Jacky Hyams - Jennifer Saunders--The Unauthorised Biography of the Absolutely Fabulous Star

W ere watching a movie. Its the opening shot. The words appear on the screen: London, autumn, 1980. Early evening. The camera is tracking down a narrow, dingy passageway in Soho in the heart of Londons West End, just a short stroll from theatrelands Shaftesbury Avenue. A brightly lit sign at the entrance to the Raymond Revue Bar declaims: World Centre of Erotic Entertainment. This is an upmarket strip club, albeit the most famous and successful of its day.

A young woman, average height, early twenties, fairish hair gelled and scraped back, clad all in black, is climbing a narrow stairway inside the Revue Bar, followed by a slightly shorter friend, also in black. Theyre laughing, wisecracking to each other as they negotiate the stairs, en route to a small theatre right at the top of the building. One girl works by day as a schoolteacher, the other is, in acting parlance, a resting graduate, doing odd jobs between stints on the dole. What do they hope to find at the top of the stairs?

Welcome to showbiz, girls. Its 15 years later and the camera reveals a posh west London street, lots of big white houses. A Rolls-Royce pulls up at the kerb. Out totters an overdressed 40-something woman in garish, expensive designer gear, big hair framing her face, teetering unsteadily on ridiculously perilous snakeskin stilettos, half-cut, mobile in one hand, ciggy in the other, screeching giddy nonsense at the top of her voice. A somewhat extreme parody of a middle-class, social-climbing PR woman turned daft fashion victim with a perennial hangover (and a sensible, sober daughter called Saffy in a state of permanent disgust), a batty PA called Bubble and an outrageous sidekick a blonde, beehived, vampish maghag well past her sell-by date but as sozzled and predatory as any ageing party girl who ever hailed a cab outside Harvey Nicks.

Those two young women scaling the strip-club stairs are not, of course, wannabe strippers or performers of erotic entertainment. They are Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, heading for their first ever audition as a double act at what became the springboard for their respective glittering careers in comedy, Peter Richardsons fabled Comic Strip, an early 1980s launch pad for so many other stars in the comic firmament. And, of course, the screeching harridan in the Roller barely needs any introduction: the whole world knows Edina Monsoon, star of TVs Absolutely Fabulous, written, performed and created by Jennifer Saunders, now one of the planets most successful comic writers/performers.

Who can forget the shambolic adventures and riotous caricatures of Absolutely Fabulous, or Ab Fab as it became known? The seminal television series reshaped the face of British TV comedy, attained cult status globally and drew an enormous, loyal BBC following: an over-the-top celebration of Brit ladette culture, born in the early 1990s into a recession-bound Britain in desperate need of a laugh.

Such is Absolutely Fabulous legendary draw and massive following, the show lives on: brand-new special episodes were created for 2011 and 2012, timed to celebrate Ab Fabs twentieth anniversary, certainly, but an opportunity for a new generation of Saffys to despair at their middleaged mums excesses.

Yet the genesis of Ab Fab came from another world, from a far-off time.

When Edina exploded into British lives, a man called John Major sat in Downing Street. Interest rates were shooting up to an alarming 15 per cent. The Prince and Princess of Wales had split up, the beginning of the unfolding tragedy that led to the death of Princess Diana. Fergie was sucking toes and garnering freebies. Even the Queen owned up to her first annus horribilis.

With superb timing, the 1992 antics of Patsy, Edina and co. lightened the British gloom and became the first ever TV comedy series since Fawlty Towers to weave its way into everyday British life and water-cooler chatter.

Call it what you will social satire, the baby boomer generation of older women behaving beyond badly, venomous parody theres no questioning its impact on the national psyche. And on the millions around the world who fell about laughing at Edina and associates. And incredibly theyre still laughing.

But, if anything, the revisiting of the unforgettable Ab Fab only serves to focus on the enduring talents of Jennifer Saunders, who has, of course, written and created a whole host of comic characters before and since the Ab Fab era.

Since those early days as one half of Britains best-loved comic pairing, French and Saunders, Jennifer Saunders career, now spanning over 30 years, has taken her right to the very peak of the entertainment industry.

Very few British female performers, aside from Dawn French, can emulate her CV, mainly because Jennifer Saunders talents are so wide-ranging. She writes. She produces. She directs. She acts. She sings. She is the great parodist, a Sheridan for the times, sending up virtually everything: the glitterati of showbiz, the fame game itself, the ageing womans obsession with youth, the darker vices of the media world, the excesses of cinema, pop culture you name it, shes there, lampooning it, puncturing pretension, ridiculing pomposity.

Yet when we laugh at her creations, as is frequently the case with successful comedy, were often laughing at ourselves, our own foibles or weaknesses, too. And because so many performers and celebrities from Lulu, to Kate Moss, to The Spice Girls, adore what Jennifer does and love to perform alongside her in the slipstream of her wit and parody, we, the audience, might even start to feel that her comic genius is giving us an insiders peek into the show business bubble.

Thats an amazingly clever feat in itself. But its even more incredible when you consider that Jennifer Saunders is an entertainer with a global audience who has flatly refused, from day one, to deploy her fame and celebrity for their own sake.

She works hard at her craft though she has admitted, time and again, that its very much an eleventh-hour, seat-of -the-pants spurt of intense energy that is her working style, rather than a slow, careful, measured approach to the business of comedy and she uses her amazingly forensic observational skills to this end. She attends the key events: the first nights, the fundraising dos. Intensely loyal to her close-knit group of friends, shes always there to support them publicly if the occasion demands it. She allows herself to be photographed with her family around her. And thats it.

The consummate professional, she will be interviewed by the press and submit to the endless rounds of questions when the time comes to promote her work because that is part of the entertainers job.

But she firmly refuses and has done so right from the very beginning to allow the personal, the private, the this is me and my wonderful life type of exposure that so many other well known names use, with increasing fervour, to have any place in her world. Its no secret that shes an incredibly private individual. And such is the loyalty and esteem that her closest friends and colleagues, in and out of the business, feel for her that they effectively form a protective carapace around her.

And yet the fact that there is this tight, protective circle around her, preventing any intrusion, reveals something important about Jennifer Saunders: these protectors are people who know and love her, both the woman and the work.

We are not talking about a paid team of public relations people and self-important professional gatekeepers, clipboard Nazis attending to her every whim, Hollywood style. Even amongst the tightly-knit but often bitchy world of television programme makers, for instance, it is widely acknowledged that the off-camera Jennifer Saunders is a true, kind, loyal, warm (and very witty) friend to those working alongside her.