Jennifer Saunders: I hate how the BBC wastes its money and talent By Richard Barber Trenchant Saunders: Jennifer poses with her new book, Bonkers: My Life in laughs She was half of Britain's most popular and enduring female comedy double act. She wrote - and starred in - one of the most iconic TV sitcoms of all time. She's just written a best-selling autobiography, Bonkers - oh, and there is new role in her family life: grandmother to her daughter Ella's 15-month-old son, Freddie. On the day we meet, though, Jennifer Saunders is in feisty form, giving vent to a series of bugbears - "or rants as I prefer to call them," she says, - about life in 21st-century Britain, starting with the cult of celebrity. I particularly blame the Essex and Chelsea reality shows. I just can't bear them and why would I anyway be interested in people I'd never met or heard of? And not one of the participants seems to be remotely normal. That's deliberate, I suppose; they're hand-picked because they're odd in some way, because they're rather ugly personalities. People used to be TV or film stars. The word "celebrity" didn't used to exist. So are we now meant to accept that both Angelina Jolie and someone from The Only Way Is Essex is each a celebrity? Not to my eye. It's like when the BBC started describing everyone who appeared on screen or radio as "talent." It's such a lazy way of defining people. We're all of us now swimming in the celebrity pool. But then don't get her started on the BBC. In the old days, if the first series of something - French and Saunders is a case in point - didn't immediately take off, they allowed you time to develop what you were doing. Now, everything has to be an instant hit overseen by a committee. 'Everybody has an opinion so you'll get six sets of notes on a new idea from six separate executives. How could you possibly satisfy so many conflicting points of view? The basic remit of the BBC is that it should make a good variety of television programmes that entertain and inform. In the old days, you could speak to someone in charge over a sandwich at Television Centre. Now, it has to be over an expensive lunch at The Ivy. Would I like a car to pick me up? No thanks, I'll get myself there. Award-winner: Jennifer poses with a Bafta in 2012. But she has attacked BBC affectations like referring to everyone as 'talent' It drives me mad. And you don't have to keep sending me flowers. It's such a waste of money. All of this involves a whole band of people who simply wouldn't be necessary if the so-called talent were left alone to get on with their job. This is not so very different from the NHS, she thinks, where management gets in the way of medicine. The purpose of the NHS is to make sick people better. Then I read the other day about nurses being sent on courses to learn how to be kind and caring. For heaven's sake! If you weren't either of those things, you shouldn't go into nursing in the first place. Crikey. She's certainly not afraid to speak her mind. But it's not long before the fond grandmother in 55-year-old Jennifer rises above the ire. Next February, Ella and husband Dan are expecting their second child. "So then I'll be a double granny," she says. Ella, 27, is the eldest of Jennifer's three daughters from her marriage to actor/comedian/now award-winning chef, Ade Edmondson, 56. Their first grandchild, Freddie, is the very apple of his grandparents" eye. "He's small and blond with blue-grey eyes," says Jennifer, "and he toddles. His smile is just like his dad's, although I thought he looked the spit of Ella at that age when I saw him the other day. And he's a boy! I'm the mother of three girls, but I've found boys are different. He has a different kind of energy. He's into everything. If it's got a motor or it's anything mechanical, he wants to know more. He loves door handles and keys. He's so into stuff - in short, a proper boy. Jennifer was at Freddie's birth. It was extraordinary and so different from having your own. Obviously. I kept thinking: "Oh, that's what it looks like when it comes out." Ella just had gas and air and sat in a bath. By the end, I was willing her to push him out. If I could have done, I'd have taken some of the pain from her. Not quite love at first sight: This photograph of Jennifer and her husband Ade was taken when they were 'just good friends' I had no warning that she'd ask me to be in the delivery suite. Then, at one point, she was musing aloud: "I just don't know who to have as my female birth partner." So I said: "I'll do it." She looked at me. "Oh, would you?" she said. I didn't like to ask. Well, of course I wanted to be there. Dan cut the cord and then I left them together for a bit. But Freddie wasn't many minutes into this world before I held him for the first time. In fact, I used my phone to take video footage of him being weighed. Fifteen months on, Freddie's favourite word, apparently, is "unk." "He applies it to almost everything," according to his grandmother, "although particularly to any dog. We're encouraging him to call me Jamjar and Poops for Ade. 'The trouble is, he hasn't made those names up; we have. So we'll just have to wait and see. The girls called my parents Namma and Nappa. The return? Jennifer hints that an Ab Fab movie could be on her to-do list When I'm in London, I do get withdrawal symptoms if I haven't seen Freddie for a bit. But Ella and Dan live near our house in Devon. 'She puts up pictures of Freddie on Facebook which I love, but it's not the same as being there with him. I do love being Granny," she says. Jennifer also loves being a mother, something she's managed to juggle successfully with a demanding career. Second daughter, Beattie, 26, is in an all-female comedy group that used to be called Lady Garden and has now metamorphosed into The Birthday Girls. Ade and I went to see her some time ago, our hearts in our mouths. But she really does seem to have inherited the comedy gene. The youngest, Freya, 23, is a fashion student. I know I would say this but I really think she does have an eye. Heaven knows where she gets it from. Way back, she used to make whole outfits out of wrapping paper when we'd all opened our Christmas presents, including shoes. In an industry littered with the husks of failed marriages - and, sadly, of course, that included long-time comedy partner Dawn French and Lenny Henry - Jennifer and Ade, each in the public eye, have done well to stay together for almost 30 years. They originally became good friends having met at the Comic Strip club in London along with Dawn, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Alexei Sayle and the rest. There's a very sweet photograph of her and Ade in her autobiography, dressed only in swimwear, and sitting back to back on tour in Australia. They weren't yet an item but there is unavoidable intimacy in that picture. "I know," agrees Jennifer. I've had that photograph for a long time. But I only realised it recently: we do look intimate and yet we truly were only friends at that stage. It's a good thing, in my opinion, if you become friends with someone before you become lovers. It simplifies everything. The alternative is that you fall in lust and those relationships are often the ones that don't last. Better to know someone, faults and all, before the friendship turns physical. While her friendship with Ade was maturing, Jennifer was going out with someone who worked on the crew of the Comic Strip tour. By the time the tour reached Spain, this boy and I split up. His parting shot was: "Everyone knows you're in love with Ade. I can't understand why the two of you don't just get together. 'And I remember my reaction was: "No, I'm not, you idiot!" But it did start me thinking. The ex-boyfriend was only echoing something Dawn had long thought, ever since she had first observed Jennifer and Ade at the Comic Strip in London. "When Ade and I did finally get together, Dawn said: "Thank God, at last!" I suppose these things can be obvious to everyone but yourself. Funny, isn't it? Anyway, we started going out officially in the October of 1984 and were married the following May, at which point I was already pregnant with Ella. Both Jennifer and Dawn French have declined the OBE for 'services to comedy drama' So what was it about Ade that so attracted Jennifer? His culinary skills, perhaps? She laughs. He didn't have any back then. Ade went on to win this year's Celebrity MasterChef with a dazzling display of impeccably presented dishes. I've never seen him work so hard or get so tired. Every evening, he'd be scouring cookery books to come up with a dish for the next stage of the competition. Then he'd be buying all the ingredients, experimenting in the kitchen, setting the timer to see if he could cook the dish in an hour and so on. He was totally dedicated to the challenge. When he sets his mind to something, he tries to do it as well as he can. He was determined to get it right. I don't mind admitting I was very proud of him. I knew he'd won in advance of it being shown on TV, of course, because it had been filmed some weeks earlier. And yet, I was still quite nervous when I watched it, which was ridiculous. Did she cry when Ade emerged the winner? I did. I admit it. Tears were streaming down my face. And the girls were so pleased, so proud, too. It was lovely. Not everything in her work has gone smoothly, but Jennifer doesn't flinch from addressing the not altogether rip-roaring success of Viva Forever!, the musical she wrote based on the songs of The Spice Girls. "The critics killed it," she says now. I really believe that. It didn't get good reviews so it felt sort of doomed from the beginning. It was a shame. I really enjoyed it and so did the girls themselves. They were very supportive of it the whole way through. I don't know if it was the wrong time in the theatre or fewer people were going to West End shows because of the recession or what. I was disappointed, but that may not be the end of it. A touring production could go on the road. That's what I'd like to think. If she's taking a positive view of that episode in her life, it's as nothing compared to the clear-eyed way in which she handled her widely reported brush with breast cancer. She deals with the episode in a chapter in the autobiography devoted to the diagnosis, the treatment and her eventual all-clear. "I'm bored with talking about it now," she says. It's in the past. I want to move on. So what next? She's currently filming another series of Blandings from the PG Wodehouse books starring opposite Timothy Spall. That should hit our TV screens at some point next year. And then? She's long threatened to write an Ab Fab movie. Well, yes. I'm running out of excuses not to, aren't I? So I suppose I'd better get on with it," she says. Bonkers: My Life In Laughs by Jennifer Saunders is published by Penguin.