Bonkers: My Life in Laughs Read online

  The truth was, though, I loved Ade more than the car. Yes, more than my Alfa Romeo Spider. And I really loved that car! I had bought it with the very first bit of money I ever had. It cost £2,000, which was a FORTUNE. I should have done something sensible with the money, of course, but why would you? (Even now, when I hear myself telling my girls to do something sensible with any money they might have earned, there is a voice in the back of my head saying, ‘Or you could just buy a really pretty car!’)

  My Spider was so damn cool. It was a head-turner. I wore a black hat and black leather jacket and drove it with the roof down. I still miss that car. I had to get rid of it eventually because when I was pregnant the lack of power steering became an issue. I swapped it for a newer red one, but it was never the same. I miss the smell of a classic car: leather and damp and engine oil. It’s a heady mixture.

  I learned to drive in an old banger in a field, and was allowed to drive my parents’ car down the lane. So when it came to taking lessons I was fairly competent. My mother gave me a small sherry to calm my nerves before I took my test, and I passed it first time. Within a couple of weeks, however, I had smashed a tiny Honda the size of a biscuit tin – which contained me and three of my schoolfriends – into a tree and overturned it. The car was a mess, but no one was seriously hurt. It was horrible, but probably the best lesson I ever had. I have been lucky since and never had anything more than the odd scrape.

  I love driving. I mentally pat myself on the back if I think I’ve taken a corner particularly well.

  I love cars.

  I believe I was the fastest-EVER female contestant on Top Gear’s Star in a Reasonably Priced Car. If I had done one more lap, which I was offered, I know I could have beaten Simon Cowell. I was an idiot.

  I like driving fast cars.

  Mainly, I like beautiful cars.

  Cars I would most like to own are the 1959 Bentley Continental, E-Type Jag, a 1949 Bristol 402 and an original Fiat 500. Meanwhile, Ade is probably happiest driving a Land Rover. He doesn’t like my little Porsche. In fact he is happiest in a boat. So I like cars, he likes boats. I say potato, you say potato. I say tomato, you say tomato.

  Nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen … except the prospect of a long and happy marriage.

  So we’ve got there. We are back. That’s how come I am lying in bed, on honeymoon, with him. We are wearing matching His and Hers nightshirts that were given to us as a wedding present. Outside, the weather is terrible. It has rained constantly since we arrived and I think I have developed tonsillitis because I fell asleep in the jacuzzi bath of the hotel we stayed in on our wedding night. When I woke, the water was cold, the window was open and Ade had passed out on the bed. I’m not feeling at all well.

  FIVE

  Dawn and I are sitting in Maureen Vincent’s office. Maureen, who has been our agent for ever, and still is. Maureen, to whom we owe the longevity of our career, who kept us in the marketplace both singly and as a pair and who, by never overpricing us (or indeed underpricing us), has kept us in the swim.

  It is 1986 and she has called us in to go through a contract, a contract that is the most important of our career. We have been offered a series of French and Saunders on BBC2. Already, Dawn and I think we know everything about television, having done a series of the Comic Strip and a show called Girls on Top.

  We wrote Girls on Top with Ruby Wax. It was our first attempt at writing a series.

  Ruby had come from America and studied acting before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company and then becoming a comedy writer. She is probably one of the funniest people alive. I can’t remember speaking in the first few years of knowing her; just listening and laughing, afraid to interrupt for fear of being English and dull. Her life was being worked into a stand-up routine, and her brain was always ticking. Ruby on a roll is a wonder to behold; her take on life and people spins everything on its head. Her brain works so fast that sometimes she starts a story halfway through, as her mouth tries to catch up.

  ‘Rubes, you have to start at the beginning. We don’t know who you’re talking about.’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you that already?’

  ‘Your brain thought it, but your mouth didn’t say it.’

  When Dawn and I wrote with her, the characters that developed were just exaggerated versions of ourselves in that room: Dawn (as Amanda Ripley) trying to wrestle some kind of control and curb Ruby’s excesses; Ruby (as Shelley DuPont) with no idea of political correctness whatsoever (and not really caring); and me (as Jennifer Marsh) saying very little, working out some comedy business I could do in the background while they fought it out. Jennifer Marsh was basically a moronic version of myself when I was twelve. She wore my twelve-year-old uniform: V-necked jumper, jodhpurs and jodhpur boots. I was very happy.

  Ruby taught us a lot about writing, but the biggest lesson we learned was never to leave Ruby with a script overnight, or by the morning every line would be scrawled over and changed.

  We taught Ruby how to say thank you.

  To waiters, even though she would have sent the food back twice. ‘Ruby, say thank you.’

  To shop assistants and runners. ‘Ruby, say thank you.’

  Ruby wasn’t really rude, but sometimes her brain didn’t stop long enough for pleasantries.

  Girls on Top was commissioned for Central Television and we filmed it in Nottingham. Tracey Ullman starred in the first series (as Candice Valentine) and Joan Greenwood played our landlady.

  If Ruby taught us how to write funny, then Tracey was a lesson in how to act funny. She was by far the most famous of us, having starred with Lenny Henry in Three of a Kind. She was the first person we ever met who had Ray-Ban dark glasses. Proper Ray-Bans. The most desired dark spectacles of the eighties. She would arrive at rehearsals in a quirky hat and those Ray-Bans.

  ‘Morning, Jen!’

  I don’t think Tracey could ever quite distinguish me from my character Jennifer Marsh. And when she greeted me it always felt like a verbal pat on the head.

  ‘Hello, Jen! Aaaah! Isn’t she sweet?’

  We made two series of Girls on Top, and somehow in that time I got married and had one or possibly two children. I contributed almost nothing to the writing process for the second series; I was pregnant and away in my head on baby planet. Eventually, Dawn told me that if I didn’t say anything, then I wouldn’t have any lines, which I accepted happily. In Series Two, Jennifer Marsh was a bemused spectator of the battles between the other two, while I planned a nursery.

  The show was regularly watched by 14 million people, which is staggering compared to today’s ratings. But then there were only four channels and it was put on at prime time. It is also possible that remote controls hadn’t been invented then and people were trapped, sofa-bound, with no choice but to watch it. In certain episodes, however, it did have rather a stellar cast. Ruby would rope in all her chums from the RSC, and the likes of Alan Rickman, Suzanne Bertish and Harriet Walter had small parts. Ian McKellen only escaped by the skin of his teeth.

  Home for me and Ade was a top-floor flat above Luigi’s Italian delicatessen on the Fulham Road.

  We had a basic rule: whichever one of us wasn’t working was at home with the children. We have always made a point of not interfering with each other’s work. And we never get jealous. That’s the thing. If I work a lot, Ade thinks it’s great, and vice versa. We keep the reason why we are working at the forefront of our minds. Making sure our kids are happy and having a nice life is always more important than anything, really.

  From the beginning, the girls have always come first. But equally there has never been any question that Ade and I would put our careers on hold for them; we have always made a real point of keeping our home life and our working life separate. We don’t take our work home with us. I mean, that would be quite hard anyway. We’re not like actors who have to live apart for months and can’t drag themselves out of character. We just mess about, make jokes and fall over to make ourselves (a
nd hopefully others) laugh.

  We have worked really hard to make sure that the girls live as normal a life as possible, and I hope we have largely achieved that. Though some things slip through. Once I took the girls to the cinema. When the film had ended and we were getting ready to leave, Beattie looked weary and said, ‘Do we have to go backstage?’

  I thought they liked going backstage, and always tried to make it possible if we knew someone in the cast of a show. We had gone backstage at Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, but I realize now that having actually seen the show, they couldn’t help but find it a bit dull.

  ‘This is the stage!’

  In their heads: Yeah, we just saw that when we were in the audience.

  ‘These are the costumes!’

  Yeah, we saw those.

  ‘Do you want to meet Phillip Schofield?’

  ‘Will Gordon the Gopher be there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can we just go home?’

  When they were little they didn’t watch us on television, simply because they were too young. Even once they were old enough they didn’t see many of our shows, because we didn’t sit down and watch them often. We were just Mummy and Daddy.

  One of them came home from school one day and was looking at me strangely.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Are you Jennifer Saunders?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes I am.’

  ‘Because someone at school said that’s who you were, but I said you were just Mummy.’

  Ella told me the other day that when we went off to work or said we were going to the office, they always thought we were going to work at the Star and Garter Home for Retired Servicemen. We passed it every morning on the way to school and it looked like offices.

  You don’t realize how little you tell them. We really didn’t talk about it at home.

  In 2000 I was touring with Dawn. Our opening gig was at the Blackpool Empire. It’s a massive theatre in a town that has seen better days. Growing up in Cheshire, we used to spend the odd day on Blackpool beach but mainly on the rides and in the arcades. I will do speed at a fairground, but I won’t do height. I won’t do the high roller coasters or anything designed to make you poo your pants, but I will sit on a wooden horse pretending to win the Grand National, and go on generally jiggly things, and the ghost train.

  High rides and aeroplanes are the same to me. I look at them, and all I see is the things that could go wrong. Most of us have to go on aeroplanes sometimes – high rides you do not.

  I once took my three girls on a waltzer, and the skinny rogue spinning the carts decided to give us extra spin. We were the only ones on the ride, so he gave us his full attention – spinning and spinning at such a rate. It was relentless. I started to panic and scream as I felt my little girls being pulled out of my grasp, but could do nothing as my brain was now flat against the back of my skull with the centrifugal force. It was only when he spotted a group of pretty girls waiting to get on that the nightmare ended.

  So now I have crossed waltzers off the list. I am very happy on the ‘It’s a Small World’ ride at Disneyland, and the spinning teacups. I’m also willing to look after everyone’s bags and play slot machines.

  So Dawn and I are in Blackpool starting the tour. First nights are always the most nerve-wracking. We had a very technical show which was two hours long and didn’t have a support act. In order to give ourselves time to change, we had pre-recorded footage that came up on big screens (we also interacted with footage on the screens, so if something went wrong with the projectors we had had it). At the end of the show I was attached to a wire and had to run backwards up a screen showing a film of a huge Dawn. It looked as if I was being eaten by her. (I will do wires. I do like a bit of flyin’. Comedy flying is one of my favourite things. I think it ranks up there with a neck brace for funniness.)

  As you might imagine, Dawn and I were nervous. We were getting ready in our dressing room, which was full of cards and flowers, and just after one of my frequent visits to the toilet my phone rang. It was a call from home. How sweet, I thought. They’ve remembered it’s our first night. It was Beattie.

  ‘Mummy, where’s the Sellotape?’

  The great thing is, I knew. I have an almost superhero-ey X-ray visiony way of finding things, and I will never give up. I will still be looking for the passport/keys/shoe/tiny-screwdriver-set-we-got-in-a-cracker-for-fixing-spectacles when others have fallen by the wayside or gone to bed.

  I am really quite a tidy person now. You have to be once you have kids. For years, though, I was hideously untidy. My rooms always looked as if a huge laundry basket had exploded, and I dressed as if I had just been hit by the shrapnel. Once, when Dawn and I were sharing a house in Acton, we had a robbery and the police had to be called. On entering my room the officer was shocked and said it was one of the worst ‘turn-overs’ he had seen; all my possessions were scattered over the floor and mattress and it looked squalid – just as I had left it. He asked me if I thought that they had taken anything, and I had to pretend to take stock.

  Had they taken the bed?

  No, I didn’t have a bed. Just a mattress on the floor.

  The truth was, they hadn’t been in there at all.

  On the whole, you have to grow up when you have children. Ade and I would do the washing-up every night and were tidy and, above all, calm. My family was never noisy. Nor was Ade’s. So we both like a bit of silence and calm; it doesn’t frighten us at all. We would manage to get the kids up and off to school with relatively little fuss and then run the gauntlet of other mothers and escape before being press-ganged into a coffee morning or fund-raiser.

  I always found it extraordinary how many women turned up late and in a panic, huffing and puffing, blaming the five-year-old, with a martyred air.

  ‘Come on, come on, have you got your bag? No, well that isn’t my fault. You should remember it. And now we’re late!’

  And then knowing looks to other mothers as if to say, Nightmare, isn’t it? Bloody kids!

  I mean, how hard is it to get two small children up on time, dressed, breakfasted and in the car without getting into a lather and dragging them into school as if you’ve just escaped Nazi occupation? And I’m not talking overstretched single mothers here, I’m talking Range Rover-driving women who obviously have a nanny!

  I never enjoy going into schools. Ade is very good at it. Even as an adult, I would get butterflies in my stomach if I had to go in and speak to my girls’ teachers, especially the head teacher. Best behaviour and say all the right things.

  My own school life had been head down and get away with it. Don’t get noticed, try not to cause trouble. I was generally quite afraid of getting into trouble.

  One of my girls once said, ‘Mummy, I don’t know why you’re so afraid of the teachers. They should be nervous of you.’

  I don’t think I ever recovered from Miss Dines. Miss Janet Dines.

  Miss Dines was the headmistress of Northwich Grammar School for Girls. She ruled in a climate of fear.

  She was tall and thin, always wore a black gown and had a large goitre (a swelling of the thyroid gland) in her neck. Her hair was kept short and neat. Being called to her office was a terrible thing.

  One fateful evening, I had been to hockey practice and was outside school waiting to be picked up by my mother. Miss Dines and her sidekick, Miss Kirkpatrick, were just setting off from school together (rumours were rife) to do their regular drive through Northwich to catch girls misbehaving, or not wearing the regulation red beret. Not wearing the beret was a crime punishable by death. She policed us in and out of school.

  They saw me and – horror of horrors – I was still wearing my games socks. I stammered that I didn’t know the sock rule. But I had to report in the next day.

  Outside Miss Dines’s office were two chairs. Girls wandering by would look sympathetically at you, crossing their fingers and wishing you luck. Those unfortunate enough to be sitting on the
chairs had to wait for a green light to go on before entering. When it did, you had to be in pretty sharpish.

  Miss Dines was sitting behind her desk, underneath which were the two black Labradors that would patrol the school playing fields at break-times.

  – Why did I think that the rules existed? Particularly the uniform rules?

  – Was I very stupid?

  – Did I have eyes?

  – Did I have a brain, because my silence on these matters would suggest otherwise?

  – What was I going to do in future?

  I felt sick and afraid. The school felt sick and afraid, and nobody seemed sicker and afraider than Miss Barnes, the deputy head. She was an older woman who behaved like a frightened budgerigar.

  Every morning, there was Assembly. The whole school would gather in the hall, and often Miss Dines would be standing near the door, watching every girl go in – each of us hoping that the claw hand wouldn’t land on our shoulder and pull us aside for some misdemeanour (laughing, untidy pigtails, whispering, inky cuffs, or just because you happened to catch her eye. You never wanted to catch her eye).

  When we were all in, Miss Barnes would walk on to stage and ask us all, in her tiny, frightened voice, to stand for Miss Dines, who would then stride down the side of the hall with her gown flying out behind her for effect. Once she was on the stage, she would say ‘Good morning’ and we would do a ‘Good morning, Miss Dines’ back. She would then sit down, and then, and only then, could Miss Barnes squeak for us all to sit.

  One day, in the middle of lessons, the bell went. All classes were ordered into the hall. Nobody knew what was happening, not even the staff. Once the whole school was in, Miss Dines came on to the stage.

  A girl had apparently been rude and sworn repeatedly at her.

  This girl was dragged up onstage with a washing bowl and a bar of soap. Whereupon Miss Dines proceeded to force her to wash her mouth out.