Quick Take
- Narration: Dawn French narrates her own material alongside the absent-but-present Jennifer Saunders dynamic, and the result is exactly what you’d want, two old friends talking across a mic with absolute ease and zero performance anxiety.
- Themes: Female friendship, comedy as survival, the absurdity of ordinary life
- Mood: Warm, raucous, and oddly comforting
- Verdict: If you’ve listened to the earlier series, this one delivers everything you came back for and then some, the extended final episode alone is worth the price of admission.
I put Series 4 of Titting About on during a long drive home on a Friday evening, windows down, with absolutely no plan to pay close attention. Forty minutes later I was laughing so hard at the bit about Jennifer’s sleep dreams involving compromised toilets that I had to pull over. That is the Dawn and Jennifer effect, completely disarming, completely themselves, and entirely incapable of pretension.
The podcast format suits these two in a way that stage or screen never quite could. There’s no audience to perform for, no camera angle to consider. It’s just Dawn and Jennifer in a studio with, as the synopsis cheerfully notes, an even bigger range of in-studio snacks. And from that relaxed foundation comes something that feels genuinely rare in entertainment: two people who are funny simply by existing near each other.
Why the Studio Format Finally Fits Them
French and Saunders built their reputation on sketch comedy, on playing characters, on building elaborate parodies of pop culture. What Titting About reveals, across four series and now confirmed emphatically in this fourth, is that their real gift is something more intimate. The chemistry that made their sketch work land was never really about the writing; it was always about two people who find each other genuinely, helplessly funny.
In the paranormal episode, Dawn tries to demonstrate ESP by guessing what vegetable Jennifer has drawn. It should be a throwaway bit. It becomes something much funnier than most scripted comedy manages because neither of them can keep it together, and the failure is the point. The bird cafe conversation in Episode 1 follows a similar logic, it starts as a discussion of garden fauna and spirals into something that defies summary. You just have to be there.
What Six Episodes Actually Cover
The six episodes here range across life faff, embarrassment, showbiz mythology, the paranormal, personal highs and lows, and a final extended episode that uses the lens of each decade they’ve lived through to look back at the whole shape of their friendship and careers. That final episode is the best thing in the series. Accepting a BAFTA Fellowship purely to gain access to the free toilets is the kind of detail that only Dawn French would share with total sincerity, and it tells you more about her than any profile piece could.
The embarrassment episode works particularly well because both women are willing to go somewhere genuinely uncomfortable. Falling off a cliff and being too ashamed to ask for help isn’t obviously funny material, and yet in Jennifer’s hands it becomes something between slapstick and confession. Dawn’s contribution, farting during a massage, operates on a different register entirely, which is itself part of what makes them work as a pair.
The One Review and What It Suggests
There is currently only one listener review for this audiobook, and it rates the series a five and calls it the best yet, noting that their timing appears effortless. The word effortless is accurate but worth unpacking. Dawn and Jennifer have been doing this together for more than four decades. The ease you hear is earned, it comes from a friendship that has survived the full weight of professional success, personal grief, and the particular strangeness of being famous women who grew up in public. What sounds like effortlessness is actually something closer to trust.
At three hours and ten minutes, the runtime is brisk enough that you can finish it in a single long drive or afternoon session. But I’d suggest pacing yourself. Spread the episodes out over a week and let each one settle. The decades episode especially deserves the space to breathe.
Who Gets the Most Out of This
Listeners who have followed Dawn and Jennifer since the television years will find specific pleasures here that newcomers won’t quite access, the Nigel Havers martini at the Palladium hits differently if you remember the cultural moment that name evokes. But the podcast works perfectly well as a starting point too. If you’ve never heard Titting About before, you don’t need the back catalog. Start here, enjoy it, then go back.
What this series is not: a structured retrospective, a comedy masterclass, or a vehicle for promoting anything. It’s two women in their sixties with long, full, complicated careers talking about bagpipes and sleep dreams and the franglais mishaps that happen when you try to speak a language you don’t actually speak. The pleasure is precisely in that smallness. Not every listen needs to be ambitious. Sometimes it just needs to be this.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to have listened to Series 1 through 3 before starting Series 4?
No prior listening is required. The podcast has no continuous narrative, each episode is self-contained conversation. That said, returning listeners will pick up on callbacks and running jokes from earlier series, so there’s an added layer of enjoyment if you’ve heard the previous three.
How does the extended final episode differ from the standard episodes?
Episode 6 is longer than the other five and uses the structure of each decade of Dawn and Jennifer’s lives as a framing device, making it the most reflective and personal episode in the series. It works as a kind of informal career retrospective while remaining firmly in the podcast’s conversational tone.
The synopsis mentions strong language and adult content, how significant is that?
The language is casual rather than aggressive, and the adult content is mostly frank discussion of bodily functions and embarrassing experiences. It’s the kind of content that would make a parent cover a ten-year-old’s ears but won’t shock anyone over sixteen.
Is Dawn French performing solo here, or does Jennifer Saunders also narrate?
Both Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders appear in the audio, the Audible listing credits Dawn as narrator, but the podcast format features both women in conversation throughout. It’s a genuine dual-voice listen, not a solo performance.
