In the interests of complete candour, I should reveal that Dawn French and I have had ‘beef’ (and how suitable that word is, as we were both beefy at the time) for decades. Since 1994, to be precise, when she made a television documentary on ‘Big Women’. She asked me to appear in it; I refused; she put my name repeatedly on the credits. What a way to celebrate porkers – by calling someone a porker!
I was merely chubby at the time, being a good 5’9 in my prime (I’ve shrunk a bit with age and disability) whereas she was only 5 foot and maybe 19 stone at her ‘peak’. Also, I really like thin girls (I eloped from my second marriage with a perfect 10 the following year) and having been one in my youth saw them as sisters under the un-stretched skin. Whereas French – a supposed feminist – once said: ‘As far as I’m concerned there are two types of women, the ones who like chocolate and complete bitches.’ Later, in the 21st century, I got really fat, and a magazine printed a photo of Jabba the Hutt saying it was me. I laughed.
A lot of SlimFast has gone under the bridge since then. I’m a shadow of my former self – Ozempic, then disability – and so is French, who has lost a whopping seven stone, through ‘walking’ and ‘calorie-counting’ – in the sole interests of health, allegedly, and nothing to do with aesthetics. Maybe she’d actually be better off on the semaglutide, because then you don’t even fancy food, whereas as it is, she seems what is popularly called ‘hangry’.
