At the TV Baftas in 2009, French and Saunders were given a joint fellowship in celebration of their comedy career. They walked on stage to the sound of Here Come the Girls, as was the legal requirement for every woman achieving something from the period between 2008 and 2012. They got a standing ovation from the crowd of TV insiders. The applause went on, and on, so much so that Jennifer Saunders had to shout at the audience to quieten them down: “Shut up, shut up! That’s very embarrassing. Far too long.”

They had officially retired as a double act the year before, with a final live show together at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London’s West End. It was, as Saunders put it, “the icing on the cherry on the cake”. But this Christmas, they’re back. They’ve unsplit the split for a one-off festive special, their first full TV appearance together, aside from Comic Relief skits, since 2007.

“We have almost deliberately stayed alive this long just to force the British Broadcorping Castration to put us on television one last time,” Saunders said, when the news was announced. There will be a spoof of The Handmaid’s Tale – who couldn’t see the comic potential in a series about the subjugation of women under an ultra-conservative authoritarian regime? – and Dawn French has promised their take on “drunken reality shows”, presumably the likes of Love Island and Geordie Shore.

Jedi mastery ... parodying Star Wars for 1999’s The Phantom Millennium. Photograph: BBC

The later series of French and Saunders were not their best, and many fans will be cautiously excited about the news that the pair are back on screen. But I am over the moon that they’ll be there in the schedules this year. The impact of their sketch comedy, so surreal, silly and pioneering, can be criminally understated. As Miranda Hart, herself a big French and Saunders fan, tweeted when they picked up that honorary Bafta: “Their influence [has] been extraordinary and often unrecognised [by] industry elite.”

If their influence has been understated, it is not difficult to trace the specific lines of their impact, both from their double act and the shows they did outside of it. Absolutely Fabulous was such a global hit that Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham have cited Saunders as an inspiration, and of course, the series emerged from a French and Saunders sketch, in which French played the long-suffering daughter. Smack the Pony’s musical skits were a direct descendant of what their forebears did.

In an early French and Saunders sketch, Saunders plays a harried dinner party host who insists on guiding her guests around the nibbles and ends up smashing her head against the sink; it’s similar territory to that tackled – though with a blacker heart – by Julia Davis and Jessica Hynes in the much-admired pilot Lizzie and Sarah. It is unlikely that any of the big comedy phenomena of recent times – from Little Britain to Miranda to Catherine Tate; the ones your parents and even grandparents can quote at you – would be the same had French and Saunders not paved the way.

Queens of the comedy world ... sinking Titanic for the 1998 Christmas special. Photograph: BBC

To me, they were pop stars. Although the show officially ran for 20 years, from 1987 to 2007, there were just seven series. I recorded their mid-90s episodes on to VHS and watched them over and over until the tapes wore thin, memorising whole sketches word for word, wondering how they managed to make falling over so funny. It was their spoofs of pop culture that first hooked me, specifically the one in which Saunders dressed as Axl Rose, deflating the pompous Guns N’ Roses video for November Rain. These parodies remain among their most popular sketches, though the best ones are often far weirder.

Everything, from high art to low, was fair game. They did their own black-and-white take on an Ingmar Bergman film that mostly revolved around tea, biscuits and death. (“Look, the best thing is if we just get through it,” says Saunders. “We can pretend to understand it then read a book about it later.” “Make us a symbolic cup of tea, would you?” replies French.)

They reimagined the Crawford-Davis dynamic for themselves in Whatever Happened to Baby Dawn, and used Misery to mock their critics, with Saunders attempting to branch out on her own. (“You’ll just have to go back to what you do best – writing comedy with both of us in that just isn’t that funny,” snaps French.) And I’m not saying Aziz Ansari is a British sketch-show aficionado, but Master of None’s Bicycle Thieves homage was not the first time classic Italian cinema has been played for laughs; French and Saunders did Fellini in 1996.



All at sea ... French and Saunders do Baywatch in 1996. Photograph: Alamy

They took on Baywatch; wafty period drama The House of Eliot (reimagined as The House of Idiot); and Joan and Jackie Collins in the outrageously flamboyant Lucky Bitches, which, with its unsparing use of leopard print, managed to make them even camper than the real thing. French and Saunders were always at their best when they were fundamentally silly, and their delight in ridiculousness found a perfect match on the art scene. Muriel and Maddie, their version of Gilbert and George, has only grown funnier with age (“We. Don’t. Eat. Meat!”), while their music spoofs relied on the same kind of absurdity that led to the unforgettable spectacle of Dawn French dressed up as Björk riding on the back of a truck attempting to swallow an egg whole.

The duo had a knack for tangling surrealism with observational humour, something that hit the mark most often when they played at being teenagers. They were schoolgirls taking pills together for the first time, though they turned out to be Tic Tacs and only made them mintily sway to the Home and Away theme. One of their most famous sketches saw the duo on a school trip, storming to the back of the bus and eating their lunch before they had even set off. Their bravado was popped at the end when, after shoplifting from the gift shop, they were crestfallen at being left behind. There’s a similar pathos to be found in their fond-ish evisceration of ballet training: “We just don’t think eating is very clever, or aesthetic.”

French and Saunders’s legacy has a kind of cosy sheen now that’s only partially deserved. It’s due to their softer later series, and the fact that the pair have simply been doing it for so long. But there were always sharp teeth in their welcoming smiles. They sent up the New York standup comedy scene with French as a Sandra Bernhard-esque comic screaming at the audience: “Get outta the pool!” (perhaps an early precursor to the Twitter insult “Get in the sea”).

Bette Davis sighs ... Whatever Happened to Baby Dawn? (1990). Photograph: BBC

Their parody of an aggressively rude radio host had Saunders asking French’s foreign correspondent how she handled the shortage of food in Beirut (“Paint a picture of how a person like you would cope in that kind of situation,” she trilled, slyly). They did shiny, happy breakfast TV with a grinning ruthlessness. “This morning after nine, I’m going to be looking at some ‘women’s things’, plumbings and waterworks …” smiles French as the patronising host. “And also some poor people who are naturally ashamed of their condition. We’ll be dressing them up in rich people’s clothes for the day before we send them back to their miserable lives.”

But for all their sharp edges, what made French and Saunders so special was their sheer, unbounded silliness – and that’s probably what made them divisive. In her book Me. You. A Diary, French recalls receiving the news that they had been given their first TV show. “Thank you Jimmy Moir the head of entertainment at the BBC in the 80s … who explained that although he didn’t personally get what was funny about French and Saunders, clearly enough other people did, so he was prepared to ‘put my dick on the table’ and give us our own series.”

Dick aside, where it belongs, that incident shows that, even then, people didn’t always get them. Plenty of viewers will never find French and Saunders funny but then, plenty of viewers will never find falling over funny, and the two hardly ever remained on their feet for a whole episode. Silly jokes are rarely treated with the same kind of reverence as, say, dark humour or satire, and that’s a shame, because surreal, joyful silliness is what French and Saunders have always done best.

30 Years of French and Saunders is on BBC1 over Christmas

Six of the best

A half-dozen of French and Saunders’ finest moments

Björk Hates Normality

Big time surreality ... Dawn French as Björk. Photograph: BBC

Björk is hardly lacking in spoofable qualities, but this combination of Big Time Sensuality, It’s Oh So Quiet and a quick trip around Iceland, the supermarket – “Why can’t I buy anything fresh?” – made for one of the duo’s very best musical skits.

Nibbles

Biting satire ... the Nibbles sketch.

“Help yourself to nibbles … I’ll show you around the nibbles myself, actually.” The suburban dinner party of nightmares builds on brilliantly precise details only to inevitably fall apart in a frantic and hilarious disintegration.



In Bed With French and Saunders

Material girls ... In Bed With French and Saunders.

The pair have had a career-long fascination with Madonna, and Jennifer Saunders has had a career-long fascination with Dawn French’s bosom; this B&W documentary spoof finally brought the two together.

The School Trip

Bad education ... the School Trip sketch.

From the tonic water with “this much brandy in it” to the inappropriate footwear to the furtive fag breaks (“Do you inhale?”), this sketch distilled everything that’s ludicrous about teenage life into six minutes of perfection.

The Original Absolutely Fabulous sketch

Monsoon season ... the original Absolutely Fabulous sketch. Photograph: Screengrab

“Come down and share a joint with us later!”: French was Saffy to Saunders’s too-cool-for-school mum in this early sketch, laying the foundations for the Ab Fab phenomenon that would later emerge.

The Shopping Channel

Wind in their sales ... the Shopping Channel sketch. Photograph: Screengrab

The F&S Channel saw the pair dressed in boxy pastels attempting to hawk emerald-ique, antique-ique, and chunky earrings with a semi-solid matching quality necklace, and may be responsible for a generation’s casual use of the word “diamonique”.