Saunders: BBC is dumbing down
...and that's why I don't work with Dawn any more
Jennifer Saunders has claimed that BBC is ‘dumbing down’ comedy – and blamed the corporation for ending her comic partnership with Dawn French.She said TV executives were too concerned at being populist, and no longer wanted to make the sort of ‘ambitious’ programmes she was interested in.
The 50-year-old comedian told Daily Mail columnist Richard Kay that the BBC’s attitude was why she decided to stop working with Dawn French after 30 years.
‘They are not making the kind of comedy we used to do,’ she said. ‘What they want now is populist programmes because there isn't the budget to try the more ambitious things we were doing.
‘We’ve been stopped from doing lots of sketches we wanted to do. Really, that's the reason we’ve decided to stop.’
‘We used to do a total mix [of spoofs], but now they only want you to do the populist stuff. If you go to them with something like Fellini now, they just say, “No, no one will know who that is, it's not popular enough.”’
Ironically, the Mail felt it had to explain to its readers that Fellini was an Italian film director.
French and Saunders, who started working together at The Central School For Speech and Drama in 1978, are now appearing in the West End on the last leg of their Still Alive farewell tour.
Published: 20 Oct 2008
