Jennifer Saunders at the Southbank Centre and Why it's Never Cool to be a Superfan

Anyone who follows my blog (as much as it’s possible to follow something that doesn’t actually move for months on end – sorry!) will know that it’s not a Jennifer Saunders fan site. Jennifer Saunders is my holey old jumper that I put on when I’m feeling a little unwell or upset and need to hear jokes that I know the punch-lines to or just be in trusting, uncomplicated, familiar company. You can read my first post for more thoughts on this subject, but the overall point is that we all have these holey old jumpers (authors, bands, comedians, actors, etc.); we just can’t wear them all the time. There are new authors, bands, comedians, actors, etc. to be discovered, work to be done, relationships to be had and life to be lived. In fact, I now use Jennifer Saunders as a marker of how well things are going in my life. If the DVDs are cold then life is probably quite sweet.  

That said…Oh my God!...She was at the Southbank Centre being interviewed and I went and I’ve never seen her live before and…oh my God!...I’m such an unbelievable sap that I almost cried when she came on the stage. What’s wrong with me? I’m a 36-year-old woman attending a literary event not a 12-year-old Justin Bieber fan hoping to get close enough to the stage to have his spit rain down me. How embarrassing! What’s more, I immediately felt possessive. What were all those other people doing there pretending like they knew what Jennifer’s all about, laughing at obscure Comic Strip references as if they understood them? Pah! She’s my Jennifer Saunders! Bugger off! But then it became quite obvious that she’s not just mine; the woman next to me looked as if she was going to kill me when I opened my bag of sweets noisily and she potentially missed a few sacred words from her hero; one weirdo had come all the way from Canada to see her and when given the opportunity to ask her a question couldn’t gather her thoughts to say anything but a garbled mumble about a diamond ring; other people came forward to ask questions, all prefixed by the words, ‘I love you, Jennifer.’ And do you know what? At no point during the whole interview did Jennifer Saunders look in my direction to seek me out, say hey, find out how I am. After all these years and the hours we’ve spent in each other’s company, this was the least I had expected.

I realise that all of this makes me sound a little crazy, but I think that it’s that pretend closeness that makes people crazy. Some part of us really thinks that we know celebrities and so they must know us back. This became apparent to me years ago when I was in a pub in Brighton and saw a familiar bloke sitting on a nearby table. ‘I’m sure I went to school with that guy,’ I told my mate. ‘I should pop over and say hi.’ Turns out it was Will Young, but I was convinced that we knew each other. Thankfully my friend stopped me from making an absolute tit of myself.

With this in mind, I guess meeting our heroes will always be an anti-climax and this is why I didn’t stay for Jennifer Saunders’ book signing after the interview. I knew that I would say something embarrassing and sycophantic or drop a nonsense on the table in front of her and she would probably roll her eyes at me or glaze over because I was the fiftieth or sixtieth mentalist to approach her thinking that there was some sort of closeness between us. So I kept my cool, went home, put the day behind me and put on an episode of Absolutely Fabulous instead.

Before I wrote this blog I thought I would do a quick Google search about superfans (understatedly defined by Wikipedia as ‘[people] who show a great deal of excitement for something’) and very quickly realised that compared to other nutjobs all I have is a mild case of admiration for Jennifer Saunders. There are people who have had plastic surgery to look like their idols, sent them letters in menstrual blood and covered their bodies in tattoos and that’s not to mention devotion shown in phenomenal volumes of calls, tweets and cash spent. One woman changed her name to Mrs Kanye West and another broke her own leg to be like Jessie J when she was injured in 2011. Perhaps most extreme, one One Direction fan killed her own dog to get their attention on Twitter. 

Yeah, by comparison I think I’m fine!  

(FYI, the JS tattoo pictured above is not on my leg. Also pictured, chest tattoo of Radiohead's Thom York with nipple for eye. Hmmm!)

   

 
Diazepam for Sale, the debut novel by Hayley Sherman is now available on Amazon
 
Time travel as a cure for depression, the Mods and Rockers on the West Pier, a vengeful Sat Nav lady, a seagull-stalked Frank Sinatra and Diazepam for sale... 
A fairytale for a prozac nation...
Fiction for a world that doesn't behave the way it should....

www.hayley-sherman.co.uk  

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Should British Comedy Thank Margaret Thatcher?

When I was a child, the alternative comedians of the eighties taught me how to hate Margaret Thatcher. She was everywhere, this pointy-faced, vile witch of a pantomime villain, and as a young kid sucking on alternative comedy like a bag of glue, it was my responsibility to boo her on sight. Did I understand the politics? No, not really. It wasn’t until later that I discovered the wide and varied shades of shit that she rained down on Britain from her indiscriminately spraying arsehole. So, learning to hate her in advance was quite lucky for an under-ten like me.

For the rest of the country, the wave of alternative comedy that hit Britain in the 1980s gave voice to the very real frustration that this woman’s reign invoked. Whether it was Ben Elton or Alexei Sayle ranting into the mic, Rik in The Young Ones blaming her for his own shortfalls or the grotesque rubber rendering of Her Ironness in Spitting Image, she was everywhere and it could be argued that rebelling against her resulted in some of the most sublime, energetic and important comedy ever performed in this country. Comedically, this launched the careers of a generation of talent that still endures. Politically, this was a way of reducing Thatcher’s perceived power and potentially rallying opposition.   

Of course, this is not the first time that comedy has been used as a weapon; Google ‘Hitler cartoons’ and you will see how ridiculing the führer was an invaluable tool in WWII (No, I am not comparing Thatcher to Hitler!). However, it does seem to me that the eighties brought satire into the mainstream because Margaret Thatcher provoked such a strong reaction in the comedic thinkers of the day. These were the alternative comedians; they were moving away from the mother-in-law jokes of the working-man’s set and the absurdity of the Oxbridge contingency. They were young, pumped and wanted to stamp their size-9 Dr Martins down on what they saw going on around them. They had microphones and it would have been irresponsible not to use them to fight back. You could argue that Margaret Thatcher was just gravy and these revolutionaries would have steered British comedy in a new direction anyway, but I find this hard to believe. She was the catalyst to revolution in the comedy world.

People are now talking about Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. I’m a working-class lefty, so my view is fairly predictable, especially as the Tories are now in power again and David Cameron seems to be only a dress and a pair of high heels away from literally following in her footsteps. Others will claim that she’s the best thing since nostril-hair clippers and the country would be drowned in custard (or something equally implausible) if she hadn’t made it to number ten. With all this talk of her political legacy, it seems trivial to bring this back to comedy, but British comedy (and music for that matter) has never had a muse quite like her, and for someone who is really struggling to find something to praise a dead woman for, this is all I can come up with.

Her comedic legacy is that satire is now a mainstream feature of our lives, whether on stage, TV or radio. We expect our leaders to be pulled up and made accountable by our comedians; we laugh at it, but we also know that something important is happening underneath. Many a truth is told in jest, and for a large section of society who would not consider themselves politically-minded, comedy is an accessible route to information and awareness. Some comedians are still just in it for the laughs and this is great, but many are devoted to giving voice to political injustice and social frustration, and as long as this continues to happen there will always be the possibility of change.

Thank you, Mrs Thatcher (sort of)

   

 
Diazepam for Sale, the debut novel by Hayley Sherman is now available on Amazon
 
Time travel as a cure for depression, the Mods and Rockers on the West Pier, a vengeful Sat Nav lady, a seagull-stalked Frank Sinatra and Diazepam for sale... 
A fairytale for a prozac nation...
Fiction for a world that doesn't behave the way it should....

www.hayley-sherman.co.uk  

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