BOOK OF THE DAY: Stephen Dixonreviews Dear FattyBy Dawn French. Century 366pp, £18.99
FRENCH AND Saunders, Britain's greatest female double-act, will split up after 30 years when their current UK tour ends in November. There's no acrimony, and they remain best friends. Each has enjoyed a successful solo career that has run parallel to the partnership, and they plan to pursue projects that are, as they put it, "more age-appropriate".
Dawn French has always seemed a truer clown than Jennifer Saunders: simple in the best comic sense of the word, less spiky and complicated, softer, sunnier, more comfortable and likeable. It would be hard to imagine her as Ab Fab'sdreadful Edina Monsoon or, indeed, Saunders as the twinkling and conciliatory Vicar of Dibley.
Dear Fattytakes the form of letters to those who are important to her, particularly her late father. While this contrivance can irritate, the self-portrait that emerges from these letters is of a warm, unpretentious woman, devoted to her family and mordantly clear-eyed about all the nonsense that goes with the way she earns her living.
She was born 51 years ago, the daughter of an RAF man stationed in North Wales. Denys French had aspirations for his daughter and her brother, Gary, and they were sent to posh boarding-schools he could ill-afford. Dawn's childhood, crammed with love and animals and vast numbers of eccentric relatives, was happy. Her parents somehow managed to disguise from the children Denys's bouts of deep depression, but when Dawn was 19 he took his own life.
Denys's own problems never prevented him instilling in his daughter a strong sense of self-worth; every day he told Dawn that she was uncommonly beautiful and clever. "It's a process of having faith in the self you don't quite know you are yet," she explains. The letter dealing with his suicide makes difficult reading, and one hopes it was cathartic to write: a howl of bewilderment and pain that the years seem to have scarcely muted. Those interested in the golden age of 1980s British television comedy may be disappointed that she doesn't get around to the glorious The Comic Strip Presentsand the fine sketch shows with Saunders that followed until fairly late in the book, but this is consistent with her contention that family comes first. French and Saunders met at drama school and after an initial antipathy became close: ". . . a relaxed, truthful representation of a friendship, however odd it may be, is the key factor in any long-standing, successful double-act relationship," she writes. According to her, they drifted into comedy by whim, and were helped to fame by a series of "being in the right place at the right time" situations.
French's husband, the comedian Lenny Henry, also makes his first significant appearance late, and anger steams from the page when she writes of the racism the couple have had to endure - from the jokey condescension of some fellow-performers to full-blown hatred: excrement smeared on the front door, death threats, a lit petrol-soaked rag pushed through the letter-box.
Many critics dismissed the BBC's The Vicar of Dibley, but the public loved its sometimes saucy but ultimately reassuring affirmation of traditional values. Not that French cared much what critics thought after a preview of one show where a third of the reviewers, fed and watered, were already asleep for the screening "and those that graced us with their attention had egg on their ties and dribble on their many chins. Was this who I had been so scared of?"
Although French describes herself as "almost entirely spherical," the Fatty in the title isn't her but Saunders - a now-not-so-private joke. She doesn't dwell overly on her professional triumphs but there is work, such as the Comic Stripparodies, of which she is intensely and justifiably proud. And yet . . .
"Oh Dad," she writes, "I wish you could have been around for that."
• Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist