Daily Mail
22 November 2003

This joke isn’t funny any more

After a 20-year comedy partnership with Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson has had enough - because he’s finally realised it’s time to grow up.
By Rebecca Hardy

Adrian Edmondson is bored with infantile jokes, bored with touring, bored with his old friend Rik Mayall. Together, the former university pals invented youth culture and grew filthy rich on their raucous alter-egos, such as the psychotic students Vyvyan and Rik in The Young Ones.

Now, after two decades, five tours of the stage version of the TV series Bottom, a film and another television series together, Edmondson, 46, wants to end this enduring, astonishing partnership. ‘We’re bored with each other,’ he says. ‘I think it’s time we stopped. You start to lack dignity when you reach a certain age and you’re still doing the kind of stuff I’m doing - the Bottom stuff. Rik knows I want to stop, but we haven’t really spoken about it.

‘Rik and I seem so opposite these days. He’s much more concerned about work and he’s got no hobbies. He’s only got his job. I’ve got my hobbies and my job takes a back seat. We don’t tend to talk about it. When we’re together we just sit and eat. Rik doesn’t drink any more, which makes him a rather dull drinking companion. I like getting drunk at home.’

I meet Edmondson at a Sheffield hotel, where he is staying while touring with the current Bottom stage show. He loathes being on tour, preferring to be with his wife Jennifer Saunders and three teenage children at their 400-year-old farmhouse in a remote corner of Devon, where he has a well-stocked wine cellar and likes to drink port.

They moved from London to the country three years ago. It was a decision made in five minutes. Edmondson now has 45 acres, four cows, a flock of sheep and a tractor. He wants to be there now.

‘The fun is down there,’ he says. ‘Privately, Jennifer and I don’t fulfil the perception people have of comedians. Deep down we’re quite conventional. Jennifer would much rather be a gardener and I would be much happier if I were a farmer. We have such a different relationship to what people probably imagine. We have a real relationship.

‘We sit and watch the football. We cook. We walk. We go and find mushrooms. It’s alarmingly dull. The only thing these tours do to our relationship is make me want to be at home with her more, because I miss her. I feel a lot more angst-ridden on tour, because I have to fill 22 hours a day with sleep, terrible food and hotels full of people in shiny plastic suits.

‘It’s just like treading water, trying to stay alive to the end. I’ve always found tours difficult. I don’t like being away from home. This tour is the last one I’m going to do with Rik.’

Adrian Edmondson is a nice, easy-going man, quite different from the raucous roles that made him famous. He steadfastly maintains that he and Mayall haven’t fallen out - they’ve just changed. Five years ago, Mayall had an accident while riding his quad bike at his Devon home, not far from Edmondson’s farm. He suffered a brain haemorrhage. The fear at first was that he would never recover and Edmondson made daily trips to the hospital.

Mayall continues to suffer epileptic fits and needs to take drugs to stop the convulsions, which make him sleepy. ‘It’s not really because of that,’ says Edmondson. ‘Rik was always a bit a twit. It’s more to do with me. You start to become more selfish as you get older.

I find the stuff I do with Rik easy. We’re probably better at it than we’ve ever been, but I’d do it with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back. There’s no challenge any more. I believe this is the right time to stop. It’s about this notion of dignity.’

Indeed, Edmondson is definitely growing up. He likes to tend his land, plant trees, work with his hands and loathes today’s youth culture of casual sex and reality TV. ‘I feel saddened and ashamed when I listen to the radio and hear people like Sara Cox and Chris the ginger-haired person - which I do while driving the kids to the school bus,’ he says. ‘The filth they get away with at that time in the morning with cars full of eight- to 15-year-olds is shameful.

‘I think: “I don’t want to know who you nearly slept with last night or that you had a drink last night.” It’s like these people on reality TV. Where do they live? I’m sure my kids are drinking and doing whatever teenagers do, but they’re not that leery with it. All the BBC is interested in is reality TV these days. It’s getting out of hand. All they’re looking for is people falling to pieces.

‘It’s a case of, “We’ll show you people who are even worse than you. We’ll dig, dig, dig until we find someone who is stupid enough to open up completely and destroy themselves on television. Can you cry now? Can you have a nervous breakdown?”

‘That’s all they want to screen on television these days - nervous breakdowns, gardening, cookery programmes. They’re so scared of doing anything different that they sat on The Office for about 18 months, wondering whether to show it or not. They just didn’t think it was funny. They’re all just scared - scared executives - and they know it.

‘What television really needs is some people with character and courage who don’t mind messing up in an effort to change things.’

Not so long ago, Edmondson was regarded as rather shocking himself. He says he started to grow weary of his work with Mayall at about the time he realised he was a grown-up.

‘There was a definite revelation two or three years ago when I realised I wasn’t a teenager any more,’ he says. ‘I’d been part of youth culture for a really long time and I began to think I needed to make a dignified retreat. The attitude of my own children played its part. You suddenly remember what you thought of your own parents when you were a teenager. You thought they were old and that they couldn’t possibly have sex together.

‘I just began to glean that that’s what my children thought of me. You hear them talking about teachers at school. “Oh, Mrs Green, she’s ancient.” And you think, “She’s not old. She’s 32. They must think I’m like a grandfather.”‘

Edmondson was not much older than his 17-year-old daughter, Freya, is now when he first teamed up with Mayall at Manchester University. He went there from Pocklington, a minor Yorkshire public school, which he detested.

‘I remember realising very quickly that we’d been the same people at separate schools,’ he says. ‘We’d done the same plays. Our mothers had sent us away with the same M&S dressing gown and we had identical record collections. We had the same infantile views of naughtiness about smoking and drinking, which is hard to credit these days.’

At university, Edmondson married a psychology student called Anna. ‘The marriage was just two 19-year-olds who thought they loved each other and made an over dramatic gesture. We got married and then got unmarried. I can’t imagine she’d have wanted it to continue - it wasn’t particularly happy. We were completely incompatible.

‘I was lonely in terms of emotional love. I had a group of male friends, but males don’t really love each other. Rik and I don’t love each other. We have a complicated relationship. It’s like the relationship you have with a brother. It’s a very primal bond, which is taken for granted in the way a lot of sibling relationships are. You eventually realise you’re tied to each other, so you bicker and you like each other in equal amounts. It’s easier than loving each other.’

He does, though, love Jennifer Saunders. He calls her his ‘rock’ and says he’s lonely when he is without her. They first met in the early 1980s when both were working at the Comedy Store in London, later joining forces with like-minded comedians at the Comic Strip. ‘When we were at the Comic Strip we used to drink before we went on. It wasn’t about being naughty, it was just doing what you liked. Rik and I were doing something that not many people had done before and there’s no doubt we were very good.

‘We were supremely arrogant. When you’re hot, and people are laughing at you for the right reasons, you do feel fantastically elated. The fact is, we didn’t really care. We spent most of our days in the pub, from opening until closing time. There was a real sense of freedom. We partied like middle-class boys.

‘Most of us had done rubbish day jobs before, and finally we were doing what we’d always wanted to do - drink a lot and not conform. Now we’re much more professional, which is very dull.’

Edmondson married Jennifer in 1985. ‘It was a long, slow burn,’ he says. ‘She’s gorgeous and we just kind of share things. She’s very nice to be close to. We’ve never had a single row, which doesn’t mean we don’t disagree - we just don’t argue.’

He was 29 when their first child, Freya, was born, followed soon after by Beattie, 16, and Ella, 13. ‘It’s very hard being groovy parents,’ he says. ‘At every school our kids have been to, we’ve always felt like the youngest parents there. I don’t know if it’s because we haven’t given in to tweeds and twin sets. I just can’t take any of it seriously.

‘At parents’ evenings I always think, “I’m just that idiot from the telly and they know it.” Then there are the coffee mornings - this idea that you have to bake something and go round to a parent’s house for a coffee and buy a cake for 10p to make £15 towards a new school bus.

‘So you waste a morning baking a cake and a morning going to the coffee morning for the sake of £15. I tend to think, “We’re all rich. Why don’t we just buy the school bus?”‘

Indeed, Edmondson’s partnership with Mayall has made him rich - very rich - although not quite as ab-fabulously wealthy as his wife. ‘I remember when I had my first £5,000 - that was a terrifically rich feeling,’ he says. ‘It was at a time that the average salary was about £5,000 a year and I had that much in the bank. I must have been in my early 20s and I took out £2,000 in cash to buy a car. It was a Peugeot 104, but it went fast.

‘Now I’ve got this sex icon, comedy goddess wife who earns a shed-load of money. People think I should be jealous, which is bizarre. It’s very hard to refute being jealous because it sounds as if I’m not being truthful, but, honestly it really doesn’t worry me. I have no fear of her superior work.

‘I think she writes much funnier comedy than I do. Hers is deeper and truer. I write surrealist slapstick and she writes about fundamental truths. I help by facilitating the world around her when she’s writing, by making sure there’s nothing getting in her way.

‘I absolutely hate Sting, but a title of one of his songs often occurs to me in moments when I’m feeling bitter. “If you love somebody, set them free.” It’s a fantastic notion. The only way to keep someone is to give them as much room as possible to fulfil themselves. Not that our life is full of beautiful beaming smiles and arranging flowers. I have those moods when I suddenly feel anxious. I just feel jittery about wasting my life. I know I’m not doing that, because I can list my achievements, but I can waste days.

‘You know the school reports that always said, “Could do better.” That’s me. I was obviously bright at one point - I was awarded a scholarship for my school. But sometimes I think I just messed it all up.

‘It’s about dignity and the fact that I feel that, at the moment, I’m approaching a stage where I could appear undignified if I carry on with what I’m doing. Bands like the Rolling Stones begin to lack dignity because they’re pretending to be young for too long.

‘Rik and I have always had this fear that somebody’s going to stand up at the back of a show and shout in a very loud Brian Blessed type of voice, “You’re not a comedian.” I’d have to stick my hand up and say, “No, I’m not. I’m pretending to be one.”

‘I always wanted to be an actor and fell into comedy. I can’t ever remember wanting to be anything else. Since moving to Devon, I’ve been in a play in the local theatre in Exeter [The Life And Times Of Young Bob Scallion] and that’s reawakened the desire in me.

‘I’ve got a new series coming out in January called Doctors And Nurses - a bit Carry On Nursing with a satirical, M.A.S.H. content. There’s pathos in it. It’s dangerous. I can tell it’s not ever going to be as exciting as when The Young Ones appeared - it can’t be - but it’s just as challenging to me. It fills me with a nervous excitement.

‘I think Rik and I have now reached an age where the next stage is still a few years down the line. There’s probably a great sitcom for us in about 20 years about a couple of grumpy old men in an old folks’ home. We’ve always known that and talked about it, but for now it’s time to stop.’

The Bottom tour runs until Dec 13; tel.. 0870 011 2626. The video and DVD are out on Monday.