Dawn French

Dawn French & Lenny Henry attend comedy event together

Separated spouses Dawn French, 52, and Lenny Henry, 51, arrived at the Great British Comedy Event together where Dawn was being honoured for her partnership with Jennifer Saunders.

Dawn French enjoys night out Jennifer Saunders

Dawn French looks radiant on a night out - her wedding ring and sparkler still firmly ON.

Divorced Dawn French & Lenny Henry return from holiday

Dawn French and Lenny Henry cheerfully return from holiday together despite their divorce.

Dawn and Lenny: Just good friends - or just good actors?

The 'amicable' split to which Dawn French and Lenny Henry aspire is more common than we might imagine.

The woman who stayed in a hotel room with Lenny Henry

The woman who stayed in a hotel room with comedian 11 years ago breaks silence on Lenny Henry and Dawn French divorce.

The REAL reason it's all over for Lenny and Dawn

Dawn French's biographer reveals the truth behind the split between French and Lenny Henry.

End of 25-year double act for comedy couple

Comedy couple Dawn French and Lenny Henry's 25-year marriage seemed one of the strongest in show business.

The woman Dawn French called 'the blip'

How Lenny Henry's marriage never recovered from his 'fling' with blonde.

The alternative comedy collective could be wonderful and they could be awful, often within the same episode. These two tales, first screened in 1984, display the best and the worst of the team's endeavours. Dawn French plays the lead in the love-story parody Susie, while Rik Mayall takes centre stage (surely not?) in the spaghetti western homage A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques. Sitcom veteran Bob Spiers directs both. Patchy scripting was a curse but ambitious, cinema-style visuals and a desire to experiment made the Strip a force to be reckoned with.

Comediennes are not the most conventionally alluring creatures on television - Dawn French, Victoria Wood and Jo Brand, to name a few, have often exploited their comfortable shape to hilarious ends.

So it will come as no surprise that striking funny-girl Olivia Lee, whose one-woman sketch show - Dirty, Sexy, Funny - starts on Comedy Central next week, has struggled to marry her glamorous appearance with her comic buffoonery.

"It has been hard sometimes getting people to take me seriously as a comedienne because people look at me and think: 'She's not going to be funny', says Olivia, 29. But that's a good thing because I am changing the cliched perception and bringing a bit of glam to it. You don't have to look funny to be funny - and there are always prosthetics which I can use in some of the sketches, although that is more for disguise in the hidden-camera bits."