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Longtime comedy partners Jennifer Saunders (of
Absolutely Fabulous fame) and Dawn French (who appeared on the
AbFab episode "Magazine" as the perky talk-show host Kathy) met at London's Central School of Speech and Drama in the early 1970s and have gone on to collaborate on a number of projects, including the
French and Saunders series, from the late 1980s to the 1990s.
The Ingenue Years, one in a group of BBC videotapes collecting the duo's skits, opens with a parody of the famous aperture-view title sequence from the James Bond films, and continues to satirize both popular and high culture for the next 85 minutes. In a recurring skit, "Dawn" and "Jennifer" share a sparsely furnished flat and spend most of their time bickering and trading non sequiturs. (Saunders's persona here seems to be a study for AbFab's Edina.) Two more recurring characters, a couple of overweight, oversexed men, share a much darker and more cluttered flat, drinking beer and fancying themselves as studs. In fact, French and Saunders often use their full figures to play against type--for example, when they make fun of starving, self-obsessed, grammatically challenged ballerinas ("A dancer's feet is her tool"), as well as characters from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the midst of a succession of Hollywood spoofs that take on the likes of Liza Minnelli and Cyd Charisse. Punctuating the skits are brief, deliberately clumsy attempts to depict dance crazes from flapper jazz to glam rock.
In the most frantic skit, the two comedians poke fun at contemporary art by imitating Gilbert and George in the persons of "Muriel and Maddy." As you watch French's head getting slammed with a leather boot while she's hollering between machine-fed spoonfuls of soup, you realize just how perfectly high and low art can be combined. --Robert Burns Neveldine
