How Dawn saved Diana... from Richard Gere!
The Twat Files Dawn French Michael Joseph €28
In 2021, Dawn French was invited to the premiere of the James Bond film No Time To Die. She replied to Sue, her assistant: ‘This will be another big f ***-off red carpet nightmare, with all the usual utter w***ers in attendance. I’d rather have my eyes pecked out by diseased pigeons. So – a polite no from me. Thank you’. She then realised she hadn’t sent the email to her PA, but to the entire James Bond PR department.
This is just one funny anecdote from Dawn French’s sort-of memoir. It gathers together examples from the comedian’s life in which she has been, to use her preferred term, a twat.
She was inspired to write the book, she says, by her recent tour, in which she delighted audiences with stories about her most embarrassing moments. The show was too short to feature them all, so she’s written a book to ensure no juicy examples of ‘twatty’ behaviour go unrecorded.
French has been in what she calls ‘the biz of show’ for several decades, and was for a time married to another celebrated comedian, Lenny Henry, so it’s no surprise to find the book stuffed with tales from the showbiz front line.
Almost without exception, these encounters are played for laughs. When she meets Johnny Depp on the set of a Vicar Of Dibley special for Comic Relief, for instance, she hopes – in fact assumes – that he will fall fatally in love with her and kiss her on the lips. He doesn’t. He is polite and professional, and clearly sees her as a ‘sexless being’.
Other encounters are more successful. At an Elton John party, French watches Richard Gere trying to chat up Princess Diana, who is clearly uninterested. French rescues her from Gere’s advances, and is told a story by Diana about watching a children’s film with one of her sons. The film, Diana said, began with a prince throwing open the curtains of his castle, and a narrator saying that one day he would become king and rule over ‘all he surveyed’. According to Diana, her son mumbled at the TV: ‘Yeah? So?’
The key to enjoying The Twat Files is probably just to take it on its own terms, as a kind of perky, luvvie loo book to be dipped in and out of. Those who aren’t confirmed French fans already might well find it both repetitive and irritatingly overfamiliar.
There are at least five stories about her (seemingly mild) incontinence, for instance, and these and many other anecdotes in the book conclude in the same way: with French deciding that the story she has just told is proof she is truly the ‘Queen of Twatville’, ‘a prize twat’, a ‘celebritwat’, et cetera.
After a while, you start to think: Fine. Have it. Claim the crown. Reign over Twatville. Whatever.
Thankfully, this is by the far the most annoying feature of what is otherwise a jolly and entertaining book. Choosing the best story is tricky: perhaps it’s when French auditions for the Mamma Mia! film and is so catastrophically bad at singing that no one can meet her eye afterwards. Or when she is told, after months of yearning to be in the Harry Potter films, that she is being considered for the character known only as ‘The Fat Lady’.
The book’s overarching aim can also hardly be objected to. French is merely, she says with a modesty that rings true, ‘an old bird’ who has learnt that mistakes make us who we are.
Her insistence that the reader do as she has – accept failure as a necessary part of life’s rich tapestry – feels, in the end, rather poignant.