Jennifer Saunders: 'Everyone's always saying, "You're frightening"'

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/sep/30/jennifer-saunders-frightening-memoir

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When Jennifer Saunders was approaching 50, she had an epiphany. "I was sitting in a meeting listening to everyone talking about some show or other, and I suddenly started thinking, do you know something? I think I have a better idea. I think my idea is probably better. Before that, if they'd said anything, I'd go, yes, yes, that's right, yes, agree, agree, agree. And I suddenly thought, actually, I think I can make this funnier, I think I know better. And it hadn't occurred to me until then that that could ever happen."

How could it have taken the comedian so long to realise this? "It's terrible, isn't it?" she laughs. "That you end up thinking, oh look, everyone's cleverer than me. Everyone knows better than me. Everyone thinks I'm an idiot. I probably can't do this, I probably can't do that. I don't know what suddenly clicked, but something just suddenly clicked, and, you just think, 'Oh, I'm fed up of this'. I looked round and thought, for God's sake, you're all idiots. And I could have been thinking that for 30 years."

The irony is that for 30-odd years Saunders often looked as if that's exactly what she was thinking. I interviewed her at the Cannes film festival in 2004 and found her aloofness fearfully intimidating, but when I admit as much she bursts out laughing, and says people have been telling her that since her teens.

"Oh, everyone's always going, 'Jennifer, they think you're frightening.' But what could possibly be frightening? They'd go, 'Well, because you don't smile an awful lot.' But I've had that face since I was a kid, actually. A sort of blankness, that's what it is, it's a blankness. And I think that's what people find odd, because if you're blank they don't know what to think." What she was actually feeling most of the time, she says, was shy. "And I don't realise what I look like when I'm scared."

It's a good job she no longer feels that way, or she wouldn't have written her memoir. "God no, I would never have considered it ever." But the epiphany made her think, "Oh fuck it, I can write a book. I like Clare Balding's book, Dawn [French] has written a book, and I just thought, I'm going to write a book. It'll be fine. I thought, just do it, just do it, I'm just going to do it. I'm finally going to actually do it, and it doesn't have to be perfect and it doesn't have to be a Booker-winning bloody thing. It just has to be what I want to say, and it has to be all right. That's all it has to be: all right."

Saunders' fans – which as far as I can tell means pretty much everyone – will be unsurprised to learn that Bonkers: My Life In Laughs is a lot better than all right. Beautifully written and frequently hilarious, it begins with her childhood as the tomboy daughter of an RAF captain, endlessly on the move between bases before settling in Cheshire in her teens. She inherited her father's sense of humour, but clearly not the military gene for disciplined purpose, because after A-levels she couldn't really think what to do with her life. Eventually, for want of a better idea, Saunders started training as a drama teacher in London, where she met Dawn French.

After graduating in 1980, Saunders couldn't be bothered to look for a job – "or even be arsed to sign on" – so lived rent-free with a friend in a dilapidated house in Chelsea, burning bits of it on an open fire when they got cold, until one day she spotted an ad for female comedians at the new Comic Strip club. Saunders called French, who was by then a teacher, and talked her into giving it a go.

Their double act quickly became so central to the alternative comedy scene emerging out of the club, that it's easy to forget they weren't ever really alternative in any political sense. "No, we were just there," she agrees. "The truth was it was rather jolly at the time, and everything was fine as long as people didn't take it too seriously." Half under her breath, and starting to giggle, she adds, "There were a lot of quite serious people. And they didn't actually make the grade, I don't think, generally. They're probably still in a vegetarian cafe in Holloway, still doing the same act."

On the whole, though, she was just happy to be part of a scene that rejected mainstream comedy's traditional bigotries. "Dawn and I were completely part of that no racism, no sexism, let's just, you know, try and be funny. Let's get away from the kind of established mother-in-law jokes, racist jokes, beep beep, old Jim Davidson stuff. So we didn't do what I would call radical, we just weren't racist and we weren't sexist."

Did the more militant wing of the alternative scene take a dim view of their moderation? Well they did have one "slightly judge-y" night, Saunders laughs, "in front of a basically hardcore lesbian audience" who let them know they considered their act insufficiently strident. "But we were lucky that we generally came on in Alexei [Sayle's] coat-tails, so nobody was going to sort of argue with us. You know, Alexei would do all this, you know, 'You bastards, yes, you bastards, yes, you bastards,' and then, 'Here's French and Saunders!' We'd sort of be allowed to happen because of Alexei. So yes, all the boys vouched for us in a way and we eventually found our sort of voice." She starts to laugh affectionately. "Alexei's a lovely man, a really lovely man, but his act was full-on and aggressive, and no one was going to argue or say anything because they thought he might just be back stage and someone might send him out again."

By 1987, their sketch show was on BBC primetime, but it was her 90s sitcom, Absolutely Fabulous, co-starring Joanna Lumley, that made Saunders an international star, and the book contains a glorious anecdote about them going to New York to receive the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Prize from the state senate. Anticipating a frivolous occasion where their real-life selves would be received with polite disappointment, they decided to go in character, as Edina, the faddish, Bollinger-guzzling PR, and Patsy, the louche fashion editor. Wildly overdressed – "squidged into a white Ralph Lauren thing with a little bit of muffin top, covered in "I love New York" badges, with a huge American flag wrapped around a silly hat" – and not having bothered to prepare a speech, they arrived to find a deeply earnest audience of politicians in dark suits.

"It was honestly one of the moments I wanted the whole world to open up and scoop me into a molten middle, because there was no way out of this." Things got worse when Whoopi Goldberg took to the stage, dressed in head-to-toe white. "And you go, oh Christ, no, and she's making a fucking speech! I'm looking at Joanna going, why did you make me not make a speech? And we're dressed like idiots. I'm just going to die.

"All I can say is, 'Cheers darlings, cheers, cheers, here's Patsy.' And Joanna came up and went, 'You can never have enough hats, shoes and gloves. Cheers, darlings, cheers.' Oh God, it was just appalling. We're going fuck, fuck, fuck, we have misjudged this to such a degree." By now Saunders can hardly get her words out for laughing, and manages to croak, "It was simply appalling."

Ab Fab was such a hit that by the end of the decade it was hard to move for fans mimicking Edina and quoting "More Bolly sweety darling" ad nauseam, so I wonder whether she ever got tired of it too. She grins. "Well obviously you think, hurrah, you like the show. But what I did find boring eventually was the fact that that became what the show was known for. And I thought, 'It isn't just about the booze and the fags'. I never wanted them to totally become caricatures."

You wouldn't necessarily guess this from reading the book, for despite its warmth it reveals very little about what Saunders really cares about. Jokes are deployed to deflect any clues to what might matter to her, which she says was deliberate – "I kind of made a decision early on I'd say as much as I'd say to an interviewer. I think that keeps it personal enough, but safe" – but I wonder if the same self-preservation technique applies in real life.

"Hmmm, yes, I think it does a lot in my life, to be honest. I don't do it all the time. The truth is, you can be honest with your friends – but you just can't be honest with the general public if you want to keep your friends."

The book's other conspicuous absence is anything resembling a row. "Ah, well you see I don't actually have many rows. I'm a walkawayer. If someone brings me a really crap meal in a restaurant I will tell them it's wonderful and then just never go to the restaurant again. I think that's the best way to do it generally, rather than sit and fight and annoy your head. Just pretend to enjoy it and then leave." She does realise that some autobiographies are written for the sole purpose of settling old scores, but says: "You just think, well if I put this or that in, I'm only going to get a punch back. And then you've got to keep fighting, and what's the point? You might as well just walk away and never see them again, that's what my thing is. And anyway, who they are is their business, it doesn't have to affect you. They're not going to change who they are. They're only going to get angry with you, and give you more of their shit. So I just always think, can't be bothered. Can't be bothered to have an argument."

Her own reason for writing a memoir, she explains, was simply money. There had also been a recent unauthorised biography, about which she'd "made a bit of a fuss" – but in fact it turned out to be a tremendous help, when she discovered she couldn't remember a lot of what had happened in her life, as she could consult it "to find out what had I'd done". Apart from live tours, she thinks Bonkers is probably the best-paid thing she's ever done.

I'd assumed she no longer needed to worry about money, but apparently not. "I think people imagine that your fame somehow sort of equates with how much you get paid. But to be honest if you're not working live and you're not doing TV …" and she breaks off to correct herself, with a dry chuckle. "Even doing BBC TV, it was never greatly paid, and now it's barely paid at all." But even if she didn't need the money, she wouldn't stop working. "No, I can't see any point. I enjoy work."

Saunders has been married to another comic from the original alternative scene, Ade Edmondson, for 28 years. He is still chiefly famous for his part in The Young Ones, but in the book she refers to them taking turns to work while raising their three daughters, now grown up. I can't help suspecting she's being rather gallant about their relative contributions to the household income, but she insists, not wholly convincingly, "No, there were loads of times when he and Rick [Mayall] were together – they were doing their live tours. He basically, you know, brought in all the beans, and we sort of vary it really."

Edmondson was doing panto in Canterbury in 2009 when Saunders was diagnosed with breast cancer. He stuck with the panto while she underwent chemotherapy, which seemed surprising, so I ask if they needed the money that badly. "Oh, no, no, no. No, I think it was through a sense of wanting to keep everything normal. And actually I was really grateful for it. I sort of said, 'Look this is what's happening, I'm going to be fine, you know, I don't need a big fuss.' And he's always been really good at just keeping it normal, and I think also he was incredibly frightened, but couldn't tell me he was frightened, because that would make me frightened. I just think his big thing was, 'Listen, it's fine, it's a thing that's happening, everything's going to be all right and that's the general thing, let's just keep life normal,' and I find that really helpful."

The only bit of the book I can't fathom is her weakness for musicals, which led to Saunders even writing one – Viva Forever – about, of all things, the Spice Girls. As a musicals-phobe I've always suspected her friendship with Ben Elton (who was responsible for the execrable We Will Rock You) must be to blame for this unaccountable lapse in taste, but when I say so she exclaims, "But I love Ben!" Elton's appeal has grown increasingly opaque with the passage of time, so I ask her to explain it.

"Oh, he's one of those funny, clever people that you sort of wish could be themselves to everyone else, you see. Often you say, God I wish the cameras could see you now, Ben, because they'd get you. They'd get who you are. But the problem with Ben is he's been absolutely crucified, and I think what's happened is that he's lost his confidence because he's trying too hard. Poor Ben is a nice, genuinely good, terribly anxious person, who just wants to make everything right and happy and good and politically correct and lovely and make everybody happy again. Ben's been trying to claw his way back, but maybe he's been trying to do it too anxiously."

How would Saunders have coped if the critics had savaged her that mercilessly? "I would have probably curled up and given up, and just gone fuck it. But he won't give up."

Had we not by now drunk almost a bottle of wine I doubt she would have obliged my final question, but there is now more than a touch of Edina about her, dauntless and camp, so I ask her to demonstrate a scene in the book from her teacher training days. On her very first placement, some teenagers brought a record player into class, claiming their regular teacher always let them dance. Soon the music was blasting out, and the kids were demanding she dance too. "Dance, Miss, dance!" So she did.

And now the notoriously aloof Saunders gets to her feet in her publisher's office, struggling to keep a straight face, and re-enacts her dance – a classic early 80s wedding two-step shuffle – until she's laughing so hard she has to sit down again.

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