Quick Take
- Narration: Dawn French in full flight, her timing is impeccable and her rendering of the duet’s dynamic within solo narration is an unexpected bonus.
- Themes: celebrity friendship, the comedy of incompetence, aging with irreverence
- Mood: Loose, generous, and reliably funny without needing to try hard
- Verdict: Series 5 is where the format finds its full confidence, the Lucky Bitches finale alone is worth the runtime.
I came to Series 5 after Series 6, which is probably the wrong order but not a problem, and in some ways the better introduction to the format. Where Series 6 occasionally pauses for a kind of self-aware meta-commentary on what they’re doing, Series 5 moves with more uncomplicated ease. It sounds like a show that has found its audience and stopped worrying about justifying itself, which produces a different and in some ways more enjoyable energy.
The premise here is the same: Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders occupying a studio for six episodes, each nominally dedicated to a subject (jobs, survival, art, bad things, luck) and actually dedicated to each other’s company. Series 5 opens with the update on the bet from the previous series, has Jen written the Ab Fab script?, and the answer sets the tone for an episode that is as much about the texture of a long creative partnership as it is about catching up on recent events.
When Jennifer Becomes a Politician and Dawn Regrets Asking
The jobs episode is the standout of the set, and the specific detail that makes it work is the note in the synopsis: Jen is alarmingly convincing as a politician. The comedy here comes from the gap between the persona being performed and the person performing it, Saunders’ ability to embody a certain kind of political authority is funnier in context than it sounds described, because it arrives as a genuine surprise in a show otherwise defined by cheerful incompetence. The moment where the performance becomes too convincing is the kind of organic comedy that no writing room could produce, and it is the example I would use to explain to someone who has never heard the show what makes it different from scripted panel comedy.
The survival episode, nominally about thriving on a desert island, delivers the format in its purest form: two people applying their specific sensibilities to a situation they have clearly never been in and never intend to be in. The advice is useless and confident, which is a reliable combination. Dawn and Jennifer’s approach to surviving in extremis involves the kinds of priorities that reveal a great deal about their respective characters, and the episode earns its place in the series through the quality of the specificity rather than the quality of the survival tips.
The Art Episode and the New York Complication
The synopsis flags it explicitly: this episode contains multiple references to Dawn visiting New York when she was in her early twenties. The detail is included as a warning, and the warning is accurate. The joke, that Dawn cannot reference art without the New York trip surfacing, is the kind of recurring bit that works in live performance and in a show with this much established continuity, because the humor is not in the fact itself but in the certainty that it will surface again. Listeners without the full series context may find it less funny than it sounds.
The episode’s actual content on art, bumping into Gilbert and George in Paris, negotiating for a naked self-portrait, is as pleasurably ill-informed as everything else in the series. The format’s great freedom is that neither participant is required to know anything about the subject under discussion, which liberates them from the responsibility of being actually informative and produces something more entertaining as a result.
Lucky Bitches and the Value of the Finale
The sixth episode is the reason this series sits slightly above Series 6 for me. The decision to close with Dawn and Jennifer recounting the moments in their careers where extraordinary good fortune arrived, singing with the Spice Girls, the Royal Opera House, meeting Dolly Parton, lands differently than a list of achievements would in a memoir or interview context. The specificity of the social catastrophes that accompanied each of these encounters (the fairly major breaches of social etiquette when meeting David Beckham and King Charles) is what makes the episode generous rather than boastful. These are stories about luck told by two people who know that luck is not something you earned.
The runtime, three hours and one minute, is exactly right for what this is. It is not a podcast, not a lecture, not a performance in any formal sense. It is a comedy friendship in audio form, and at this length it does not overstay its welcome or compress itself into something shorter than the material deserves. Come for the Lucky Bitches finale, stay for the politician impression.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Series 5 a better starting point than Series 6 for someone new to Titting About?
Possibly, yes. Series 5 has a slightly more settled energy that makes the format immediately legible, and the Lucky Bitches finale gives a new listener a strong sense of what the show is capable of at its best. Series 6 is equally good but benefits from more accumulated context.
The bet about the Ab Fab script keeps coming up, do you need to know Ab Fab to understand what’s at stake?
Not particularly. Knowing that Ab Fab is one of Jennifer Saunders’ signature achievements adds some texture, but the humor in the bet is about Dawn waiting for Jen to deliver on a promise rather than about the specific content of the work. The comedy functions without the cultural context, though fans of Ab Fab will find an additional layer.
How does the bad things episode handle its subject matter, is it confessional or comedic?
Firmly comedic, though specific. The bad things Dawn and Jennifer confess to, cheating at boardgames, buying pheromones from the internet after being click-baited, are calibrated to be recognizably real without being genuinely damaging. The episode is not a confessional in any meaningful sense; it is two people performing a version of candor that stays well within the bounds of what they are comfortable sharing.
Is the show primarily driven by prepared material or does it feel improvised?
The texture is of improvisation, but the show has clearly been shaped in production. The specific jokes have the quality of things that happened in a recording session rather than being written in advance, but the episode structures and topic choices are clearly deliberate. The result sounds more spontaneous than it is, which is a technical achievement and the main reason it works as audio.
