Imagine… French And Saunders: Pointed, Bitchy, Bitter
Physicists name it the Yentob Effect – a gravitational discipline of super-serious artiness that compresses something gentle and enjoyable right into a dense humourless mass.
Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders resisted it for about eight minutes, in an hour-and-a-half profession retrospective. They even tried giving it a self-mocking title, Imagine… French And Saunders: Pointed, Bitchy, Bitter (BBC1).
Friends queued up initially to declare tongue-in-cheek what terrible individuals they’re, how troublesome to work with. ‘Narcissists,’ agreed Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins. ‘I hated their work,’ claimed Kathy Burke.
But the Yentob Effect swallows all jokes and permits no scrap of levity to flee. French and Saunders knew this and satirised it 20 years in the past in a sketch the place they performed ‘free-runners’ or city gymnasts, displaying off their jumps and leaps to Alan Yentob himself.
Alan despatched himself up on that event, however now he was decided to power the duo to take themselves, and him, in earnest.
Friends queued up initially to declare tongue-in-cheek what terrible individuals the pair are and the way troublesome to work with
Their one-time Comic Strip colleague Alexei Sayle blundered into the Yentob lure, pontificating on the significance of Alternative Comedy within the Nineteen Eighties. ‘What I think we were attempting to do,’ he droned, ‘was to get people to laugh about the truth of the absurdities of their own lives. But there was a kind of central honesty behind it that had never really been attempted, you know,’ he waffled on. ‘I was aware, I think, that we were creating a new art form.’
Alexei was Yentobbed!
What adopted was a list of clips from their reveals. But as a result of French and Saunders comedy depends so closely on characters relatively than one-liners, these snippets had been humorous provided that you remembered the context.
Both ladies talked with studied care, not even strolling on eggshells however tiptoeing round them, whether or not they had been discussing their early friendship or analysing why they now work collectively a lot much less. Dawn revealed the second that made her determine to drag the plug on their sketch sequence for good in 2008 — a tepid routine that noticed her singing with pop star Anastasia.
‘I got in the car and just wept all the way home,’ she stated, boiling over on the reminiscence. ‘I hated that, I hated everything about the day, I’m by no means going to try this once more, I’m by no means going to really feel humiliated like that once more.’
Jennifer sat beside her, surprised and silent, listening to this evidently for the primary time. A extra intrusive interviewer, much less involved to point out reverence for his or her Comic Genius, would have seized on this. Yentob simply nodded properly and allowed Jennifer to deflect the blame onto the Beeb’s commissioning editors.
Both ladies talked with studied care, not even strolling on eggshells however tiptoeing round them, whether or not they had been discussing their early friendship or analysing why they now work collectively a lot much less
Because French and Saunders comedy depends so closely on characters relatively than one-liners, snippets from their reveals had been humorous provided that you remembered the context
This time within the barn, the artisans had been restoring a ceramic Alsatian for a chap who spent 25 years as a police canine handler
For followers of Ab Fab, there have been a few sudden surprises. Joanna Lumley described how she created Patsy, hunching her shoulders to suggest most of her inside organs had been eliminated — bodily in addition to emotionally hole. And Jennifer accepted Dawn’s £50,000 guess to jot down one thing Ab Fabby by the tip of this 12 months… not one other movie, she stipulated, however a spin-off. Sweetie, darling, that’s simply mwah!
For this to occur, Patsy might need to be despatched to that hospital for hopelessly broken previous wrecks, The Repair Shop (BBC1). Imagine the layers of nicotine they’ll have to clean away. This time within the barn, the artisans had been restoring a ceramic Alsatian for a chap who spent 25 years as a police canine handler, and peeling off slabs of lamination from a physician’s valuable medical certificates.
No fix-it ever fails, and even differs very a lot from earlier mends, however to see such talent and care at work is reliably soothing.