Photograph: Perou for the Guardian Photograph: Perou for the GuardianMore than 20 years after creating Ab Fab, the queen of the double act has revived our favourite booze-addled duo. She reveals why she never argues, shrugs off failure – and wants more women to do panel shows
Interview: Elizabeth Day. Portrait: Perou
We’re about five minutes into our interview when Jennifer Saunders lets slip the N-word. She is sitting in a dimly lit private members’ club off Oxford Street in central London. The sofas are grey velvet, the walls are dark and Saunders is dressed in floating shades of navy blue: a silky top that billows like expensive drapery over her trousers, cropped at the ankle to reveal slip-on trainers.
Saunders is friendly but self-contained. Her smile doesn’t linger on her face longer than strictly necessary. The first few questions are politely answered, but she has a slightly distracted air, as if her mind is on other matters.
When the N-word comes, in the middle of a long explanation about her late-flowering love for hip-hop, it is calmly delivered in her clipped, well-spoken tones. She is 57, a grandmother twice over, but only started listening to hip-hop relatively recently, when putting together the soundtrack for the new Absolutely Fabulous film.
“What’s my favourite track?” Saunders muses absent-mindedly. “It’s Jason Derulo and Get Ugly or That Ugly or something. I just suddenly starting listening to it and because of that I started listening to other bits of hip-hop – Drake and things – and I thought: ‘Actually that’s rather nice.’ You know, I’ve always had this kind of aversion to it, thinking: ‘What a load of nonsense, saying the word “ho” and “nigger” quite a lot, I’m not having any of that,’” she says, all Mary Poppins briskness.
She’s talking contextually, of course, and the anecdote is amusing precisely because Saunders is poking fun at her tin ear for rap culture. She’s the mistress of the perfectly aimed tease, even when the target is herself. It brings me up short, but then she has long been adept at shock presented as self-deprecation, acidity cloaked in affection. Her humour has that somewhat English sensibility – the sense that, however mercilessly it skewers its targets, there is a seam of gentleness running through it.
Saunders started out in the 1980s alternative standup scene with her long-term collaborator, Dawn French. It was a boys’ club, but instead of being cowed by their difference, the two women celebrated it, calling themselves The Menopause Sisters and sewing tassels over their breasts. When they transferred their act to the small screen, now calling themselves French And Saunders, the show’s mix of meta-satire, spoof and running gags was hugely popular throughout the late 80s and early 90s. It was given one of the highest budgets in BBC history and led to hammy re-creations of films such as Thelma & Louise, Misery and Titanic, treading a fine line between naturalism and absurdity. Their piss-takes of pop stars including Madonna and Kylie were similarly well drawn: when they ribbed a Corrs video, French took the part of the three musical sisters, while Saunders played the overlooked brother constantly trying to edge into shot.
“Now, television is so executive-led that you really have to jump through hoops to get anything done,” says Saunders. “In our day it was, like: ‘Oh, you seem to be doing quite well in the clubs, we’re going to give you a TV show and then we’ll give you two seasons to see if you get better.’” French And Saunders ran to seven series and was broadcast, on and off, over a 20-year period, ending in 2007. The pair were rewarded with a Bafta fellowship in 2009, the first double act since Morecambe and Wise to receive the honour.
Saunders’ characters (vacuous PR maven Edina Monsoon from Ab Fab, desperate talkshow host Vivienne Vyle) tend to be darkly funny but rooted in vulnerability; we like them in spite of ourselves. Her influence continues to be felt by a new generation of female comedians on both sides of the Atlantic: in America, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham (having Saunders on Girls would be “the best thing ever to happen to us”) have cited Saunders as an inspiration; in the UK, you can see her influence on the work of female comics from Julia Davis to Catherine Tate.
But it was writing the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous that cemented Saunders’ reputation. She also starred as Edina, whose life is a desperate, Bollinger-soaked struggle to keep up with the latest fashions. The show won her a Bafta and an Emmy, and garnered both Saunders and her co-star Joanna Lumley international acclaim.
The film version, released next week, catches up with Edina as she hurtles towards 60. Her innate desire to be hip is gradually fading, along with the realisation that “there is a point in your life when you just can’t keep the party going”, says Saunders. “I think there’s a natural time when you just think: ‘I don’t want to know about any new bands. I’m happy, I’ve got my uniform that I wear. I don’t need to know about everything that’s happening all the time. In fact it’s just very, very tiring.’”
Is that how Saunders feels? “Oh, I try. I really do try,” she replies, with a sort of weary determination. She’s only just got on to Facebook, “and I’m finding it very useful. It’s the only way I get to see photographs of my children. But, you know, I’m sure a whole generation is going to grow up thinking this is just bonkers, isn’t it? To expose yourself like that online to everybody.”
She says the movie will be “quite different to the TV show, in that if you’ve got an hour and a half, you can explore a lot more things. Also, it’s got loads and loads of gags and the idea is basically just to be as funny as possible.” As part of the writing process, she watched old episodes “to try and get the rhythm again. And then I just start writing lines, and then I do a lot of Googling – it’s like a little patchwork quilt, and then it all just comes together in the end.
“Sometimes, late at night, you’ll find you have the best conversation in your head and think, ‘Oh, I’ll have to write that down.’ Often the best stuff comes out in a kind of a rant, you know – an illogical rant rather than writing down lines.”
So she’s not a tortured writer, anxiously biting her fingernails in front of the screen? “Oh, it’s very tortured! I torture myself by not doing it on time and leaving it far too late. I do lots of that.”
I wasn’t allowed to see the film before we met, which is usually a worrying sign, but there was no shortage of celebrities wanting to be involved – everyone from Kate Moss to Jeremy Paxman. Moss was “fantastic, funny and professional”. How did Saunders persuade her to take part?
“Well, we asked her.” When it’s Jennifer Saunders doing the asking, one imagines there aren’t many people who say no. She is forceful in a straightforward way, like a seasoned midwife who takes it as read that you’re going to give birth and there won’t be any unnecessary fuss.
It has been said that Saunders seeks out the double-act formula (with French and then with Lumley) because her partners bring a warmth and likability that counterbalance a perceived frostiness. Her friend Ruby Wax, and co-star in Girls On Top, the 1980s sitcom centred around the adventures of four female flatmates and their landlady, once noted that Saunders has “this deadly blank face and she sucks the personality out of people and becomes them”.
It’s true that one can never quite grasp what Saunders might be thinking. Her eyes are lively but vague, her smile broad but distant. “I’m not very good at doing things on my own,” she admits. “I like to play against things. I need an audience, and a double act.”
She says, almost in passing, that she has never once had an argument with French. What, never? She nods. What if one of them suggests a bad joke? “Sometimes she’ll say something and I’ll just go, ‘Urgh!’ and she’ll go, ‘OK, no, we won’t do that.’”
Doesn’t all that unresolved resentment just fester? “Isn’t it better that you just get on and do the things that you both love, than fight for something that’s going to cause a bit of angst?”
The same rules of non-confrontation seem to apply to her marriage of 31 years to fellow comic Adrian Edmondson. The two met as part of the Comic Strip collective, and were friends for six years before they fell in love. Saunders thinks that made a difference, because “we’re not too complicated about it, you know? I think often people over-analyse things. Ade and I argue very little. I think it’s to do with the fact that, if you know you’re heading for one, you avoid it and you compromise.”
She can recall only one disagreement she had with her parents; it was about her mother not letting her go out at night. “There was no shouting involved. It was more a quiet sort of seething.” Saunders has little time for the modern mania for individualism, the belief that someone has a right to express hurtful feelings simply because not doing so might infringe on their rights.
“Ade and I have, sort of, parallel lives and we come together in the marriage. We don’t force something. We don’t say: ‘Oh, you’re denying me my individuality.’ I think I’m happy being quite quiet most of my life. And in fact Ade said, at first, when he met me, he was put off by the idea that I would sit quite quietly if we went out together and not say much. But actually, that was me being happy, not unhappy.”
Recently, she’s discovered a new diversionary tactic. “I realised that if you ask people questions, then you don’t have to say very much. If you just go in and go, ‘Hi, how are you? That’s lovely, where did you get that?’ Dawn’s had that for years.”
Saunders has three grownup daughters with Edmondson – Ella (who has two children, Fred, four, and Bert, two), Beattie and Freya – whom they raised in Devon, before moving back to London a few years ago. They still have a home in the countryside and go back frequently. She clearly misses the outdoor life and gets a contented, faraway look when she talks about tramping through fields or rescuing dogs.
She took up smoking for the first time when she was diagnosed with cancer: 'I thought, why not?'“I just loved nothing better than the sheep and cows and chickens, dogs, ducks,” she sighs. “I’m planning that for my retirement, if I ever retire. But I would love a menagerie.”
Like the Duchess of Devonshire? “Yes! Honestly, chickens are the best thing in the world. You spend hours looking at chickens, it’s like a little soap opera. I used to go out in the morning to feed them, take the kids to school and come back, and still be out there at about 11.30.”
She compares the exercise to mindfulness, but gets it wrong and calls it mindlessness, then laughs at herself. “That’s a joke,” she says, and you can see her mentally filing it away for future use.
Saunders grew up with her three brothers. “There wasn’t something that defined me particularly as a girl,” she says. “I could do everything they did. I just lived outside mainly, with animals. I would fall over and hurt myself quite a lot.”
Her father, Tom, was an air marshal in the RAF and her mother, Jane, a biology teacher, who taught her the names of all the plants and birds. Her father’s job meant the family moved around between bases, before settling in the Cheshire countryside in Saunders’ teens. Her autobiography, Bonkers, relates how she spent much of her childhood careening around fields on motorbikes or riding horses. She didn’t do a lot of what she describes as “school socialising”: as long as she had horses, she was happy.
Saunders’ grandson, Bert, is now similarly obsessed with horses, but when she tries to buy him toys “it’s all pink! All girl-orientated! Little ponies with rugs and flowers on.” She wishes children’s toys could “go back to [being] proper toys that represent proper things, you know? Every toy is a bloody dinosaur, every book is about a bloody dinosaur. And they know the names of all the dinosaurs, but you point at a badger and a fox and go, ‘What’s that?’ ‘I don’t know. Is it a stegosaurus?’ ‘No. It’s a badger and it actually exists.’”
She laughs and her features lose their aloofness. Her forehead is almost entirely wrinkle-free and she seems to have become more beautiful with age. “You know, I’m not very thin and I do think that makes a difference when you get older – if you keep a bit of flesh on.”
Still, she hates being asked for selfies. “It’s just a nightmare. Like, in an airport. You’ve got off a plane after 10 hours, looking like shite, and someone goes, ‘Can I have a picture?’ And you go, ‘Actually no, you can’t, sorry.’ And they look at you like you’re the most disgusting thing in the world: how dare you say I can’t have a picture? And then you go, ‘I don’t want to have a picture with you. I don’t know you. And you’re going to have a picture of me looking shite on your phone. I don’t want that. Why is that so hard to understand?’”
Usually, her level of fame is fairly manageable. If someone recognises her in the street, “they generally walk by and then I hear them muttering and they look back and shake their heads”. She doesn’t think too much about fame, to be honest.
Saunders maintains a healthy perspective on most things. You would, I imagine, find her making the soup in the event of an apocalyptic nuclear disaster. In her career, she has taken the knocks with the same level-headedness as the successes.
When something goes wrong – like Viva Forever, the Spice Girls musical she wrote, which closed in 2012 after six months and some truly awful reviews (“tawdry, lazy and unedifying” said the Telegraph) – Saunders’ tactic is to “blame everyone else”, she says. “And then just go: ‘Well, these things happen,’ and move on. But you learn from it. And you learn how to do things differently or better. If you don’t learn from it, then it has been a disaster.”
When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009, she insisted Edmondson complete a panto run while she underwent chemotherapy, because she wanted things to stay as normal as possible. She took up smoking, for the first and last time in her life, because her body was so full of chemicals already: “I thought, why not?”
After chemotherapy, Saunders, like many women, was prescribed the drug Tamoxifen, which triggered menopause and depression, both known side effects. Does she feel she is now “over” cancer? “As a physical experience, yes. You’re never quite over it, because I’m going back on Tamoxifen. I came off it after five years for a break. I wanted to know what was age and what was side-effect. And so I now know how achy I am, generally. If I go back on it, I’ll know what’s the drug and what’s me.” There is a small, reflective pause. “But I’m grateful for that because, you know, you want to live as long as you can, really.”
The prospect of turning 60 doesn’t particularly bother her, mainly because she looks at Joanna Lumley “and she’s just turned 70 and she doesn’t seem to have changed at all and I just think, ‘It can’t be that bad, can it?’ What you don’t want to be is crippled with knee pain and all the rest of it. So it feels like you have to start looking after yourself, I suppose.”
Saunders started wearing a Fitbit a few months ago and is very proud of it, pulling up her sleeve to show me it. She has set herself a target of 10,000 steps a day, and likes it because she’s “very competitive. And I do very small steps. I’ve realised that because Ade goes, ‘How come you’ve done 10,000 and we’ve walked the same amount?’”
Getting older has given her more confidence. It’s not that she was ever insecure about her work, more that she cares less what the men in the room think. “In the TV world, I think it’s still easier for a gang of boys to get a show on than it is for a gang of girls, and I don’t know why that is. I think there’s still an expectation that there is women’s humour or girls’ humour.”
She has done more comedy panel shows of late. “I was always so terrified of doing Have I Got News For You, and then I did it and didn’t find it terrifying at all. I think women should do [panel shows], and the more women that do them, the more women-friendly they’ll become.”
She gives a funny account of what it was like filming the sports TV show A League Of Their Own and being surrounded by young blokes brought to the edge of frenzy by Red Bull and cock jokes. “It was quite frightening because it was so high energy,” she says drily. “It was ‘GUYS, LET’S DO THIS!’ And I was, like, ‘Hey, I’m trying to be high energy, too! Look at me’” She breaks off to do jazz hands. “‘High energy! Did you say the word ‘PENIS’? HAHAHAHA. I’m laughing!’”
You just know, as she talks, that she was funnier than any of them without even trying. We get up to go and she gives me a hug on the street. I watch her walking away, taking very little steps.
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is out on 1 July.
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