1 of 3 | Dawn French stars in the new comedy, “Can You Keep a Secret?” premiering Thursday. Photo courtesy of Paramount+
NEW YORK, Feb. 12 (UPI) — The Vicar of Dibley icon Dawn French — one half of the comedy duo French and Saunders — is back on television Thursday with the hilarious new series, Can You Keep a Secret?
Streaming on Paramount+, the show stars French as Debbie, a lower middle-class woman who doesn’t try too hard to correct the life insurance company that mistakenly declares her husband William (Mark Heap) dead and issues a huge payout to her family.
Problem is, William, a loner who suffers from Parkinson‘s disease, is actually still alive, so Debbie throws a funeral for him, then keeps him hidden in their loft, only telling their horrified son Harold (Craig Roberts) the truth months into the scheme.
The sitcom was created by Simon Mayhew-Archer, the son of Dibley scribe Paul Mayhew-Archer, who lives with Parkinson’s in real life and served as an adviser on Can You Keep a Secret?
“Over the last 15 years, we have watched what’s happened to [Simon’s] dad, who honestly couldn’t be more cheerful about having Parkinson’s. He’s hilarious about it,” French, 68, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
“I’m not taking away from the fact that it’s a challenge for him, because it certainly is. But he’s taken a show to Edinburgh about it. He has a podcast. He’s written gags because he can’t stop himself from writing jokes,” she said. “But, along with that, comes the massive unfairness and the injustice of what happens with insurance companies when you’ve got Parkinson’s Disease. It seems that, in the small print, it’s left out.”
The show’s fictional story was inspired by the Mayhew-Archer family’s experiences, as well as the true-crime case of John and Anne Darwin, a British couple convicted of fraud in 2008 after they faked John’s death in a canoeing mishap and enjoyed a nice life paid for by insurance money they were not entitled to.
“This curious thing happens to this odd little family. It drops into Debbie’s lap,” French said about the comedy series.
“She doesn’t go looking to be kind of massively fraudulent. But, a couple of things happen. He’s mistakenly pronounced dead and then she goes to the undertaker to kind of own up to it,” French explained.
“But there’s a series of stupid events there and it’s when the undertaker says: ‘Make sure you get lots of copies of death certificate. You’ll need them for the insurance,’ that triggers that sort of self-righteous part of her — or just the righteous part of her — that thinks this is unfair. She just thinks, ‘Well, actually, we could get the money we have paid in after all.’ And she manages to frame it like that for herself. And I think we all know people like that.”
Although no one would accuse Debbie of being overly nurturing as a matriarch, she does see this as an opportunity to help her family.
“She completely believes that she’s right,” French said. “She’s domineering. She’s not a natural mum, but she loves her family and they function in this massively dysfunctional way.”
French said that William and Debbie had a fairly normal relationship, complete with fights, before they faked his death.
“There’s a sexual attraction, most definitely, and I love that. I love that Simon is unafraid to write people who talk about it far too much, all the way into their late 60s and 70s,” she added.
“I like how that embarrasses the son. They’re massively inappropriate, but they do love each other. They’ve been together a long time and I don’t think she’s joking when she says, ‘Look, if you died, who’d really miss you, except us?'”
The character is a departure from Geraldine Granger, the gregarious village minister she played in Dibley, a comedy created by Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral writer Richard Curtis that ran from 1994 to 2000 and remains popular in re-runs.
French also has occasionally revived the character over the years for Red Nose Day telethon mini-episodes and she recorded a few uplifting videos as Geraldine during the COVID pandemic lock-downs of 2020-21 when people revisited the show for comfort or discovered it anew in a time of uncertainty and isolation.
One of these pandemic-era videos allowed Geraldine to emotionally address the death of the beloved character Alice, whose portrayer Emma Chambers died in 2018 at the age of 53.
“As Geraldine, I was able to celebrate Alice after Emma had died,” French recalled.
“It took a lot of takes. Let’s put it that way. We were all in bits, but Richard wrote the most beautiful eulogy, really, to her, and because we all knew her and loved her, and by that time, we’d lost a few people [in the cast], it was kind of heartwarming,” she added. “But you can only do that if you’ve earned the respect of people over the years.”
French said fans of the show have likened it to “a big, warm hug” about “a very decent person” in the center of a “mad group of people.”
Because of her character’s religious background, viewers have asked her to exorcise demons from their houses and to perform wedding services.
“Bonkers, bonkers!” she said.
French noted that because there is so much good will towards it, though, the show’s cast and writers got to be as bold and naughty as they wanted to be.
“It’s a massively cheeky show,” she laughed.
The actress — who has appeared in the Harry Potter franchise and TV series Murder Most Horrid, Larkrise to Candleford and The Trouble with Maggie Cole — also starred in the sketch-comedy series, French and Saunders, with Absolutely Fabulous star/creator Jennifer Saunders from 1987 to 2007.
The pair also played uncharacteristically serious roles in the 2022 Agatha Christie mystery, Death on the Nile.
“Jennifer and I were friends first. We shared a flat together and we love each other very much and, so, really, working together all these years has just been a way to play, to have time with my mate,” she said.
“But, sketches are a young person’s game because when you’re younger, you can pretend to be older. It’s more difficult when you’re older to pretend to be younger,” French said. “Plus, it’s really hard work playing plenty of those characters a week.”
Instead, they now co-host a podcast called Titting About.
“We sit down and just go through various bits and bobs,” French said.
“We’re always talking about things we’d like to do and then we just don’t get on with it. We just forget about it until the next time we see each other. More important than any work is our friendship and, so, really, we just want to carry on being in each other’s lives and, if that involves work, great,” she added. “We love the bones of each other.”
