A Comedy On This Day: French & Saunders: The House Of Idiot (25 March 1993)

 With only three sketches (plus a tiny Gladiators skit as a coda), this feels meandering and overindulged to me. The big House Of Eliott parody initially scores some proper Acorn Antiques-style laughs (Saunders' troubles with opening doors and hanging her coat, the telegraphed plotlines, superfluous characters, the reused vintage car and incongruous penny-farthing), but then they all get repeated several times... The eventual appearance of the real House Of Eliott actresses, demonstrating what good sports they are, is the kind of 'celebrity chums' television that I find hard to tolerate. Comedy about the media reflecting itself rather than comedy drawn from life itself.

A Comedy On This Day: French & Saunders (22 March 1990)

 I think that the duo may have been at their peak with this third series. By this point they had a sure sense of what distinctively they could achieve with a sketch show, with less of the aimless drifting that mars the early episodes while not yet falling into the overindulged celebrity trap that increasingly irritated me later on. I was in the first year of sixth form when this went out, and I can't remember any other show being so universally popular, with both fellow pupils and teachers.

 I think that the part that resonated most with my peers was the Star Test Bros interview, probably because of the worthy target (the hapless briefly-popular Goss brothers being both teen-orientated culture and something that we would have all felt was beneath us). Watching it now, I'm mainly interested in the very tight-looking facial prosthetics that the performers have been squashed into. With much of this episode's comedy, I find the details much funnier than the ostensibly amusing scenarios - Saunders' Luke Goss dropping her drumsticks, or the (slightly disturbing) visual effect in Kirsty MacColl and Simon Brint's duet of 'Something Stupid' of both singers’ reflections being superimposed over each other's eyes.

 The extended Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? parody is one of the best they did, partly because of the pleasure of recognising their takes of Davis and Crawford, but mostly because the original piece had such a distinctly camp Grand Guignol style that it didn't need to be extended very much to become overly comic. The audience laughter over this filmed piece is a bit of a shame, as overt laughter at certain jokes detracts from the greater subtlety of the whole conception.

 The sketch that I (and my parents, who I watched this with in 1990) most enjoyed at the time still strikes me as being the best bit now. Its a scene of an editorial conference between the two refined ladies in charge of a popular mid-market women's magazine, and - Hurray! - for once French and Saunders aren't parodying something else or impersonating other celebrities or doing recurring characters. The skit both celebrates and skewers the vacuity of the magazine ("Sue Lawley on flans? "Too spiky"), bombarding the viewer with closely-observed fine detail of the all-too-convincing magazine, discussed by two well-drawn characters. 

A Comedy On This Day: French & Saunders (8 February 1996)

 This should be interesting. 1996 must have been about the height of their popularity, but after I'd stopped watching. Seeing it now is an ideal test of the instinctive prejudices that meant that I didn't see it at the time.

 I think that it was the combination of a perceived self-satisfied quality about them - combined with the amount of emotional investment that so much of the British public had in them, as much for what they represented as celebrities as their actual comedy - that put me off. I was largely right, though there are still enough funny bits to make it worth watching.

 By far the worst section is the v-e-r-y l-o-n-g parody, a mash-up of Judge Judy as populated by characters from Star Trek. The production values are right, but it’s a long stretch of them and their comedy friends doing funny business (like going "woosh" whenever the doors open) rather than a tight, pertinent, sketch.

 

 Another long sketch is the pair playing two soppy brides planning a double wedding. Here the details are funny and the initial effect of their characterisations is impressive, but something goes a bit wrong when the two women have to fall out and be reconciled. The emotions are rushed and the performers corpse a little, and I start to feel that it would benefit from more guidance from a third party.

 The best part of the show is the final sketch, a The Making of Pride & Prejudice-type feature with F & S as the two posh homeowners who unwittingly continually disrupt the filming on their estate. Rosemary Leach is fantastic in this, not only when playing herself but especially in the disrupted scenes from the fake serial, which she always manages to make wholly convincing but just pushed a little further to show how they can look absurd. It’s the best-judged comic performance in the show, and it’s from an actor rather than a comedian.

 I am curious to identify which bits of additional material were written by the young Mel & Sue. I'm fairly sure that I can tell, but who knows?