Dawn French talks to Adam Bloodworth about overcoming shame, her real friendship with Jennifer Saunders and her new book
It’s a cold winter’s morning, the type the Scots would call ‘raw’, but not in Soho House White City, where Dawn French has her arms around the singer Alexandra Burke. She’s wearing a sparkly red jumper with a heart emblazoned on it, as well as her big sharkish grin that I swear should be used by the government to disarm the staunchest bastards.
There’s strong ‘card-carrying celeb’ energy, and that makes sense: weirdly, this room used to form part of the former BBC Television Centre where French and Jennifer Saunders filmed comedy skits for decades. To call it a symbolic meeting place is a wild understatement. “This is just my whole career in this building,” says French, gazing across the room before offering me sparkling water. “This was the old BBC Club, where we used to come after the shows and get hammered.”
Picture the scene: David Frost spitting an anecdote in one corner, Jimmy Savile gesticulating with his cigar in another, French and her then husband Lenny Henry fizzing between groups as the rightful King and Queen couple off the telly. She’s at home here, then? “I don’t really know the rules of this place,” she says. “Do you know what I mean? You come here and, what, sit about? I don’t know what you do. I feel that often in my life.”
Jennifer Saunders comes over for lunch and makes me belly laugh. She tells me old stories I already know but it’s so good that I want to hear it again
Dawn French on her relationship with Jennifer Saunders
You believe her. In person Dawn French is lovelier, warmer and even more charming than you’d expect – which is quite something for someone famous for their warmth. She says she is skilled at being gregarious when necessary but as a “functioning introvert, it exhausts me. I couldn’t be happier when the door shuts, bra comes off…” Feeling awkward or unnatural in social situations surely puts you on the back foot, especially as a woman in an industry that was dominated by more posh men then than it is today. You need raw talent, then, and thank goodness Dawn French had that in droves.
Dawn French is ‘brutally unsentimental’, but can’t help feel nostalgic over old French & Saunders clips posted by fans online
Coming up through TV series The Comic Strip Presents in the early 1980s, she shouted loud enough to be heard by the egomaniacs who fill the types of rooms we’re in today, and looking back, it is hard to overstate how progressive her work was. The sketch show French & Saunders, as well as the sitcom The Vicar of Dibley, were pioneering. French & Saunders birthed the sketch that led to Ab Fab, and marked the inauguration of one of primetime TV’s first female double-acts, while French’s depiction of female vicar Geraldine Granger when Dibley began in 1994 angered many traditionalists (largely men), who protested when the show first aired in 1994. (Unbelievably, The Church of England first allowed the ordination of women t o priesthood in 1992.) In a 2006 poll of British women, French was called the most admired female celebrity.
That was then – but what about now? The day we met, French had been surprised when a fan born in the 21st century stopped her. “I thought, ‘you’re far too young to know anything about me, but I’ll take it, thanks.’” But her contemporaneity burns strong. A number of social media groups feature young American women in particular sharing daily clips of her work. She is “brutally unsentimental” but watches these clips when they pop up on her computer at home in Cornwall. “I get a bit nostalgic when I see those,” she says. “I think, ‘Oh my god, look at that. And that prompts a conversation with Jennifer about, ‘do you remember when we did such and such?’”
And then there are the best-selling books and shows, the most recent of which recently played the London Palladium. French sold an estimated £20m of books in the UK before 2021, and her latest, out now in paperback, is called The Twat Files, and it is classic French: her declaration about kindness; how we should all celebrate our flaws – our twattishness – more often. “I hope that the more we can be properly inclusive of people, the better,” she says. “You shouldn’t ever give anyone shame for anything that is just human behaviour. “I realised that there were some things, mistakes I’ve made in my life that were heavy luggage, if you like,” she continues.
“And I just don’t want them to be. They don’t have to be and it’s so utterly liberating when you decide that they won’t be anymore. And the way to do that is to claim it and retell it. So you get your power back, you reframe it, you make it entertainment. I do that in my private life. I will tell you something dreadful that I did yesterday to get a laugh out of you, and to unburden myself from any shame of it, and you will tell me the same and then you will trust me to hear your mistakes and not judge me for it. Yeah, and I think that’s a human connection. I really do.”
The book recalls moments from youth, like went French went horse riding and had to cling on upside down beneath the animal as it galloped in front of her friends, as well as a platinum-tier anecdote about when she turned up to Elton John’s Louis XIV inspired 50th bash with Lenny Henry dressed as a giant gorilla, then immediately left out the back door mortified. “It’s just wrapping ourselves around stuff rather than letting it make us feel alienated or wrong. Somehow that’s not okay.” (The couple divorced in 2010 and French seems surprised when I say there are lots of mentions of Lenny Henry in the book.)
Sat opposite me, French promotes the same shtick about human connection, wanting to sort out every problem and make me feel as comfortable as possible. When I say I have a bag that won’t fit under the table she says: “That’s alright – so have I!” When I worry about my audio recording in this loud room she tells me not to with a reassuring change of tone.
Dawn French’s new book on overcoming shame is about laughing at our mistakes. She’s approached often to write about female body image – but isn’t ready
She’s furiously busy but wants to make more time for writing, an activity that brings her into herself. She says her Protestant upbringing means she feels the need to work on many projects at once, almost every day of the year and already has 2025 mapped out: ten months of writing, then two months filming a new sitcom she will tell me absolutely nothing about. She’s casting at the moment. Would I fit, I ask, seeing if I can cheekily glean something about the show? She guffaws when I flail my arms about and pretend I’m auditioning. “Not right,” she says, giving that guttural belly laugh that forces you to spurt out your own mini Frenchism. “I need to just pull back so that I have more brain space for writing,” she repeats. “Yeah, I love it.”
When she’s not on the clock she’s enjoying Cornwall with her husband, charity executive Mark Bignell who she began dating in 2011, as well as her daughter Billie from her first marriage, now 33. There she is a “happy hermit,” busy on walks with her dog and cold water swimming on beaches the tourists don’t know about.
She has another pastime too: Jennifer Saunders. First performing together in 1987, the duo became one of the most recognisable comedy duos of the last 30-plus years, appearing in sketch comedy shows on the BBC until 2017. They still present a podcast together as well as working sporadically on other screen work, most recently Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel Death on the Nile in 2022.
The night before we met, French and Saunders, who still hang out regularly, had dinner with their agent. “We realised we’ve been with her for 43 years, we must take her out and just celebrate with her because she’s very much… She’s a very typical agent where it’s all about us. The laughing: it was just like,” she imitates a sicklike physical release. “Visceral, down to my gut, no filters.” The duo spend time at French’s house a 40-minute drive from Saunders in Dorset to plan their podcasts, which gives the women an excuse to get together. They’ll have lunches and tell each other stories, and French bullies Saunders into writing more material.
“I’ve got a big bet on with Jennifer at the moment because she’s very good at procrastinating,” begins French. “She wants to write something but the only way she wrote the Ab Fab film was I had a bet with her and threatened to take a lot of money off her if she didn’t write it. I have given her until the end of April to hand over the first draft.
That’s how Jennifer and I operate: I try and stick a firework up her arse to get her to get on with what she wants to do as she’s always distracted. There’s always a horse, or visit to Antwerp, or something and she doesn’t get on with the writing. I’m much more methodical, more disciplined, but she’s very bright. What’s really annoying is that she can write in a day what will take me all year.”
She lets off a genuine giggle before saying something so adorable I almost burst. “We can sometimes repeat stories endlessly. She’s very good at impressions. She will retell me a story and I will just decide I haven’t heard it before because it’s so good I want to hear it again. We both know we’ve talked about this person already but it’s so good I’m up for it again. She’s a delight in my life and I love the bones of her.” Will they work together again? “ We talk about it all the time. We were talking last night about a project that we might get involved with, or might not, I don’t know.”
She also “keeps” being approached to write a book about female body image but you get the sense she’s trying to justify something she doesn’t need to justify when she says she’s “not ready” to write that yet. “I don’t think I’m going to write that book; I think I live that life. I think my life is an actual human embodiment of that thinking. No, I’m not ready,” she says, clipping and rethinking the final word. “I’m not going to write that book. I don’t think you should start any project until you’re sure what you want it to be and that’s a bit flakey for me, it hasn’t formed itself yet. I dunno, it doesn’t fit with me right yet. I just haven’t thought my way round it properly, and I’m not ready for that. Yet.” Is it that publishers are suggesting a theme rather than a story? “That’s right.”
“I’ve got a new novel cooking in my head and next year I’ll be 9-5 at my desk. It’s rare for me but I love that. I go very quiet. If I’m writing a difficult book, you know, I have a sad few months (her novel Because of You documents a mother losing a baby) and it’s very isolated, quite intimate and me with my head. I disappear back for a bit and re-emerge and then there’s this weird moment where you tell everyone about it and give birth to it. Next year will be like that.”
You get the sense that back in Cornwall, she’ll put the sparkly jumper away . “As I got older – I think this is absolutely to do with age – Jennifer and I talk about this quite often: I didn’t want to waste time,” she says. “I think I wasted some time in my life with certain people, or certain things where you think, this is going nowhere, this is pointless, or who is this person, or whatever. I don’t want to do that anymore. I’m quite on the clock.”
I take the hint and we wrap up, and off goes French, probably to bob about in the waters of Cornwall and forget all this promotional namby-pamby.
“When there aren’t tourists around in the off-season, that’s when you’ll find me in the water,” she says. “When I know no one’s got their camera phones. I’m not like a massive wild swimmer, don’t get me wrong, but I love the sea, I love walking.” Then she draws her words out longer and sounds a bit poetic: “Just to be in that lovely fresh air. Big open horizons. That is good for my soul.”
Dawn French’s book The Twat Files is released in paperback today through Penguin