Whilst promoting ‘The Life And Times Of Young Bob Scallion’, Adrian was interviewed by The Daily Mail.

Confessions of Mr Ab Fab

I’m happy for my wife to make millions but I’m fed up ironing and cooking dinner!

Adrian Edmondson invented lad culture. As Eddie in the television comedy Bottom, he became - along with his old friend Rik Mayall - the patron saint of putrid living. But The Young Ones have grown middle-aged, and Edmondson, now 46, has swapped festering bedsits for an Archers’ lifestyle.

Not long ago, he and his wife, Jennifer Saunders, sold their £2 million Richmond home to live permanently in a 400-year-old farmhouse in a remote corner of Devon.

Last year, Edmondson bought himself four cows and a flock of sheep, all rare breeds, to graze his 45 acres. His transport is a tractor, and he comes to London, which he finds filthy, as infrequently as possible. ‘I’ve wanted to work with animals for a long time. You have to have a hobby otherwise you go insane.

‘Most artistes become parodies of themselves because they don’t have anything else to relate to except work. The only world they inhabit is the corridors of the BBC - a totally debilitating frame of reference.’

Edmondson has done well. The success of Mr and Mrs Monsoon, the company he and Jennifer own, once prompted him to describe himself as ‘filthy rich’, but now he says more modestly: ‘I’m always surprised by the reported figures. We’ve never had £11 million, but we’re very comfortable.’

So Edmondson can choose his work. He is about to star in a new comedy, entitled The Life And Times Of Young Bob Scallion, at Northcott Theatre, Exeter, a short commute from home. In addition, he has a small part in the new TV series of Jonathan Creek, which begins next month.

By glittering contrast, Jennifer, who said she would never write another series of Absolutely Fabulous, has changed her mind. Soon, she will leave Devon, her husband and their three daughters for the couple’s flat in Kensington, West London, where she will write and work in total solitude.

‘She’s never done a series while we’ve been in Devon. She’ll be in London for eight weeks. It will be good for her. She likes to work late.’

Although there is no resentment on Edmondson’s part, something in his voice suggest this disruption is an arrangement he accepts rather than encourages.

Does he mind being in his wife’s professional shadow? ‘When we go to America, where I’m completely unknown, I become Mr Saunders,’ he says.

‘It’s quite pleasant. I know people want to find some proof of personal pique. The very fact that I deny it convinces them the feeling must be there. But I’m really happy with the fact that Jennifer is a completely successful artiste - and earner,’ he adds quickly.

Though the admiration is genuine, there is some sense that Edmondson’s existence has not been quite as tranquil as he suggests. His professional partner and best friend Rik Mayall came close to death, and his career - once lucrative and diverting - became a long chronicle of non-fulfilment from which he is only just emerging.

Adrian Edmondson is the antithesis of the raucous Visigoth roles that made him famous. He is a nice man; punctual and polite, in keeping with his strict upbringing.

His father Fred, a Yorkshire-man whose bluffness verged on rudeness, was a teacher whose work with the British Forces took him and his wife, Dorothy, to a string of troublespots.

Adrian, the second of four children was one year old when the family left for Cyprus, before moving on to Bahrain and Uganda.

Eventually he was sent back to Pocklington, a minor Yorkshire public school which he detested, before studying drama at Manchester University. There he met Rik Mayall and Ben Elton, who are still his closest friends.

He also got married, to a psychology student called Anna.

‘I think, on my part, it was just a desperate attempt to be loved, and it all went wrong,’ he says.

‘There were no children. The marriage lasted three years, maybe less. We lived in a council flat in Birmingham after we graduated and before we broke up. I haven’t seen her since.’

He met Jennifer Saunders in the early 1980s when both were working at the Comedy Store in London (later joining forces with like-minded comedians to create TV's The Comic Strip), and they married in 1985.

‘It was a slow burn. She had a boyfriend, I had a girlfriend, and we didn’t get together for ages. I think it is a successful marriage. We work hard at it. You have to.

‘That’s what you have to understand about marriage. It isn’t just the first flush of love. You have to get through the period two years on when things aren’t as they were when you first fell in love.’ One presumes that Saunders, feted and busy, can be autocratic when she has to, but he says not.

‘The public and private faces are entirely different. Everyone thinks Jennifer is this whirlwind of dynamic creative talent, but she spends most of her time dead-heading roses. Most of our life is about gardening and shovelling horse muck.

‘The superwoman image is nothing we know about. She becomes very powerful when she’s making her show because she is the central spark and it doesn’t happen without her. But we leave all that aside at home. She’d rather not work and so would I. Wouldn’t everyone?'

But Edmondson does not seem naturally indolent. The energy he put into his early parts looked manic, and his behaviour seemed, at times, hardly less so.

He was almost sent to prison for drink-driving, escaping with a three-year ban instead. Where now he has a well-stocked wine cellar and drinks port, he and Mayall spent their twenties fuelled by danger and strong lager. Both men were older, sober citizens with families - in Edmondson’s case his daughters Ella, now 17, Beattie, 15 and Freya, 12 - when disaster finally caught up with them. Mayall was riding a quad bike at his Devon home, not far from Edmondson’s farm, when he fell and suffered a double brain haemorrhage in April 1998.

The fear at first was that he would never recover. Even now, five years on, Edmondson says Mayall is not quite as he was before.

‘At first it was terribly upsetting and depressing. I didn’t realise how much I liked him. I’m an averagely repressed English male who doesn’t show his feelings, but it was shocking.

‘I made daily trips to the hospital. He was in a coma for five days, and for six more months you didn’t know what you were going to get back.

‘He woke up a baby, really. It was at least a year before he was anything like himself. He had lost all cynicism. He knew who I was, but his memory was bad and he had a very short attention span.

‘Even now he can’t listen to two things at once, or talk on the phone if the radio’s on, because there’s too much stimulus. Head injuries like that take eight years’ recovery time.

‘He’s 99 per cent recovered, but there’s one per cent that isn’t back. That’s due to the pills he takes which make him sleepy. He’s an epileptic now, and has to take medication to stop himself having fits.’ One wonders if this brush with his best friend’s mortality drove Edmondson to buy farmland and fulfil his dream of being a herdsman, but he says he had always planned to slow down.

While that is no doubt true, his career seems full of fractured dreams. Guest House Paradiso, a film he directed with Mayall in the starring role, was not much talked about. A novel, The Gobbler, proved to be a one-off.

‘I keep trying to write another one but it just won’t come. I have three unfinished novels, all four chapters long. I keep attacking them and I get no further. Writing is what I would most like to do. It would fit my lifestyle so well. I don’t know why I keep getting blocked.’

It was some time before he realised that even his stage performances, in his eyes at least, were becoming second rate.

Before one of the regular Bottom tours he does with Mayall (a stage version of the TV show), they tore up half the material and began again. It was only afterwards that he realised how low he had become.

‘I rediscovered the thrill of performing. Everyone goes through the motions at some stage. You’re not being cynical - just unexcited by what you do.’

How long did this disillusion last? ‘Twenty years,’ he says, and although he laughs, there is a sense that he is serious.

Through all his mixed success, Edmondson’s marriage stayed happy and conventional. He considers himself a strict father with a liberal overlay and, in his account, Ab Fab undertones.

‘We’re archetypal groovy parents, which must be annoying. Jennifer and I always were interested in youth culture. Hell, we invented a lot of it.

You can’t become a middle-aged curmudgeon if you were in The Young Ones - though I always stopped the girls seeing Bottom when they were young, so that’s passed them by. You shouldn’t watch that after-the-watershed stuff when you’re ten.’

A dedicated parent, Edmondson also seems to be in charge of household chores.

‘I used to do all the ironing until we got someone in. Jennifer was too lazy. I rebelled recently about the cooking. I’d done it for far too long. How imaginative can you be, week in week out, deciding what to have for tea? So, a year ago Jennifer took over.’

Do they ever row? ‘No, we’re both champion sulkers. We don’t argue. Rowing is too pointless. You can never take anything back, can you? Better to let it simmer, then it passes.’

He thinks now that they will grow older and tidier 'until there are just the two of us left in our armchairs by the fire'.

Next month Adrian Edmondson will open in an unknown play at a provincial theatre, earning a few pounds a week.

Shortly afterwards, Jennifer Saunders will closet herself away from her family to write a glitzy television series that will almost certainly earn her more acclaim and millions.

It is an odd basis for an enduring show business relationship. If, as seems likely, Edmondson’s vision of tranquil old age comes true, it will be because he has no shred of envy for workaholic contemporaries furiously churning out novels and film scripts.

Or if he has, he would never say.