Jennifer Saunders takes a break from writing her Spice Girls musical to talk to Arts Editor Laura Davis

MIX together a conspiring mother, some underwhelming exam results and a gap year in Italy and you get one of the nation’s best-loved comedy partnerships.

Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, who would become two of the most influential people in British TV comedy, met by chance on a teaching course that Saunders had not signed up for.

Finally relinquishing ambitions to send her daughter to an Oxbridge college, her mother had secretly filled in an application form for the Central School of Speech and Drama on her behalf.

“When I got back from Italy I found out I had to go to an interview and I think they must have been so desperate for students that I got on the course,” laughs Saunders, 53, who as fate would have it is giving a talk at another higher education institution, Ormskirk’s Edge Hill University, later this month.

“Not in my wildest dreams would I have wanted to be a teacher but it was a fantastic course and I think it stood me in very good stead having to stand up in front of a class of fairly wild kids.

“I never could see it being my career just because I liked the kids but I couldn’t take staffroom politics.”

Lessons in tackling unruly, heckling audiences and a future writing partner – not bad for a course she had never intended to be on.

Without their meeting, which led to the formation of their early double act The Menopause Sisters and subsequent stand-up gigs, there would be no award-winning comedy career, no female input into The Comic Strip Presents, no hilarious spoofs of the films Titanic or Misery, no Jam and Jerusalem.

Not even Saunders’ non-French-related creations would have likely been written – no wildly misbehaving Edina and Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous and no Spice Girls stage musical on the way.