Bonkers: My Life in Laughs

by Saunders, Jennifer

  My make-up artist and friend Christine Cant and hairdresser Beverly Cox had, between them, lined up various wigs and fake lashes, so I was well provided for on that front. Like JoBo, I always had a little acrylic wig that I could pull on, which didn’t look half bad under a beanie hat. Luckily it was winter, so I just wore hats all the time if I went out.

  Ade is a good hat-wearer. Why don’t more men wear hats? I can’t bear it when I watch the news and see bald reporters standing outside in the sleet with their collars up and a bare head. Wear a cap! Ade has got into caps recently. Caps, hats and glasses. If he doesn’t, he says he looks like an onion.

  I didn’t keep my cancer a secret. It was just private. All my friends and the people I worked with knew, and I think the press probably did too. I just like to think they were being respectful. Yes, I actually do believe that’s possible.

  I have great girlfriends and family who rallied round and who I am incredibly thankful for. Because of course there are times when it isn’t possible to stay positive, times when you feel completely bloody shit. There are times when you just want to cry all day. The chemo is accumulative; you have to think of it as medicine, but it is also trying to kill you.

  My lowest point came when I had lost all my hair; every eyelash, every pube, every follicle was empty. Your periods stop and you have no hair. There’s very little for a girl to do in a day! It was then that I got a terrible rash all over my face. They think it was a reaction to the Herceptin, and it was horrible! I felt like a great big overgrown baby with pimples all over my face. A big, horrible, red-faced baby.

  So, feeling like hell and not wearing anything like my best underwear, I went to see a dermatologist. I thought it was pretty obvious, but still she asked me what the problem was. I pointed to my face.

  ‘Is it anywhere else?’

  ‘No, it’s just on my face.’

  ‘But it’s nowhere else?’

  ‘No.’ Quite angry now. ‘It’s just on my face.’

  ‘Would you strip off so I can have a look? Just go behind the screen.’

  Strip off? I am incredulous. But I do as I am told and go behind the screen, wanting to cry. Why does no one ever specify what they mean by ‘strip off’? Even when I have a massage, I’m never sure what to leave on and what to take off before they cover me with a pie crust of towels. And at the doctor’s, it’s a nightmare! Does she mean just take off your jumper, or does she mean take off everything but leave your bra and pants on? Or does she mean everything? Why aren’t people more specific? Why must it be left to the embarrassed individual to have to ask? And I’m wearing a wig. Do I take the wig off and go out bald, or will this be too shocking? I decide to remove it. I don’t care if she’s shocked.

  ‘Shall I keep my bra on?’

  ‘Yes. If you like.’

  If I like? I want to keep all my clothes on. I would like to keep all my clothes on! I don’t know you, and I don’t want to be here.

  Suddenly, the screen gets pulled back and she’s looking at me in my very poor bra and pants. She circles me and then gets me to stand in a better light and looks again at the strange baby. Am I on Candid Camera?

  ‘OK. Get dressed now.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s just on your face.’

  I can’t answer because it would make me cry. I am silent until I leave.

  She gives me some steroid cream for my FACE. Which I take and apply to my FACE and which clears it up slowly from my FACE.

  Just after Christmas, I get a call from Maureen.

  ‘Hello, love. Just to say, I think I may have taken your name in vain. I hope you don’t mind. It’s just I was talking to Judy Craymer. You know, love, the producer of Mamma Mia!’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Of course I knew, but I couldn’t understand why Judy herself would be interested in having anything to do with a person who had ripped the piss out of the Mamma Mia! film as mercilessly as I had.

  I recalled Sue Perkins as ‘Judy’ in the sketch, and wondered what Judy really must have thought …

  JUDY/SUE: The genius I had was thinking of Abba … and then friends called and said, ‘Hey, Judy, you’ve got to make it into a film!’ And so I did!

  Judy had taken it all with a great sense of humour, thank God.

  ‘Mamma Mia!’ may be my favourite of all the parodies we ever did. At a time when we had retired the French and Saunders act, we were suddenly given this gift by Comic Relief. I had of course been to see the film, and walked out knowing that I could not go the year without somehow wearing Meryl Streep and her dungarees.

  We had a fantastic cast: Joanna Lumley, Sienna Miller, Alan Carr, Miranda Hart, Sue Perkins, Mel Giedroyc, Matt Lucas, and Philip Glenister, who was a revelation as a comic actor. He was playing Pierce Brosnan and had noticed that, in the movie, Pierce is generally leaning on something – a wall, a door, a tree. And when there was nothing close, he would simply lean on his own hand.

  The whole thing was a joy. We honestly didn’t want it to end! We would happily have gone on and done the whole film. I wished it could have become my job for the rest of my life – just singin’ and dancin’ and messin’ about. I wouldn’t care if no one ever saw it, because sometimes that’s not the point; sometimes, when something you’re doing with people you really love really works, it’s enough. It’s like being in the best game of pretend that you had when you were a child, but with huge, need-to-pee laughter.

  So.

  ‘Judy is looking for a writer for a new project.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘And I told her you might be interested.’

  ‘Right. What is it?’

  ‘It’s a musical based on the music of the Spice Girls.’

  ‘Maureen. Ring her up now and tell her I want to do it. Don’t let her get anyone else.’

  ‘Right, love. Will do.’

  ‘Tell her what I’m going through, but assure her that my brain is fine.’

  Of course my brain wasn’t really fine, but I didn’t realize that until months later when my brain was actually fine.

  I met Judy, and liked her, and shared the same vision for a Spice Girls musical. We also shared a love of martinis, which made everything even more pleasant. I hadn’t stopped drinking during chemo; I just thought that alcohol in the old bloodstream was the least of my worries. But of course, and yes, thank you, I do realize … DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

  Judy was patient as I went through the treatment and the accumulation of chemicals took its toll. My nose was constantly dripping, due to the lack of nasal hair, and often bled, which was less than lovely. I felt breathless if I exercised and had little in the way of an immune system. I felt chemical. I felt like a chemical.

  The midpoint between treatments is the lowest point for your immune system and it is recommended that you avoid people you might catch something from. It was at one of these low points that I went to Canterbury to see Ade in panto. I got in a slight panic. The tent was vast and hot and filled with germ-ridden children. It was a cauldron of mucus. But I had planned for this and had in my bag a white mask as often seen modelled by Michael Jackson and forensic pathologists, so I wore it. Feeling ridiculous but safe.

  When the six months was up, I was relieved. But strangely I knew I would miss the routine. I would miss my hours in the white chair. I would miss laughing with Joel. I would even miss my portacath.

  The radiotherapy treatment kicked in immediately, so I could put off my medical-institution cold turkey for a few weeks.

  What they do basically is blast the affected breast with X-rays to kill off any stray, unwanted cancer cells that have managed to survive everything else that’s been thrown at them.

  It is incredibly precise, and you have to lie still in a lead-lined room as they align you with the machine, using a tiny dot of a tattoo that is between your breasts. You have to breathe rhythmically as the rays are delivered in pulses on the out breath, so that they don’t affect your heart. (I can now hear doc
tors screaming, ‘That is not how it works, you idiot! Didn’t you listen to the explanation?’)

  The nurses leave the room and seal the massive doors.

  And then the voice starts. A calm, soothing woman’s voice.

  ‘Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out …’

  I do as I’m told.

  ‘Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out …’

  I had always believed that I would be impossible to hypnotize. I just don’t think my brain cuts out easily.

  Doing research for Ab Fab, Abi and I once went to a woman who was famous for taking people back into their past lives. She had been on TV and taken the likes of Phillip Schofield back to – in his own words – seventeen something. It was regression. Or Soul Freedom Therapy, as she called it.

  We went up to her flat, which was predictably cream-coloured and full of candles. We were upfront and told her that we were only there out of interest; we were curious to see what might happen.

  I was actually excited about who I might once have been, because there are times when just being who you are isn’t enough. I want past lives, and I knew that Edina definitely wanted them too. Abi was there as my witness, and to pull me back from the brink if it all got a bit hairy. There was a time in my second year at school when we put a girl into a trance on the playing fields and couldn’t get her to come round. Teachers had to be called. I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want to get stuck in Cleopatra’s time with nothing but handmaidens for company.

  She was a nice woman, with a perfectly normal voice. I sat on her comfortable sofa and closed my eyes. Then I heard a different voice. It was still her, but this was her regression voice, slower and deeper and frankly silly. Without opening my eyes, I just knew that Abi was desperately trying not to laugh. I was trying not to laugh.

  She attempted to take me to a lovely beach where I could hear the waves gently lapping on the shore – a place where all the cares of the world had disappeared and I felt relaxed … so relaxed …

  ‘The most relaxed you’ve ever felt … and now I want you to feel sleepy … you’re drifting off … OK, now I want you to find a place to be and I want you to imagine looking down at your feet … you are somewhere else … take time and look around … where are you?’

  ‘I’m still here. Sorry.’

  I opened my eyes to see her disappointment and Abi in the grip of laughter suppression, trying not to catch my eye.

  ‘Sorry.’

  We tried everything. We tried dimming the lights and lighting more candles. We tried lying on the floor on my front and on my back. We tried Abi not being in the same room. Eventually, I was so embarrassed that I put myself firmly on the lovely beach and beyond, faked a shiver, and allowed her to cast off a demon spirit that had become attached to me.

  What we didn’t try – but should have tried – was a voice saying, ‘Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out,’ because within thirty seconds of the door closing and the voice beginning, I was always asleep, and sleeping wasn’t the point because then I wouldn’t be focused on my breathing. At least twice every session, I would be woken by the klaxon alarm. The heavy doors would open and the whole process of alignment would have to start again.

  Even now, just writing the words, I can feel my eyelids droop and a heavy sleep coming upon me …

  ‘Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out …’

  KLAXON!!!*

  EIGHTEEN

  When my hair eventually came back, it came back with a vengeance. It came back everywhere. Every tiny hair follicle – even the ones you thought were extinct after years of plucking and shaving and waxing – erupted into life. I started going over my body with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers. My face was a fuzz.

  My head hair grew back thick and steely grey and looked quite funky – until my addiction to bleach kicked in again.

  It was midsummer when it started to regrow. I had gone to stay in the south of France with our friends Betty and David. Tracey Emin was having a birthday party nearby, and we were invited. She’s a great character, Tracey. I went to her retrospective show at the South Bank, Love is What You Want, and it was wonderful. I tell you, what that woman can do with a blanket is nobody’s business! (Except of course it is.)

  In one room, there was a big screen playing an animation of one of her drawings, a drawing of her masturbating. It was on a loop, so it looked pretty frantic. At the side of the screen was an attendant, an oldish man in a blue uniform sitting on a chair. All he had to look at was the screen. Day in, day out, shift in, shift out, hour after hour, and then going home to the family with that image flickering in his brain. I mean, it’s bad enough when you get an advertising jingle stuck in your head.

  ‘How was your day, dear? Did you get Neon or Masturbation?’

  ‘Masturbation.’

  ‘When do you get Neon?’

  ‘When Susan moves from Blankets into Writings.’

  ‘I like the blankets.’

  ‘Yes, I like the blankets. I never thought I’d say it, but they really are rather beautiful. I’d rather Blankets than Writings.’

  ‘Is Writings where she framed the tampon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes. I think I prefer Blankets.’

  Tracey is often at Betty’s house in the summer and we have, on occasion, got stupidly, beautifully drunk. One time, we were in the pool singing one minute and then passed out the next. I woke up on the bed still in my wet swimsuit. And then Ade walked in. Hours had passed and he announced that the rest of them were off to get something to eat in Cassis. I refused to be left out and was going to prove that I wasn’t really that drunk, actually.

  I got dressed. Well, I thought I had got dressed, until I was seen by the others. I still had my swimsuit on, but had pulled on a couple of pairs of leggings (with my shoe still inside one of them), a shirt, a dress and a jacket. But I went to Cassis. I wasn’t going to let the fact that I was decidedly wobbly and walking inside my own leggings stop me. I’m afraid that I recall little else of the evening, dear reader.

  Tracey, meanwhile, had passed out and wasn’t seen till the next day. Lightweight.

  Anyway, before we set off for the party, I had to make a decision about whether to wear the old wiglet or not. It was so hot that I took the decision to ditch it and go with the light sprinkling of new growth that had appeared.

  It was a terribly glamorous party in a restaurant on a beach, and the photographer Richard Young was there snappin’ the arty crowd and me. I didn’t mind, because Richard is one of the good guys. He’s a gent. During the party, he came up to me and asked if I wanted to hold back the photos of me because my breast cancer hadn’t been made public. I had a quick think, but told him it was fine. There was no way I wanted to go back to the wig.

  The pic went in the papers (with lovely Richard Young, unprompted, giving all the proceeds to a breast cancer charity) and for a few days it was news. And then, just as quickly, it was over. Though I did fear that, from then on, I would always be referred to as ‘Brave Jen’ …

  Brave Jen’s Cancer Hell Secret

  All Clear for Brave Jen

  I made a statement via Maureen that just said I had caught it early and now it was gone. Surprisingly, I got lots of correspondence from people telling me that it was a reckless statement and that cancer is never gone. That I was only in remission and it could come back at any time. I was being told off for being positive! And for giving a false impression, apparently. I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, it was gone and the chances of it coming back were – and are – really small. You move on.

  And I did. I was out and about again.

  Bear with me while I briefly explain the final part of my treatment. I have to do this, because it is relevant to the story I will tell next. I sense you’re tiring, but delay switching off the light, or making a cup of tea, or putting the Kindle under the sunlounger and reapplying the cream, because it won’t take long.


  I had started taking the drug tamoxifen, which prevents you ever having any oestrogen ever again. This basically means it plunges you into the menopause in one fell swoop. It’s fairly brutal and you go through all the accompanying side effects: hot flushes, weight gain; a sense of mourning for lost youth, sexiness and somehow the point in anything.

  I did become depressed, and this is how I know …

  Ade and I had wanted to go away on holiday in the late summer. I had said I would book somewhere but could never quite get my head together to do it. Eventually, Ade said that he would do it. I was pleased. We decided to go on a tour of the lakes in northern Italy: Maggiore, Como and Garda. This sounded good. Ade took care to show me all the places we were going to stay, and I approved everything. It looked idyllic.

  Was I happy?

  Yes, I was. What could possibly be nicer?

  We flew to Milan, hired a small Fiat 500 and drove to our first stop on the trip: a lovely hotel that I had seen on the Internet, and approved of, on the shores of Lake Maggiore.

  The weather was heavenly. We drove through the town of Stresa, towards the hotel. There were lots of hotels on that road. I thought the first one was going to be ours, but it wasn’t. Nor was the next one. Or the next one. And then it happened. I felt a terrible, sad, heavy fury come over me.

  A voice inside said, Why didn’t he book those nice hotels? The ones we’ve just passed? The ones close to town?

  This Evil Jennifer voice continued as we passed other hotels, eventually coming to ours. This hotel wasn’t good enough. I could tell. We got out of the car and walked in. The lobby made me angry. The lobby of this nice hotel – a hotel almost identical to all the others we had passed – made me angry.

  Ade had booked a lovely room with a balcony overlooking the lake. It was lovely. But not lovely enough for Evil Jennifer.

  Why couldn’t I love it? What was wrong with me?

  We walked out at night and found a restaurant on the Isola Bella where we ate delicious food and watched the moon low in the sky, over the water. The next day, we walked through ancient gardens and did a little light shopping. This is normally my thing. This is normally perfect for me. Italian food and light shopping are the things I dream about, but I couldn’t get past a looming feeling of disappointment.