When we meet for lunch, Adrian Edmondson has spent most of the previous five months in Thailand, filming a TV series based on the Alien films. He is in need of a sense of home, so before he heads to the real thing in Devon that evening, he’s chosen a proxy. We’re at Arlington, Jeremy King’s new revamp of his much-loved former restaurant Le Caprice in London’s St James’s. Edmondson used to come to the original, back in the day, long before King was ousted from his restaurant group and had to rebuild.
“It was awful, what happened to Jeremy,” Edmondson says. “He’s such a good man. I loved every place that he ran, the Wolseley, Fischer’s, but particularly here. All brasseries, not too fussy. I avoid Michelin stars, I always think of it as over-fingered food. I want food to be delicious but I don’t want it to be the centre of attention. I don’t want to admire it.” He orders caesar salad and salmon fishcakes.
He and his wife, Jennifer Saunders, “used to come here when we first made it – is that the phrase? – at least when we could afford to come. It was a cool place. Rod Stewart might be in the corner. Or George Melly. And all the mirrors on the walls mean you can look at people without them knowing you’re looking.”
Food has a walk-on part in Edmondson’s cracking, heartfelt memoir, Berserker!, titled for his Viking surname, and his general state of mind as a younger comedian and actor. There is, for example, a poignant section about how he first discovered the possibilities of eating out when he moved to London.
“I discovered a whole different palate of tastes,” he says. “I grew up on pilchard and tomato sandwiches, and egg and chips. No seasoning, not even mustard. Then suddenly there were all these other possibilities.” In contrast to the limited culinary ambitions of his characters Vyvyan in The Young Ones or Eddie in Bottom, he became an excellent home cook (winner of Celebrity MasterChef and runner-up in Hell’s Kitchen, to Linda Evans, Krystle Carrington from Dynasty). He laughs. “I taught my mum how to make spaghetti bolognese. And the next time I went she served it up – but she had used bay leaves rather than basil, and I had about 12 of those on the plate. It tasted like tea bags.”
That scene is emblematic of some of the wider themes of his book, the story of a life in which he rebelled against a loveless and alienating childhood. He notes how he once saw his mother play the piano, a couple of knees-up tunes, but only once. His father was a Yorkshire schoolmaster, who took jobs overseas, in Cyprus and Uganda, an angry man whom Edmondson can hardly recall ever smiling. He sent Edmondson away to boarding school, unlike his sister and two brothers, at Pocklington in Yorkshire where there was a regime of corporal punishment – “grown men hitting boys with sticks”. When he started his book he sat down and wrote about being caned “because I thought it might be funny”; he ended up writing 12,000 words and found not nearly as many laughs in the memories as he imagined. “It was like finally winning, though,” he says of the process. “I was happier afterwards.”
When thinking about his own style of parenting – he and Saunders have three grownup daughters – he had a perfect guide, he suggests. “I would just think – what would Dad do? And I’d do the opposite.”
That sentiment fuelled his career too. It’s hard to imagine that Fred Edmondson would have approved of his son appearing on the BBC every week breaking furniture and making fart jokes. Edmondson had a couple of abiding heroes, Viv Stanshall, anarchic lead of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and Johnny Rotten.
“I’ve got a very beautiful portrait of [Johnny] in my study,” he says. “From 1976. He looks like an angel, wearing Vivienne Westwood. I’ve always idolised him. I used to buy that butter because he did the advert. We once went skiing in Squaw valley in California and I looked down and there was this bloke in an orange jumpsuit, obviously in big trouble on the snow. And it was Johnny with his wife. I assumed he might have no truck with skiing. But I guess you can’t be angry 24 hours a day.”
That understanding is really the triumph of Edmondson’s own career. He had some demons to overcome – including intrusive suicidal thoughts, which he was surprised to discover not everyone had. He has been saved – and thrived – as an actor and writer, by the two great love stories of his life. The abiding one is with Saunders.
They have kept celebrity at bay, he suggests, partly by living most of the time on the edge of Dartmoor. He tells how one of their daughters came home from school one day in some distress. Kids in the playground had been insisting that her mother was the famous Jennifer Saunders off the telly, and she had been insisting that no, she was Jennifer Edmondson. Her mum had to finally own up.
The other, perhaps more complicated, love story was and is with his long-term comedic partner, Rik Mayall. On his recent Desert Island Discs, Edmondson was moved to tears when he recalled how, after Mayall’s death in 2014, he wrote to Rik’s mother. She wrote back to tell him how she treasured a memory of the pair of them in the early days, sitting out on deck chairs in her garden, “just laughing and laughing and laughing”.
He recalls that again now. “If you can’t make each other laugh as a double act, then it’s dead from the start,” he says. He loved the tension they could create between them, the internal drama of all duos going back to Laurel and Hardy. “I did a one-man play once at the Soho Theatre,” he says. “It was so lonely. I can’t tell you.”
He says sometimes late at night when he’s flicking through TV channels and gets to Dave or Comedy Central he finds himself confronted with their earlier work. He can’t really watch The Young Ones, “it all seems a bit torturous”, but with Bottom he will always stay to the end “and just enjoy it as a punter”.
Their partnership was never quite the same after Mayall’s near-fatal quad bike accident in 1998 left him with head injuries; there were efforts over the years to sit down and write together again. Not long before Mayall’s death, the BBC commissioned them to write Hooligan’s Island, a sequel to Bottom. But alarm bells began to ring when Mayall started obsessively counting the laugh lines that each of them had. Edmondson pulled out of the show. “I don’t think we ever fell out,” he says. “But it changed. Things became thinner.”
In some ways the great success of his work with Mayall got in the way of other ambitions – it’s only recently that he has been getting the acting parts he trained for – but he is not regretful. Their shared creativity cracked open the straitjacket of his childhood in unexpected ways. Their mutual love of Waiting for Godot – they played it together in the West End in 1991 – is one example.“I still read it quite regularly,” Edmondson says. “In fact, I’m waiting to hear back from Radio 4 about a proposal to write a play called Waiting for Waiting for Godot, about four actors who were due to perform the play on the evening the theatres were closed for Covid. Radio 4 are umming and ahhing…”
He and Mayall, of course, emphasised Beckett’s comedy at the expense of the bleaker elements of the play. One of their gifts as performers was a full-frontal assault on English cultural solemnity.
“It’s fucking everywhere,” he says. “When I did War and Peace we filmed in St Petersburg and myself and Greta Scacchi went to see a Russian version of a Chekhov play. We had been taught by British versions to think of it as a kind of mournful costume drama. What we weren’t prepared for were the waves of laughter in the theatre. Everyone was pissing themselves. The cod mournfulness was hilarious.”
At 67, Edmondson is determined to keep that anarchic spirit in his life. He toured with his punky folk band, the Bad Shepherds, for many years, but he has hung up his mandolin for the time being to concentrate on writing and acting. He daydreams of hobbies. “I’d quite like to join the church choir – though I don’t go to church. I’d love to be a bellringer. I’ve also a desire to be a Morris dancer …”
It’s what old berserkers do.
Berserker! is out now in paperback (Pan, £10.99)
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