Search - French & Saunders: Gentlemen Prefer French & Saunders on DVD

Movie Release: 1993 DVD Release: 02/05/2002 Format: DVD - Closed Captioned Edition: Television SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 2 hrs 20 mins Studio: BBC Warner Members Wishing: 0 Genres: Comedy, Variety Show [TV], Sketch Comedy

The third series of French & Saunders, which originally aired on the BBC in 1990, produced the various clips assembled as French & Saunders: Gentlemen Prefer French & Saunders. Gone With the Wind, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Exorcist, and Dangerous Liaisons provide fodder for Hollywood parodies, but much of the material focuses on original characters. Chat show hosts and pundits, cleaning ladies with attitude, women in prison -- Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders embody them all. Elsewhere, the duo aim their satiric sights at both the publishing and PR industries. Ladies' magazines and late-in-life hangers-on of Andy Warhol also get their due. There's also an opera documentary in which dueling divas belt out Kylie Minogue's "I Should Be So Lucky" and a feminine twist on the dirty-old-men characters who have been one of the show's staples from the beginning. "Modern Mother and Daughter," the sketch that provided the basis for Absolutely Fabulous, is included, with French originating the role that would be played by Julia Sawalha in the actual series. Sharp-eared viewers will catch a snippet of Inner City's Detroit techno classic "Good Life" in "Modern Mother"; sharp-eyed audiences, meanwhile, will notice that Eleanor Bron, who would go on to play Patsy's poetess mother in Absolutely Fabulous: Birth, appears as an over-the-top academic commentator in the Warhol segment. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Dawn French
Jennifer Saunders

Before going on to write and star in the cult comedy series Absolutely Fabulous, Jennifer Saunders teamed up with Dawn French to produce a very funny sketch comedy series for the BBC. This disc offers one of the full-length specials they would occasionally create. The DVD offers a standard full-frame transfer that preserves the original broadcast aspect ratio of 1.33:1. A closed-captioned English soundtrack is rendered in Dolby Digital Stereo. Fans of Absolutely Fabulous will certainly want to see this disc as it contains the original skit that introduced the characters to the world. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide