Since the early 1980s, Jennifer Saunders has been a popular and influential figure in British television comedy. Her success stems from her involvement as both a performer in and a writer of several comedy shows that have been heralded as innovative by critics and received as hugely entertaining by audiences.

Saunders established her career as part of a double act with Dawn French on the live comedy circuit in the late 1970s. She and French, who have remained collaborators on many projects since, made their initial impact while on tour in 1981 with the Comic Strip, a group consisting of several young comedians performing an alternative, innovative form of comedy. The group were rapidly transferred to television, appropriately making their debut on Channel 4’s opening night in November 1982. Throughout the 1980s, the original members appeared in The Comic Strip Presents… , in which they wrote, directed, and performed a series of narratives satirizing a variety of genre themes. The program set a precedent for the so-called alternative comedy of the 1980s, won critical approval, and was awarded a Golden Rose at the Montreux Festival.

Saunders and French’s role within this group was particularly significant in that the two succeeded in providing much more complex and interesting female characters than had hitherto been offered by television comedy. They placed their characters in opposition to the traditional representations of women in British television comedy — such as the sexual accessories of The Benny Hill Show; the domesticated, subservient wife of The Good Life; and the nag of Fawlty Towers. Saunders and French’s very presence in The Comic Strip Presents… was a timely intrusion into a realm of comedy that had previously been the exclusive domain of male performers, from Monty Python to the double acts of the 1970s: Morecombe and Wise and Little and Large.

The autonomy that women were gaining was confirmed in French and Saunders. This show, the first series of which was screened on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1987, presented the pair as partners combining stand-up and sketches. French and Saunders offered a uniquely feminine version of British comedy (unique, with the notable exception of Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV, first screened in 1985). Their writing and acting focused directly, and with hilarious results, on female experience. Many of the scenes worked to reinforce the centrality of women’s talk and to parody the position and representations of women in the media.

It was out of a French and Saunders sketch that Saunders conceived of and developed her most prolific work, Absolutely Fabulous. Saunders has written and starred in four six-part series of Absolutely Fabulous (BBC, 1992, 1994, 1995, 2001, with a fifth season commencing in 2003), which have achieved uniformly high viewing figures as well as critical acclaim. In some respects a domestic sitcom, Absolutely Fabulous satirizes the matriarchal household of fashion public relations executive Edina Monsoon (Saunders) and the women around her, including her unruly best friend, Patsy (Joanna Lumley), and long-suffering daughter, Saffron (Julia Sawalha). Because Absolutely Fabulous remained an unusual example of a peak-time situation comedy written by women, with a predominantly female cast and a special address to a female audience, it provides rare viewing pleasures of self-recognition and humor to women. In addition to having feminist concerns at the core of its structure and themes, it stresses the artificiality surrounding “womanliness” and celebrates gender as a complex social and cultural construction.

In terms of her writing and performance, Saunders helped to raise the profile of female comedians in television, leading the way for others, such as Jo Brand and Dawn French, the latter in her solo series Murder Most Horrid. Saunders took on her first noncomedy role for a BBC drama, Heroes and Villains (1995), a period piece based on the life of Lady Hester Stanhope, an eccentric 19th-century traveler. As well as revealing a further talent for dramatic acting, the show crystalized Saunders’s TV persona and arguably her role in British television as an independent and powerful woman.