The “1980s roly-poly comedian” shares the moment of self-loathing that made her quit French and Saunders — and explains how she’s too old to be cancelled.
It’s a rainy Thursday night in September and the news is full of stories about a certain male comedian that make you want to grab your daughters and hide them in a cave. But inside the London Palladium a certain female comedian is spreading proud, defiant joy. “Hello, I’m beloved 1980s roly-poly comedian Dawn French,” she says by way of introduction to her one-woman show, mocking and owning the once ubiquitous sneery description of her.
French has been an adored member of the British comedy elite since French and Saunders first aired in 1987, and 36 years later that adoration appears not to have waned a jot. The audience — older couples, groups of young men, pairs of young women — gasp with delight at the stories from her career and her 25-year marriage to Lenny Henry, which ended in 2010. She describes the time Ben Elton came up to her at a party and told her he was writing a play: “And I want you to be the lead,” he told her. She recreates her gushing excitement before then switching back to playing a bemused Elton. “I said I want Hugh to play the lead. Hugh Laurie?” Elton did later write a play for her, she adds, and then puts up the poster on the screen behind her for those who have forgotten what that 1991 West End hit was called: Silly Cow. Across the aisle, Dan Levy from Schitt’s Creek and Emma Corrin from The Crown are in near hysterics.
French has called her own show Dawn French Is a Huge Twat and it consists of her describing her most idiotic moments. It will be followed by her latest book, The Twat Files, which includes stories from the show and more. “Now you’ve seen the twat in me and maybe it will help you recognise the twat in you — and we can celebrate being huge twats together!” she says at the end, arms aloft, and the audience roars with happiness.
The next day I meet French, 65, backstage at the Palladium hours before her next show, and I apologise for the giant spot on my forehead.
“Stop it! I love flawed people and don’t apologise for something so totally normal anyway,” she says looking firmly into my eyes and not at the spot at all. I long to hug her, but suspect that might be flawed behaviour too far. She is wearing a long brown tunic, black leggings and trainers and looks lovely, with her grey bob (she stopped dyeing her hair during Covid) and a face free of makeup and filler.
I never thought of you as a “roly-poly comedian”, I tell her.
“But that’s what was said about me constantly! Certainly until recently, when it became unfashionable to be so unkind. But for many years Jennifer [Saunders] and I were always described by how we looked, especially me, because I was the bigger one. It was always about ‘running to fat’ or ‘plump’, and they never said that about any of the male comedians. I absolutely own whatever my size is and I will call myself whatever I want. But if I feel like the intent is to shame me, I will not have it,” she says. It is why she refers to her best friend, Saunders, as “Fatty”: she is, once again, mocking and owning the sneers.
It’s impossible for today’s young women to understand just how groundbreaking French and Saunders felt back in the 1980s: in a comedy landscape that was even more male-dominated than it is today, here were two women with their own show, making character-led sketches about — but not exclusively about — women, from Madonna to mothers who never stop commenting about what’s on TV (“Is it necessary that we should watch a grown woman with teeth like that?”).
They emerged from the alternative comedy troupe the Comic Strip, along with Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson (who married Saunders in 1985). Nigel Planer co-founded the Comic Strip and he was at French and Saunders’ audition. He tells me: “Female comedians often have to show male characteristics because that kind of testosterone aggression is what the stand-up world is built on. But here were these two girls with cut-glass accents in cardigans doing sketches about awkwardness, and we thought that was so cool. Plus they were really funny. That was the clincher.”
It still is. French and Saunders is one of the rare sketch shows that hasn’t aged; old clips are as funny now as they were three decades ago. Like Victoria Wood, they were 10 times funnier than many of their male contemporaries. “Back then, if you were a female double act and went to the BBC, they would say they’d already filled their quota of female comedians,” French says. Were she and Saunders ever told that? “Well, we were the quota. So no. But I think others were told no because there was already French and Saunders,” she says with a small embarrassed smile.
When French and Saunders announced the end of their sketch show in 2004 after six series, fans were blindsided. Saunders was too. It had been French’s firm and sudden decision. “To this day I don’t really know what happened,” she says.
What happened was this: the pair were filming a very funny sketch in which they are each in a lavatory stall in the BBC building, and French describes her fantasy that the American pop star Anastacia hears her sing and invites her to come on Top of the Pops with her. You’ll never guess who’s outside the loos overhearing this conversation and French’s singing. Cut to French, done up in Anastacia’s signature cowgirl gear, singing on Top of the Pops alongside the star. From the outside a standard French and Saunders sketch; on the inside, French writes in The Twat Files, “I’d genuinely never felt so ugly. I’d often voluntarily, happily been ‘ugly’ for hundreds of sketches. I’ve never minded what something looks like, as long as it’s servicing the joke right. The mirror was clearly telling me why this was so painfully abhorrent. Because the joke was on me.”
She didn’t let anyone know what she was feeling, but after filming the sketch she walked calmly out of the studio, climbed into her car and “burst into hot, angry tears. I properly sobbed all the 28 miles home”. She decided to end the show right then and told Saunders, who was bewildered. Did she try to dissuade French? “Jennifer would never fight me on something so big. She does say now, ‘What the f*** were you thinking? We could have sorted that easily.’ But it wasn’t a problem.”
Did she experience much sexism from other male comedians back in the Eighties? “You’ve got to remember I was part of the Comic Strip, a so-called alternative group, and we were pushing back on a lot of the very obvious sexism,” she says. Does she think comedy in particular attracts men with an aggressive kind of male entitlement? “Well, certainly the men in the Comic Strip were the opposite of that.”
In 2007 French interviewed Russell Brand for her BBC4 series Boys Who Do: Comedy. Has she been surprised by the allegations against him? “Oh yeah. I mean, I reserve my thoughts about it at the moment until the whole thing is investigated. I don’t like all this jumping too quickly or whatever. I will always listen to what women have to say, but I want to wait and see how it unfolds,” she says briskly, moving on.
While the Comic Strip, followed by her marriage in 1984 to Henry, arguably shielded her from the worst of 1980s comedy sexism, being with Henry showed her the worst of 1980s racism.
“There were performers — older ones usually — who in rooms at the BBC felt completely free to call Len ‘Boy’, crack racist jokes and then hug him as if to say, ‘You’re not like that.’ Like they were teaching him a little lesson. Insidious racism that was everywhere, not just in the industry. And also big racism, with people leaving s*** on our doorstep. It was absolutely there all the time.” The couple have a mixed-race daughter, Billie, now 32, whom they adopted after years of fertility difficulties on both sides. Billie, French says, has stayed “well away” from the entertainment industry.
Was she able to speak up about racism in the industry at the time? “Well, Len has been fighting against it his whole life. But back in the ‘80s we were taught that if you were offended you had a chip on your shoulder. Now if you offend someone you’re cancelled immediately. The pendulum has gone massively the other way. And it’s tricky because comedy is supposed to offend a bit. It lives on the edges. Obviously, if someone is a massive racist there are laws against that. But if someone wants to be a bit dangerous, or even just talk about cancel culture, you’ve got to be a bit edgy and I would fight for people’s right to do that.”
Does she worry about being cancelled? “No — I’m too old and look what the show’s called! So many people told me not to. But you’ve got to stand in your own skin.”
In 2014 French lost 48kg because she had a cancer scare and required a hysterectomy. The doctor told her that if she lost the weight her recovery time would be much quicker, so she did. Cue a tsunami of articles about her “miraculous” weight loss. “I have never rejected the bigger woman I have been. Lots of people do it and say, ‘Oh, you look so much better — now you look well.’ And I think, ‘F*** off! Don’t judge that other person who I loved.’ Alison Moyet is a very good friend and so often she has been reduced to descriptions of her physicality. She’s this giant talent, why reduce her to that? I’m not taking any s*** from anyone about any of it.”
Does she think people are becoming less judgmental about women’s weight? She makes some enthusiastic comments about the rise of plus-sized female celebrities (“Is it Lizzo?”). But judging from her anger about the reaction to her weight loss, I doubt if the answer is a full-throated yes.
Throughout her career, French has made jokes about her size, as if to get ahead of the barbs. As she writes in The Twat Files, she was often bigger than the characters she was parodying on French and Saunders — from Hannibal Lecter to Harry Potter — “it’s an essential part of the delight of the parody joke, and it’s a key part I’m collaborating on at all times”. She and Saunders launched a podcast — “Award-winning podcast!” she bellows with mock emphasis — in 2020 called Titting About. On it she described herself two years ago as “the size of a barrel again”. She wants, she says, to “take the shame out of things, not be burdened by feelings of humiliation about mistakes we all make”. Which is all very laudable, but is this self-deprecation healthy?
“Well, I’ve got this armour my dad gave me because he always made me feel so loved. But if a friend says, ‘You’ll never guess what stupid thing I said today,’ I then connect with that person because I’ve done that too, and then we’re in love with each other because we’re open and vulnerable. If someone’s telling me how perfect they are, well, I don’t know how to connect with that.”
French was born in Wales but moved around a lot because her father, Denys, was in the RAF. “We were kind of divided into two: my dad and I were the funny ones, and my brother and mum were more like the audience. But I was definitely encouraged to be a bit dramatic for everyone’s amusement, and I could do impressions of people and stuff like that. My dad encouraged that completely,” she says.
I say it’s lovely that she remembers her childhood with so much levity, given her father suffered from severe depression. “He hid it. I knew he was ill but not that ill,” she says. “That kind of depression is the black dog that comes and goes. When it goes it might go for years, and then we have our dad back. When we didn’t have him it was very brief, until it was all-consuming for him.” In 1977, when French was 19 and the family were living in the Cornish town of Saltash, Denys drove to a field near where he kept rabbits and took his own life in the car. He was 45.
French writes about this in her 2008 memoir, Dear Fatty, but she couldn’t bear to do the audiobook (Liza Tarbuck stepped in for her). For a live show about her life in 2014, Thirty Million Minutes, she pre-recorded the segment about her father, not trusting herself to talk about him on stage without crying. “But I feel I understand him more now I’ve written about it. We all understand mental health better, and wouldn’t it have been better if that had never been a subject surrounded in shame?” she says.
French then went to London to study at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she befriended Saunders, who made her laugh for the first time since her father’s death. “Every minute I’ve spent with her in my life has been a massive big plus. Nobody makes me laugh more than her,” she says. Planer, who has been friends with them for 40 years, says: “They are a proper lifetime double act. They would always sit together and they complement each other perfectly. Dawn is the organised one with a schedule and coloured markers, and Jennifer isn’t.”
“Jennifer isn’t a slacker but she is a procrastinator extraordinaire,” French says fondly. “I’m a plodder, slow and steady, and if I’m writing something I do a bit every day, writing slowly and then rewriting. But Jennifer is like a shark in the water — not doing any work for ages, and then at the last minute she smells blood and goes straight at it. When she told me she was going to write the original Ab Fab film, I said, ‘Do you really want to do it?’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Okay, we’re going to have a bet: you will give me the first draft of the script by New Year’s Eve or you give me 20 grand.’ That focused her because I understand the shark.”
Do they ever get envious of each other’s solo successes? “No, because we’re like sisters. You might have 20 seconds where you feel massively jealous, but you have a whole lifetime of just being proud of them. We’ve been through everything: births, deaths, kids, cancer. The friendship came first and nothing will ever come between that.” Can she imagine what her life would have been like if she hadn’t met Saunders? “No I can’t — and there’s no reason to because that life would never happen.”
I tell her that I rewatched the Anastacia sketch after reading the book — she makes a small but perceptible wince — and I really didn’t think she looked ... “It wasn’t so bad,” she agrees before I can say it. “But it wasn’t what I wanted. It felt out of control and I felt humiliated. It tipped me over.”
Has French ever regretted ending the show? “No, never. I think it was time to go to another chapter, and you have to know when that happens.” She continued with the sitcom The Vicar of Dibley (1994-2007), then went on to become a bestselling novelist, writing four books in the past decade. And now there’s the award-winning podcast, which has just launched its fourth season.
In The Twat Files, French writes that when they filmed the Anastacia sketch she was nearly 21 stone — “The biggest I’d ever been. I have all kinds of theories about that but that’s a whole other book, I reckon.”
What’s that other book? “Oh. It’s an interesting book about women’s relationship with their bodies, and I have a lot of feelings about that. But it’s a big ol’ subject. Do I want to write that book? Dunno. It’s a serious book, isn’t it? But it was an interesting moment. I think many things were going on, something to do with how I was feeling at the time.”
A few years previously there had been suggestions in a tabloid that Henry had been unfaithful to French, which came as a shock to fans who saw them as a golden couple of comedy. The sections about Henry in Dear Fatty from 2008 verge on uxorious as she recalls falling in “proper, big, marvellous, astonishing love” with him in the 1980s. Two years after the book came out, she and Henry divorced.
French and Henry, 65, have both found new partners and are good enough friends for her to include funny stories about him in her new book. “Everything about Len is written with massive affection,” she says. But Mark Bignell — her husband of 10 years — is barely in the book at all. After one marriage that was so much in the public spotlight, does she want to keep this one off-stage?
“A hundred per cent. He hasn’t got anything to do with this industry and he doesn’t like it. He has a job working with very vulnerable people and doesn’t need to be looped into anything. It’s a different life.” Bignell, 58, runs Hamoaze House, a charity that helps to rehabilitate drug abusers and alcoholics, which was co-founded by French’s mother, Felicity. So did her mum bring them together? “She did, yes, so he comes with a bit of a warranty.”
The couple live together in Cornwall and Saunders is not too far away in Devon. “Jen and I, we just want to invent hours in the day because there’s so much we still want to do,” she says. “But as long as I have her in my life, any work is a bonus.”
It’s time for her to get ready for her next show, telling everyone she’s a huge twat, so I get up and reach out my hand.
“No, no, come here,” she says and gives me a massive hug. And it feels wonderful.
- Dawn French Is a Huge Twat tours New Zealand in May 2024 (Wellington, May 21; Christchurch, May 24; Auckland, May 29). Tickets are on sale now.
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London