Dreams often weave the unbelievably fantastical with the mundane to create seamless logic – a logic entirely unfathomable when you awake.
Last night my subconscious pulled a trick on me of some magnitude. In it I was watching one of those French & Saunders sketches set in a empty white room and whilst watching it I witnessed myself finding it funny.
There I was laughing as one gurned and the other looked deadpan; laughing as one kept saying “comedy partner” and the other looked blank; laughing as one dressed up as something and the other looked browbeaten. Laughing, laughing, laughing.
Of course when I woke up I realised how utterly ludicrous this was. I don’t think I have laughed once at French & Saunders and watching their current ‘best of’ series on BBC1 you are reminded in bite-size if not especially digestible chunks how tremendously unfunny these two are together. When apart they can be brilliant but put them together in the same room and surely the only people laughing are dear Dawn and Jennifer and their agent. All the way to the bank.
When I’ve said this to some people they often point out that “their spoofs are hilarious”. But they’re not – they just look fantastic because the BBC has seen fit to give them as much cash as they like. The set designers, costume makers and make-up artists have been brilliant but in spite of these magnificent efforts French & Saunders manage to drag everything down into a soup of of comedy blather by their dullard scripts. Those who insist on defending them also refer me to their “early work”. A sure sign of desperation: that if something is signposted in the long and distant past the haze on the horizon might be misconstrued as hilarity.
Their continued presence on our TV screens particularly annoys me because while they keep going the BBC quite often rejects other female comedy groups on the grounds of “oh we’ve got one of those.” I know several talented comedians who’ve been rejected with this line but then you consider BBC 3’s Titty Titty Bang Bang and Bearded Ladies on Radio 4 and really wish those executives were as strict as they say they are.
I think French and Saunders have done some reasonable stuff (at a time when it was still a novelty to have female comedians on TV), but have now had their day as a double-act and I don’t like the beeb’s ‘best of’ rehash, though some of the stuff they do individually is still good. To state the bleedin’ obvious the beeb seems increasingly scared of taking any risks at all (aka new acts and comedians). Perhaps they should be more scared of paying Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton so much for so little and financing the digital switchover using our licence fee, which will ultimately decimate their viewers, when they could be using it to make more interesting programmes using presenters who don’t require such obscene fees and who we viewers actually like to increase their current viewing base! More older presenters in a world where there’s hardly any grown-ups left would also be fab and have more gimmick value than they currently give the idea credit for.
Bring back John Noakes and Tony Hart, for two!