s. ‘What I think we were trying to do,’ he droned, ‘was make people laugh at the truth of the absurdities of their own lives. But there was a kind of core honesty behind it that had never really been attempted, you know? -he continued. “I think he was aware that we were creating a new art form.”
Alexei was hit by Yentobb!
What followed was a catalog of clips from his shows. But because French and Saunders’ comedy relies so much on characters rather than one-liners, these bits were funny only if you remembered the context.
Both women spoke with studied attention, not even walking on eggshells, but rather tiptoeing around them, whether talking about their first friendship or discussing why they now work together much less. Dawn revealed the moment that made her decide to pull the plug on her sketch series for good in 2008: a lukewarm routine in which she watched her sing with pop star Anastasia.
“I got in the car and cried all the way home,” she said, seething at the memory. “I hated that, I hated everything about that day, I will never do that again, I will never feel humiliated like that again.”
Jennifer sat next to him, stunned into silence, evidently hearing this for the first time. A more intrusive interviewer, less concerned with showing reverence for her comedic genius, would have taken advantage of this. Yentob simply nodded sagely and allowed Jennifer to deflect the blame onto the Beeb’s commissioning editors.
Both women spoke with studied attention, not even walking on eggshells but tiptoeing around them, whether they were talking about their early friendship or discussing why they now work together much less.
Because French and Saunders’ comedy relies so much on characters rather than one-liners, bits from their shows were funny only if you remembered the context.
This time, in the barn, craftsmen were restoring a ceramic Alsatian dog for a guy who spent 25 years as a police dog handler.
For Ab Fab fans, there were a couple of unexpected surprises. Joanna Lumley described how she created Patsy, hunching her shoulders to imply that she had most of her internal organs removed, physically and emotionally emptied of her. And Jennifer accepted Dawn’s £50,000 bet to write something about Ab Fabby later this year… not another film, she stipulated, but a spin-off. Honey, honey, that’s just mwah!
For this to happen, Patsy might have to be sent to that hospital of irreparably damaged old remains, The Repair Shop (BBC1). Imagine the layers of nicotine they will have to remove. This time, in the barn, craftsmen restored a ceramic Alsatian dog for a man who worked for 25 years as a police dog handler and peeled off laminated plates from a doctor’s precious medical certificate.
No solution fails, or even differs greatly from previous repairs, but seeing such skill and care in action is reliably heartwarming.