A selection of articles and interviews with, about, or related to French and Saunders.

Jennifer Saunders is one of Britain's most talented comic actresses. In a rare interview, she reveals why the part of an animated Fairy Godmother was her toughest challenge yet.

'Being in a film with the girlfriend of Justin Timberlake is just about as cool as you can get'

      It's not the most obvious connection to make, but the prospect of Jennifer Saunders appearing in Shrek 2 meant just one thing to her three daughters: Justin Timberlake. 'This is definatly the project that has made me go up in the estimation of my children,' says Saunders with a sardonic half-grin. 'Not because it's the chance to be part of one of the best animated films ever, or because it's the start of a major Hollywood career for their mother. No. It's the fact that I'm going to be in a film that also stars Cameron Diaz, who is the girlfriend of Justin Timberlake, and it might possibly mean that Cameron will invite Justin to the British premiere and my children will come with me, so they are clearly, absolutely definatly going to get to meet him. And that is just about as cool as you can get.'

      She leans back and adds, with one eyebrow raised: 'I have, of course, pointed out that Cameron may not be bringing him to the premiere because he may be busy touring, singing or generally being Justin Timberlake. That is a small fly in the ointment, but still they are clinging like limpets to the chance that it might happen.'

      We are sitting in the aqua-blue office of Saunders's office at BBC Television Centre, west London. As production offices go, it is not, in any way, terrifying or grand. It is smaller than you would imagine and rather invitingly haphazard and messy, with yellow Post-it notes stuck everywhere, magazines, sandwich wrappers and a selection of biographies from Madonna to Dylan Thomas, and Dorothy Wordsworth to Samuel Beckett, spilling from various metal shelves.

      Saunders herself is also much smaller and less intimidating than you would expect. Dressed in jenes and a blue denim jacket, her blonde hair sticking out at all angles because she is, it transpires, a woman under pressure. There are fewer than three weeks before filming starts on an upcoming series of French and Saunders, and clearly several deadlines have been and gone already. The show's producer, Jo Sargent, is by Saunders's disorderly desk telling her - very nicely, but very firmly - to buckle down and start writing the scripts.

      Saunders immediatly goes into procrastinating-college-student mode, pulling and twisting her hair, looking down at her cowboy boots, muttering all sorts of vauge excuses for not having finished her assignment. 'We've got all the ideas,' she says, 'but they're in my head. I've got this terrible fear that once i commit them to paper, they will die on the page... and we still haven't sorted out our guests. I need to have a kind of idea and Dawn hasn't arrived yet. I'm waiting for her.'

      One of the Post-it notes has the name Madonna scrawled across it in felt-tip pen. Sounds promising. Jo leaves the room, Saunders pulls a mock anguished look, then glances up at the note and grins, 'We always say we've got Madonna,' she says. 'Dawn and I have asked Madonna to do our show ever since we first got a gig on the telly two decades ago. She always says no, but every year we ask again. Dawn and I now ring up her agent just to hear her say "Sorry she's touring, sorry she's out of the country," or whatever. So we just put her name down anyway. It's become a little tradition.'

      And if Mrs Ritchie ever said yes? Saunders's deadpan face twists in sudden horror. 'We'd be terrified. The only reason we ask is because we know she'll say no.'

      Saunders, 45, is a showbuisness conundrum. She is probably the most talented female comedy writer in British TV history, but she behaves as if she hasn't got it in her to pull together one single funny line.

      The creator and star of Absolutely Fabulous - and Dawn French's comedy partner for the last 25 years - is like one of those girls at school who never handed in homework, fell asleep in lessons and then got straight As when it came to the exams. Indeed, while she may come across all vauge and scatty, the bitingly funny, cleverly observed characters such as Ab Fab's ultimate fashion victims, Edina and Patsy, illustrate the super-sharp brain that lurks beneath. Saunders's eye misses nothing - she is a comedic anthropologist extraodinaire.

      However, Saunders, who is married to the comedian Adrian Edmondson, is much more comfortable in the laid-back, lackadistical world of her own creation. She freely admits she'd never bother to work if she didn't have to. Part of her wishes that no-one had ever found out that she had a talent. 'I only do things when I know I absolutely have to and I can't get out of it.'

      The couple have recently moved from Richmond, Surrey, to Devon, and the country life couldn't suit her better. 'I spend hours at the bottom of the garden making bonfires,' she says. 'I can be there for such a long time Ade has to send out search parties. I like a long, slow burn, lots of wet leaves on top, no sudden bursts of flame. Actually, it's when I'm tending to bonfires or sweeping - I'm big on sweeping too - that I do most of my thinking. Ade knows a new show may be coming up if there's suddenly a spate of bonfires.'

      She insists she needs a rocket put under her bottom before she gets round from the thinking process to doing any work. Her nails are bitten to the quick because, she explains, she's always putting off what she's meant to be doing, and that makes her worry. 'Dawn and I are the absolute worst,' she says. 'We sit around talking for days on end and then all of a sudden we've got a few weeks left to put a show together. I have a panic attack when she wheels her chair around and sits next to me at the computer because I know that means we really have to do some work.

      'I'm horribly lazy. I never quite believe I can do it and then when I do, I can never quite believe it's funny enough.'

      When last summer she was asked to be the voice of the Fairy Godmother in the new Shrek 2, rather typically, she assumed nothing would come out of it. 'I said yes right away, but I never actually thought I'd get to do it. I just thought an awful lot of people must have turned it down.'

      'I loved the first Shrek - I thought it was absolute genius,' she continues. 'The girls [she has three daughters, Beattie, 18, Ella, 17, and Freya 14] loved it. It's like the whole Toy Story idea where it's animation, but it's also a really clever story and it appeals to all age groups. My children are teenagers, but they love these movies.'

      Saunders didn't meet any of the other members of the cast before doing her voiceover, which was recorded at a west London studio. She had to be crammed into a very small polystyrene box throughout the sessions and with a camera focused on her face to capture every expression on a film. The tape was then sent to the animators.

      For a performer so used to being part of a double of act (French and Saunders) or a team (Ab Fab, The Comic Strip), it must have been an extrodinary experience. 'I spent all these weeks inside a box with a very nice man from Dreamworks guiding me through exactly what I had to do,' she says. 'You know what, I think it was the most difficult, the most amazing, and the most enjoyable thing I've ever done.'

      'I have all these theories about my voice,' she says, shaking her head. 'It's very flat and rather boring, so I never normally get asked to do voiceovers - unlike Dawn who has a very expressive, warm voice. So I had this vauge idea to "do" the Fariy Godmother as Edina, as obviously my own voice wouldn't do, but I was told very nicely and ver repeatedly just to speak as myself.

      'My greatest fear, however, was singing. I can sing reasonably well, but I always sing as somebody else. Again, they wanted my voice. Me singing as me, and I had a big panic about it. I knew my voice would not just be heard, but listened to in massive cinemas, amplified to nightmare proportions, so in the end I had a few singing lessons. And then I realised I could do it. The point is, it's not a Disney aminmation - Shrek's producers want the reality with all its imperfections.

      'The people who make these animations are a particular breed. They are so amazingly laid-back, clever and encouraging. I actually learnt a lot about myself, I learnt that with a bit of effort I can do things a lot better than I think.' She breaks off suddenly, as if to ponder the point she's just made. Then she laughs just as suddenly in case she's now sounding too self-important.

      As a comic performer Saunders couldn't possibly take herself too seriously, How could she, when most of her comedy comes from lampooning the self-importance of others?

      After initially vowing to kill off Edina and Patsy, she was persuaded to ressurect them after a five-year break - to poor reviews - and then once more a year ago, to ecstatic reviews. The challenge now is to keep it going. Saunders does one of her Mona Lisa half-smiles.

      'The thing is they're getting even older. That's what i want to focus on next. Joanna Lumley has always had this idea in her head that Patsy is actually 72 years old and held up with embalming fluid. Thats how she's always played her, but it's time for age to really hit.'

      Saunders herself has no time for Edina's main obsession: fashion. The major downside of the celebrity age, she says is not that stars are expected to look like supermodels but, most hideous of all, that they have to know how to handle their 'red-carpet moment'.

      She twists her body into a full feotal cringe. 'I can't bear it. The worst thing about having to go to Cannes for the premiere of Shrek 2 was having to think about what I was wearing.

      'I had millions of people asking me: "Who are you wearing?" (outfit). "Are you going to get a St Tropez?" (tan) and "Are you going to get a full body?" (wax). All these ridiculous questions.'

      Her attitude to clothes is similar to her attitude to work. With a fine bone structure, smooth skin and a good figure hidden beneath her baggy shirt, she could glam up well, but it all comes down to effort and inclination. You can't help liking her all the more for it.

      'In the good old days, you could turn up in a reasonably smart outfit or even a pair of jeans and no one would take a blind bit of notice. Now it's every inch of flesh on show, a very small bit of spangly fabric, a few ribbons and the prospect of appearing in a celebrity magazine under "Worst Dressed". God help us!

      'I've got no fears about dying, but I don't want to die of stress and the idea of all this pressure about what clothes to wear does my head in. It's insanity.'

      And unlike Patsy or Edina, the idea of borrowing a dress from Gucci, Prada or Armani - the usual celebrity route - practically brings her out in hives. 'I'd far rather just buy my own clothes.' she says. 'There's no such thing as a free lunch. You borrow a dress from Gucci, then they start sending you a pair of shoes with an invite to the staff party. You can't say no, and you have to wear the shoes and find something to go with them. Then it's a free skirt and an invite to a shop opening. The whole thing is just a stress-fest.'

      A message from Jo arrives, telling her to get back to work. She looks slightly woeful. Her excuse for not writing is about to be over. 'I'd better make a start,' she says. She asks if Dawn has arrived (she hasn't) and then reluctantly starts up her computer. You know - as does Jo - that she is guaranteed to come up with the goods. Hers is a talent worth any wait.

*taken from the Mail on Sunday magazine: Night and Day*

      There were three boys in my family when I was growing up. I was known as the dustbin. If any food was left over, I'd eat it. Dad was a teacher with the British Forces and we lived in Cyprus, Bahrain and Uganda. We went to all these foreign places and we'd eat English food. My dad Fred eventually thought he could make cury but it was really English stew with curry powder, desiccated cocnut, sultanas and pineapple.

      I went back to boarding school in England whe I was 12, and the food was bloody depserate. There used to be this stuff called welsh rarebit which nobody could face - it was gunk. For breakfast we once has baked beans and just hot boiled tomatoes. There used to be a punishment called 'toast' where you had to get up early and make toast for 128 boys' breakfasts. I was a good toaster.

      I started cooking at university, things like spag bol. I learnt to cook from books, my mum didn't really teach me. She was quite old-fashioned and beef was always well done. When you eventually find out the joys of rare beef it seems a shame you've spent years eating charcoal.

      When Jennifer [Saunders] and I decided to get married we'd already booked a holiday, so we decided to call it the honeymoon. There are two little volcanic hills in St Lucia that look like breasts called The Pitons. Our hotel was just nestled inside them, and I had a Piton burger with Thousand Island dressing. I got food poisoning and thought I was going to die. I was in the toilet for three days. It was coming out of ever orifice!

      We eat a mixture of English and Mediterranean food - lots of roast meats and roast vegetables. I don't really like chinese of indian food. At home I had been doing all the cooking because I was competent and liked it. But when you've got three kids, what used to be a joy becomes a chore. So I suggested to Jennifer that she started cooking, and of course she does it better than I do.

      She can cook anything and she's very good with meat. We've got this farm with sheep and cows. We haven't eaten any of our own animals yet. But I've got some lambs I'm going to slaughter. The calves may be harder to do because cows are gorgeous.

No-velle Cuisine: Nouvelle cuisine is really pointless. It's like someone has spat on a plate. With any cuisine that they have had to carve vegetables, think about how many finger have touched your food and for how long!

Balls Up: In Paris when I was a student, I ordered what I thought was rice with veal, but someone told me they were calves testicles and it looked like it! I ate one then was told it was offal. A few years ago I was in Paris again and thought I was ordering offal because I recognised the word. But it was a steamed lump of brain. There was no gravy and it was a bit rubbery.

Telling Porkies: I once worked in a pork pie factory and every week there was a list posted on the notice board of what had been found in the pies during that week. There were about 30 catagories, and one at the bottom said 'miscellanious'. I don't eat pork pies any more. When it says 110 per cent pork, it means the bones, the skin, hairs, eyeballs, everything. Nice.

The World's My Oyster: I used to love oysters. Then once I had a bad one on Christmas Day. I missed my lunch because of it. Now I can't face one because I remember how ill it made me.

Large On Little: Alistair Little has two London restaurants - one in Notting Hill and one in Soho. He cooks great food and is a nice bloke. I met him once in the toilet and he was very jolly. I like people who like their food.

*taken from: Tv Quick January 2004*

She' back - with a lap-pool bath and a panic room.

      Outrageous Edina returns tonight in a new series of Absolutely Fabulous, anxious about her pregnant daughter, Saffy. Her creator, Jennifer Saunders, talks about her own, much more sober, family life in a Devon farmhouse.

      Jennifer Saunders is sitting on the floor opposite me, wearing hot pants that are two sizes too small, fluorescent tights, a bomber jacket, and a shiny Dolce & Gabbana porkpie hat atop her fine features. It is, of course, her latest look for her Ab Fab character Edina; her filming schedule is so hectic that she hasn't got time to change, let alone meet me anywhere but her dressing room at BBC TV Centre.

      Unlike her publicity-seeking alter ego, Saunders is behaving as though she hopes she's invisible, despite her attire. She greets me by glumly looking me up and down, before turning her attention once more to her lunch, a plastic box of limp-looking salad. She is notoriously publicity shy. So why is she putting herself back in the public eye with another series? "I needed the money, to be absolutely honest," she says flatly, staring at her lettuce. A few more questions are met with a similarly disheartening response. Her arms are wrapped protectively around her chest, her lips barely move, her eyes, when not fixed to her lunch, are fastened on me with a narrow stare. It's all rather unnerving. According to her long-time collaborator, Dawn French, she's hilarious in private, but she's not prepared to let me see this side at the moment.

      You suspect that, if Saunders could afford it, she'd like nothing better than to stop working altogether. She has certainly cut herself off from the media and showbiz world by, last year, moving to a large, 400-year-old farmhouse in Devon. There, she lives with her husband, fellow comedian Adrian Edmondson, and their three children, Beatrice, 18, Ella, 16, and Freya, 13, plus several cows, horses and rare-breed sheep. While the rest of the world may be falling at her fabulous feet, she admits it's harder to win over her own children. "Their only ever comment to me [about the series] is, 'Why are you smoking? Why are you smoking?' That's all I ever get asked," shrugs Jennifer. "They love Ab Fab but I think they are quite unimpressed by me ..."

      The marriage is famously happy: they have been together for 18 years without a breath of scandal. Edmondson and Saunders met while working for the alternative comedy revue the Comic Strip, but they were both seeing other people and it took them six years to get it together. Saunders credits French for the eventual romance - "Neither of us did anything about it until Dawn said we should go out together, which we did."

      Edmondson, who made his name playing various comedy slobs in programmes such as The Young Ones, turns out to be the domesticated partner, doing all the cooking and ironing, while his wife earns most of the money. When she's not working, she spends her time pottering around the garden, helping with the parish council and riding on Dartmoor.

      ANATHEMA to her Ab Fab character Eddie Monsoon, of course, but this is the lifestyle to which Saunders is accustomed. The daughter of an RAF captain, she was born into a Cheshire family of high-achieving Oxbridge types. She was something of an academic disappointment, though; her careers officer suggested she could end up as a dental assistant. Saunders herself always planned to work with horses, but was put off by the hard work involved. "The idea of mucking out when it's really cold ... somehow you're just not going to do that."

      Having failed to get into university, she spent a year in Italy as an au pair, then returned and was persuaded by her mother to go to the Central School of Speech and Drama and train as a drama teacher.

      It was there that she met Dawn French, whom she hated on sight. "She had gone to drama classes as a child. I thought she was cocky and she thought I was snotty." By their final year, though, they were sharing a flat together and in 1980 the pair answered an ad in the showbiz trade paper, The Stage, for female acts to join the Comic Strip. At the time, French was working as a drama teacher and Saunders was on the dole and spending much of her time in bed, depressed.

      They were paid £5 a night to perform their routine, but it was well worth it. It was there that they met Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, Nigel Planer and Adrian Edmondson. Then, the Comic Strip was signed up by Channel 4, and soon French and Saunders were stars in their own right with their eponymous series.

      It was French's decision to adopt a baby that gave rise to Ab Fab. The pair were seven weeks from recording another French and Saunders series when French was told that a baby had become available. She had to pull out, and didn't want anyone to know why. To cover for her, Saunders told the BBC that the planned series wasn't going well, but she had another idea for a sitcom based on a sketch the pair had once done. And so in 1992 the Bolly-guzzling fashion faux-pas phenomenon was born out of necessity.

      This new series, the fifth, sees many changes in the Monsoon household. Good girl Saffy (Julia Sawalha) returns home pregnant after travelling in Africa, giving Eddie nightmares about becoming a grandmother, while Edina's mother (June Whitfield) has difficulty remembering why Saffy is fat. Edina is working from home - or "cocooning", as it is now called.

      "I've tried to keep it much more domestic this time," Saunders explains. "I think when you go out and about and film on location too much it can dilute everything. It's at its best when Patsy and Edina are in the house, totally overreacting." Eddie is now a celebrity PR, whose only clients are Queen Noor, Emma Bunton and the cast of Cutting It. Otherwise she is keeping busy with her celebrity book club, her lap-pool bath and new panic room, fully stocked with spliffs and champagne.

      Meanwhile, for pill-popping Patsy (Joanna Lumley), things couldn't be better. She has somehow been promoted to manager of a highconcept fashion store - a boutique so exclusive ("You can't come in, you're too fat - get out!") and pretentious, it makes Voyage look like Etam. "It's just a dazzling white space with nothing in it. One blouse hanging on one side and a handbag on the other," explains Saunders, laughing.

      There's a splendid cameo from Minnie Driver, sending herself up as a money-grabbing Hollywood star who is working it for every freebie she can get. "Minnie was terrific. There was no behaviour. She came in, only had two days to rehearse and just got the whole joke of it. She was absolute gold dust," enthuses Saunders, wiping her mouth with a napkin. Other guest stars include Kristin Scott Thomas as bulimic health journalist Plum, Emma Bunton as Saffy's friend, and Elton John - as himself - pounced on by the grotesque duo at a recording studio bash.

      Saunders has had a few problems with Eddie's customary appalling wardrobe: she says it's getting harder and harder to find the outrageous when it comes to fashion and fads for the show. "Nothing is very extraordinary any more, because within seconds everyone is doing it," she complains. "There are very few things that are bizarre." She's done her best, especially with Eddie's Gaultier combo of denim matador jacket and trousers "where the waist is above your tit level and the shoulders are over your head".

      Saunders herself is not much of a fashionista. "I don't do the shows. They are a complete bloody nightmare. I only ever go to Betty Jackson because she is my very good friend. There's some really poor clothing around. You can't really tell the difference between Topshop and designer any more. Most of it, I don't get at all. The Eighties throwback stuff is just because that's what designers feel safe doing - that's what they grew up with, watching Charlie's Angels. I'm sorry but a ruched trouser is not my idea of fun."

      These is a certain lassitude in her attitudes. Saunders is always announcing the death of Ab Fab, then resurrecting it in response to public demand. But you won't be too surprised if this time she really does kill Eddie off - drowning her in the lap-pool bath perhaps? Retiring her to the country, where her creator couldn't be happier, would be far too implausible.

• The new series of Absolutely Fabulous starts tonight on BBC1 at 9pm.

GOLDIE HAWN : SEEING THE SITES AND HAVING AN ABSOLUTEY FABULOUS TIME WITH JENNIFER SAUNDERS AND RUBY WAX.

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