Imagine… French And Saunders: Pointed, Bitchy, Bitter review: Only Alan Yentob could make French and Saunders unfunny! writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Imagine… French and Saunders: pointed, bitchy, bitter
The repair shop
Physicists call it the Yentob effect – a gravitational field of super-serious artistry that compresses everything light and fun into a dense, humorless mass.
Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders battle it out for about eight minutes, in an hour-and-a-half career retrospective. They even tried to give it a self-mockery, Imagine… French And Saunders: Pointed, Bitchy, Bitter (BBC1).
Friends lined up at the start to ironically declare what terrible people they are, how difficult they are to work with. “Narcissists,” Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins agreed. “I hated their work,” Kathy Burke claimed.
But the Yentob effect swallows all the jokes and doesn’t let an ounce of levity escape. French and Saunders knew this and satirized it twenty years ago in a skit in which they played “free-runners” or urban gymnasts, showing off their jumps and jumps to Alan Yentob himself.
Alan sent himself upstairs on that occasion, but now he was determined to force the duo to take themselves, and him, seriously.
Friends lined up at the start to ironically declare what terrible people the pair are and how difficult they are to work with
Their former comic colleague Alexei Sayle fell into the Yentob trap and pontificated on the importance of alternative comedy in the 1980s. “What I think we were trying to do,” he drank, “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 hesitated. “I was aware, I think, that we were creating a new art form.”
Alexei was Yentobbed!
What followed was a catalog of clips from their shows. But because French and Saunders comedies rely so heavily on characters rather than one-liners, these segments were only funny if you remembered the context.
Both women talked with studied care, not even walking on eggshells but tiptoeing around them, whether discussing their early friendship or analyzing why they work much less together now. Dawn revealed the moment that made her decide to pull the plug on their sketch series for good in 2008 – a lukewarm routine that saw her singing 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 the day, I’ll never do that again, I’ll never feel so humiliated again.”
Jennifer sat next to her, stunned and silent, apparently hearing this for the first time. A more pushy interviewer, less concerned about showing deference to their comedic genius, would have seized on this. Yentob just nodded sensibly and allowed Jennifer to pass the blame on to the Beeb’s editors-in-chief.
Both women talked with studied care, not even walking on eggshells but tiptoeing around them, whether discussing their early friendship or analyzing why they work much less together now.
Because French and Saunders’ comedy relies so heavily on characters rather than one-liners, clips from their shows were only funny if you remembered the context
This time the craftsmen in the shed were restoring a ceramic Alsatian for a guy who worked as a police dog handler for 25 years
There were a few unexpected surprises for Ab Fab fans. Joanna Lumley described how she created Patsy, shrugging her shoulders to suggest that most of her internal organs had been removed – both physically and emotionally hollow. And Jennifer accepted Dawn’s £50,000 bet to write something about Ab Fabby by the end of this year… not another film, she said, but a spin-off. Honey, honey, that’s just meh!
For this to happen, Patsy may have to be sent to the hospital for hopelessly damaged old wrecks, The Repair Shop (BBC1). Imagine the layers of nicotine they have to scrub away. This time the craftsmen were in the shed restoring a ceramic Alsatian for a guy who worked as a police dog handler for 25 years, and peeling slats off a doctor’s precious medical certificate.
No fix ever fails, or is even very different from previous repairs, but it is reliably soothing to see such skill and care at work.