Dawn French

Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders: interview

As Jam & Jerusalem returns, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders talk about sexism in comedy and the joys of turning 50.

Saints be praised! Sunday night television is saved by the return of Jennifer Saunders's fabulous comedy centring on the activities of the Clatterford Womens' Guild. It's brilliant, gentle stuff, but cut with a sense of anarchy that you'd expect from Saunders's writing. Sue Johnston, Dawn French and Pauline McLynn are all back, with great support from Rosie Cavaliero, David Mitchell and
Maggie Steed, amongst others. This first hour long episode of three has the villagers getting flustered over a planning application - then they find out it might be for Charles Dance...

Who knew Dawn French could be quite so frightening? Even more frightening than the conjoined twins with matching eye patches or the hook-handed alcoholic clown, in fact. But if you thought she was scary, just wait till you see Freddie, her fake baby, starts talking to her over the intercom... We're beginning to realise that comedy is very much The League of Gentlemen's second love after horror.

A collection of characters - a theatre dwarf, a clown whose act has been usurped by the surgeon who amputated his hand, a blind collector of soft toys, a maternity nurse who cradles a doll as if it were the living baby she lost, an adult "mummy's boy" who attempts to be a serial killer - are caught in a mysterious web of revenge, punctuated by messages saying: "We know what you did". It is mildly sadistic and disgusting; it has many homages to other films (such as, this past week, the Hitchcock thriller Rope, in which two teenagers murder, inspired by their teacher's discussion of Nietzsche's superman) and has fleetingly haunting passages. But, unless you like mild sadism and disgust, you won't find pleasure. You certainly won't find humour, which, since Dawn French is in it, is itself an achievement

What makes this a very special sort of sitcom is that Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton dream up such horribly sinister "sits" for their "com". And the fact that we're on edge at the unpleasantness of it all makes us that bit quicker to laugh when the jokes come. It's a balancing act, but it's one they pull off cleverly, with their eyeless collector, eBay-obsessed conjoined twins and Joy, a deranged Bristolian midwife. Dawn French is great as Joy, cuddling her fake-baby "Freddie" in a papoose and, at one point, filling his drinking bottle from a hospital blood bag. Other highlights tonight include a fabulously daft fight over a Punch and Judy booth and a scene where murderous David Sowerbutts runs a bath in which to drown his next victim, urged on by his mum. This week's mystery messages, delivered to the various apparently unconnected characters by a masked figure, is simply "You killed her" - though naturally, we're no nearer to finding out who or why.

It might have links to The League of Gentlemen, but Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, two of that august number, have managed to craft something in Psychoville that feels distinctive in its own right, despite some of the trappings of the former. While the original League had a rotten core at the centre of the dark comedy, there's a surprisingly tragic heart here, exemplified by Joy, Dawn French's doll obsessed midwife. It's hard not to feel sorry for this woman, but at the same time. She's absolutely terrifying, charged with the potential energy to go off and do something abhorrent. Chilling, brilliant and funny.

After That Mitchell and Webb Look came the premiere of Psychoville. This is by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, two of the men who made The League of Gentlemen, a gruesome comedy-horror series about dangerous freaks from a remote village. Psychoville is a slight departure: it's a gruesome comedy-horror series about dangerous freaks from all over the country.

Among them are a midwife (Dawn French) who looks after a doll as if it were a real baby, a one-handed clown (Shearsmith) who bullies children, and a man (Pemberton) whose obsession with historical murders is exceeded in creepiness only by his uncommonly close relationship with his mother.

In its less queasy moments this first episode was fairly funny. Although casting directors prefer to give us Dawn French as a cuddlesome yokel, she's so much better as a seething nutcase - remember Murder Most Horrid. Print probably won't do justice to the menace she gave the final line in this exchange:

Midwife: "This bit at the top of the baby's head is called the soft spot."

Woman: "You mean the fontanelle."

Midwife: "What's that, Miriam?"

Woman: "My name's Kate."

Midwife: "Oh I'm sorry, I thought you were DOCTOR MIRIAM STOPPARD."

Psychoville isn't some chortling spoof of the horror genre; it genuinely is eerie. Then again, perhaps "horror" is the wrong word. The worry is not that you're about to see something scary, but that you're about to see something revolting. Inventively revolting. You want to turn over before something hideous happens, but you want to keep watching to find out what it is - and at least you rest safe in the knowledge that Krod Mandoon is already behind you in the night's schedule.

As openings go, Psychoville's was near perfect. A quill scratched over paper, a guttering candle flickered in the darkness. Then suddenly all was light. The candle was on a post office counter. A figure shrouded in black swept out, and a stout lady in the queue pursed her lips. "'E's left his candle," she said to another lady.

The slick genius of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's new comedy was that it didn't feel like the first episode of anything: indeed its gallery of grotesques seemed immediately very familiar. Were they benefiting from our foreknowledge of their previous opus, The League of Gentlemen? Here too are a monstrous set of characters, ghouls made flesh and plonked in the everyday, and they are all linked (as yet we don't know how) by a letter each receives which reads menacingly that the sender knows what he or she did.

Dawn French as the deranged ante-natal nurse who treats her doll baby as if it was real was particularly compelling. The scary children's entertainer, Mr Jelly, comes with a hook hand and is terrifying. He's not, he says emphatically, Mr Jolly and scares a group of children into screaming fear. When the parents nervously inquire if he really is a children's entertainer, he growls, "No, I'm Harold Shipman." In a production of Snow White, a dwarf actor falls for the leading lady and receives the benevolent counsel of the leading man, without realising that they spend their downtime laughing at him in the porn video he once made. But he has a rather violent capacity for telekinesis...

In a gloomy mansion, a shadowy figure called Mr Lomax intrigues "Tealeaf", the young man sent round to help him. The strangest relationship is between a mother and son, incestuously attracted to each other (she scrapes his back and tucks him in just a second too long), which is quite dark enough without the delicious twist that he seems to be ready to start acting out his obsession with serial killers.

Pemberton and Shearsmith's characters hum with a deranged vitality. The humour is dark, irreverent and vicious - yet warm and affectionate too. The characters are freaks, but we care about them. The mysterious figure in black reminds me of the Phantom Flan Flinger in Tiswas.

Since Royston Vasey closed its doors to business in 2002, the assorted League Of Gentlemen have scarcely set the world on fire. I don't know about you but I expected a bit more from the black-hearted crazy gang than cameos in the likes of Poirot and Benidorm. But at least two of them are back on form for now we have Psychoville (BBC2), a delirious wander back into the Gothic universe of Papa Lazarou et al.

The infected brainchild of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, Psychoville features a psychic porn dwarf, a scabrous one-handed children's clown called Mr Jelly, Dawn French doing penance for The Vicar Of Dibley as a demented midwife and much besides, all wrapped up in a cloak of blood-spattered menace that would do Edgar Allan Poe proud. The story thus far is not the point; episode one was all about soaking us in nutjob atmosphere.

As the coterie of oddballs each received a twirly-scripted anonymous note bearing the legend 'I Know What You Did' it was clear it was going to take a while for this plot to thicken, but there were more than enough gruesome diversions going on to galvanise the attention. I was particularly taken by much-too-close-for-comfort mother and son Maureen and David Sowerbutts, especially when she took far too long sorting out his fly. Who hasn't had a moment like that? Oh, that's just me then.

The Sowerbutts also got the best potential catchphrases, essential when students get round to re-enacting scenes. David's 'Sorry, Mum, I did a bad murder' is a definite contender. But better still was the even more disturbing 'Come and give your mummy a kiss'.

Half of The League Of Gentlemen bring us a new grotesque comedy show that's nothing like The League Of Gentlemen. Apart from, well, the scary clown. And the nurse who likes the fake baby, who could have been a direct lift... if she wasn't played by Dawn French. And the other characters. But otherwise it's totally different.

It's a series, you see - all the characters are loosely linked in that they receive missives from a mysterious letter writer (who has a good gag in the first minute). So that's different. Apart from all those characters in the last one being loosely linked by living in the same town. Ach, who are we kidding? It's The League Of Gentlemen. And that's a good thing.