French With Rips
PRESENTER is jolly and English and knows full well what is going on, which is why he is so determined to prevent it happening in front of an audience. JACQUES and MONIQUE are stereotypical French and dressed appropriately, even down to his beret and her slit skirt. Maybe even an onion or two.
PRESENTER: Hello, and welcome to lesson three in our new modern language series French Without Rips. Today my wife Monica and our next-door neighbour Jake are going to show you a scene typical of appartements all over la belle France.
MONIQUE: Bonjour, je m’appelle Monique.
PRESENTER: Good day. I call myself Monica.
MONIQUE: J’attends Jacques.
PRESENTER: I am waiting for Jake.
MONIQUE: Jacques est très long. (holds hands eight inches apart and winks)
PRESENTER: Jake is very tall.
(knock on door)
MONIQUE: Tiens! Le voilà!
PRESENTER: Hold it! There he is!
(enter JACQUES)
MONIQUE: (meltingly) Jacques…
PRESENTER: (ultra dry) Jake.
JACQUES: (hornily) Monique…
PRESENTER: Monica, old girl.
MONIQUE: Je vois que ta bite est déjà s-i-i-i lo-o-o-ng.
PRESENTER: Long time no see.
MONIQUE: Entre-moi vite, Jacques.
PRESENTER: Come in, Jake, and wipe your feet.
JACQUES: (embracing her) Ah, tu es belle.
PRESENTER: Ah, was that the bell?
JACQUES: (to PRESENTER) Non!
PRESENTER: Might have been, I’ll just pop out and have a look shall I? Won’t be a second.
MONIQUE: (breaking away, teasing) Ah, tu es méchant.
PRESENTER: I believe you’re a merchant of some kind.
JACQUES: Mais non, je suis homme d’affaires.
PRESENTER: No, I’m a fairy.
JACQUES: (to PRESENTER) Non. (to MONIQUE) Oui.
PRESENTER: And a schizophrenic.
(brief pause)
MONIQUE: (new tack. Starts rubbing herself suggestively, or undoing buttons) Je suis très chaude aujourd-hui.
PRESENTER: Clement weather we’ve been having.
JACQUES: Oui, je le vois bien.
PRESENTER: Yes, so good for the grapes, don’t you think?
MONIQUE: Tu veux me déshabiller toute nue?
PRESENTER: Please take my clothes off – (JACQUES can’t believe his luck and goes for it) – they don’t suit you.
JACQUES: (foiled) Ah merde!
PRESENTER: Oh dash-it.
JACQUES: (new ploy) J’aime bien tes – meubles.
PRESENTER: (puzzled, but going with it) I like your – furniture.
MONIQUE: (catching on) Merci, et dans ma chamber se trouve un grand lit.
PRESENTER: Thank you, and in my bedroom I have a big – (damn) – chest of drawers.
JACQUES: (savagely) Un lit mou et confortable?
PRESENTER: A soft and comfortable – chest of drawers.
MONIQUE: Énorme et séduisant comme ma poitrine (her breasts).
PRESENTER: Norman said it was like my jumper.
JACQUES: (to PRESENTER) Quoi?
PRESENTER: (smug) Black.
(slight pause)
MONIQUE: Mais regarde, j’ai aussi une chaise américaine.
PRESENTER: But look, I also have an American chair.
JACQUES: Et une armoire espagnol.
PRESENTER: And a Spanish wardrobe.
MONIQUE: Une table chinoise.
PRESENTER: A Chinese table. (this is going great)
JACQUES: Et sur la table chinoise –
PRESENTER: And on the Chinese table –
MONIQUE: Une lettre française.
PRESENTER: (smug) A glass of whisky.
(pause)
JACQUES: Est-ce que c’est pour moi?
PRESENTER: (oh shit) Is it for me?
MONIQUE: Oui.
PRESENTER: But Jacques, you’re a recovering alcoholic, you’d better not, or who knows where it might lead?
(the other TWO look daggers at him. PRESENTER gives a beatific smile, having won again)
MONIQUE: (upping the ante, rubbing her chest) Mon coeur est en flammes.
PRESENTER: I think I’m getting heartburn.
JACQUES: Va te coucher sur le lit.
PRESENTER: Go and lie down on the – (sod it) – chest of drawers…
(JACQUES and MONIQUE rush offstage, ie, into the bedroom, while the PRESENTER, his eye to the keyhole, continues stoically to mistranslate their dialogue as it filters through)
JACQUES: Ah, je l’aime sur ce lit!
PRESENTER: I like it on this chest of drawers.
MONIQUE: Comme tu es dur, Jacques.
PRESENTER: You’re such a hard man, Jake, I don’t know why I have you in the house.
JACQUES: Ah, chérie…
PRESENTER: (inspiration) Ah, have you got any sherry?
MONIQUE: Mon amour!
PRESENTER: No, no more.
JACQUES: Tu me veux, chérie?
PRESENTER: Are you sure you haven’t got any sherry?
MONIQUE: Viens, viens!
PRESENTER: Come on, let’s go back into the sitting room, you’re getting all excited over nothing.
(MONIQUE and JACQUES reappear, angrily adjusting their dress)
MONIQUE: Viens, chéri, nous allons le faire chez toi.
PRESENTER: I know, let’s go to the fair.
JACQUES: Oui, c’est une bonne idée.
PRESENTER: Yes, it is a fine day for it.
JACQUES: (gesturing rudely at PRESENTER) Et va te faire foutre.
PRESENTER: And afterwards we can have a game of football. (hastily, as they dash off) And next week, we’ll find out just what they got up to at the fair – as if we didn’t know – Come back here, you filthy pair of guttersnipes… (he runs off in pursuit)
PS
You can’t say you speak a language well until you know at least a few off-colour idioms, and this is sadly not the sort of thing they teach you in books. You have to go off-piste to find this stuff out. At school, what we used to do was corner the French or German teaching assistants they sent over sometimes and get them to spill the beans behind the bike sheds, as it were. It certainly pays to know your onions when teaching foreigners. I once had a job in a summer school teaching English as a Foreign Language to a bunch of rich, bored French and Swiss sixth formers. At one point I was trying to din into them how adding an E to the end of a word can change its pronunciation. So I wrote the word ‘bit’ on the blackboard. “A piece,” I explained, “or a small part of something.” “Un morceau, quoi?” they replied. “Oui,” I agreed. (I’m not saying I had a flawless technique as a TEFL teacher.) Then, to indicate how the sound of the vowel could change depending on the spelling, I added an E to make ‘bite’, and these bastards started sniggering. It took me a moment to catch on, and then I realised what the problem was: to all intents and purposes these French kids had just watched their teacher write the word ‘cock’ on the blackboard. The only thing to do to get them back onside was to spend the next half hour writing out every obscenity I knew. The mimes we swapped trying to reach a consensus on what these all meant were both hilarious and disgusting. From a professional point of view it was no doubt completely unconscionable. But on the other hand, how else were they going to learn?
So all the French in this sketch is correct, even down to the filthy slang, and in performance in Edinburgh we were lucky enough to have a proper French speaker playing Monique. Joanna H was, like me, a Mod Langs student but, unlike me, she ended up with a First. Michael W, who played Jacques in this sketch, not only achieved a double first in History at Cambridge but went on to become a Labour MP, served three years as Minister of State for Justice, and in the 2010 Dissolution Honours was awarded a life peerage. And I once wrote the word ‘cock’ in French on a blackboard. Funny the different journeys life takes us on, isn’t it?
“Un lit, mou et confortable…” Joanna H, Michael W and Dave E. Those splendid ladies in the front row seem to be au fait.