Hello, I'm Cresti Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast

in 1996 and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

My cast away this Christmas is a writer and comedian. As a child she appeared to have no ambitions

to become either funny or famous and only achieve both after she met her equally well-known

stage partner while they were training to be teachers. Together they created a series of highly

popular television comedy shows but when her partner took a year off my cast away decided to go

it alone, writing and starring in a situation comedy that has become a BBC classic. She plays

Adina, the champagne-swilling mother of a straight-laced daughter, who with her friend Patsy

equally biblious and not averse to the odds not of coke, make mayhem in the grand style.

Most people find it absolutely fabulous. She is Jennifer Saunders. It's true isn't it Jennifer

that ABFAB came about by default really back in what was it 92 because you performed without

Dawn. We had both taken the year off. We both sort of decided that we loved doing French

and Saunders but you know we just needed some time to do other things and the telephone didn't ring.

The office didn't pour in and he sort of had to keep employed so agent ringing you a lot saying

is there anything you can do love and eventually I thought well I could write this character

because I knew the character quite well. Why didn't you know the character well?

Because it was one of the sketches that Dawn and I did in French and Saunders and I just

felt that that character could go a bit further. You're not telling me Dawn played Patsy?

No, Dawn played my daughter. She was obviously too old. So it just developed. It was the first time

without Dawn really wasn't it that you'd done anything professionally? Yes I mean we'd work with

the group called Comic Strip and made some half-our films and the early 80s but yeah it was it was

...