Posted: Sun Mar 23, 2008 4:08 pm Post subject: Adrian Edmondson
Ade Edmondson plays a not so Young One in Teenage Kicks
Bruce Dessau
22/03/2008
It is a bright, crisp morning in a pub in West London and Adrian Edmondson is looking dapper in jeans and plush drape coat. The 51-year-old could easily pass for, ooh, 49, which is fortunate, as this is the age that he is supposed to be in his new sitcom, Teenage Kicks. “Ah yes,” he sighs and sucks in his tummy. “I think I can carry off playing someone a bit younger.”
The comedian, who made his name as the head-banging Vyvyan in The Young Ones, has come full circle. More than a quarter of a century on, he is back living in student digs, this time as Vernon, an ageing punk who moves in with his undergraduate son and daughter when his wife leaves him. A crucial difference, of course, is that the students in Teenage Kicks are nothing like the undergrads at Vyvyan's Scumbag College, circa 1982. Edmondson sips his tea and gets misty-eyed. “They seem a lot less exciting than in my day. There is not the kind of freedom we had when we were paid to have fun at the Government's expense.” The Young Ones almost wrote itself. “We were grotesque versions of ourselves. I was a bit of a drunk, Rik Mayall was a pretentious wannabe radical, Nigel Planer was a hippy...”
Edmondson continued to have fun after leaving Manchester University as part of the pioneering alternative comedy spearhead. Earlier this year he made a tabloid splash when he talked about his cocaine use, saying that Jennifer Saunders told him to stop taking it because it was making him “act like a tit”. It was way in the past, he explains. “It was actually before we were married. I wasn't even that wild. I wasn't an addict, it was just what you did.”
There are no more drugs and he has even cut back on the beer, though he has not opted for a cardigan and slippers just yet. “It's trying not to be fat that alters your lifestyle the most. I'm not a social drinker, I'm a social event drinker. If it's someone's birthday I get trashed and have a bloody brilliant time.” He once drove into a Soho lamppost and still has a grudge against the West End. “I kicked a taxi the other day in Old Compton Street,” he says with a hint of pride.
So is Vernon just Vyvyan with less hair and more belly? “No, he is actually much more me now. Vernon is very Rock Against Racism, the kind of lefty who proved his credentials by living in a squat with a blocked toilet but went home to his parents in God-alming at weekends to have a poo.”
The idea for Teenage Kicks came from Edmondson's time in the Fame Academy house in 2005, when he was finally forced to realise that he was no longer one of the kids. “I mistakenly thought I was being groovy with the young people. Then I discovered that behind my back they called me �uncle'. I realised there is no way you can be mates with young people. It's like my kids (Ella, 22, Beattie, 20, Freya, 17) think that there is no way I could know anything about youth culture but I think that I invented it.” Reality TV made him face harsh realities. “I threw away my motorcycle leathers. I accepted I was never going to have a 32-inch waist again.”
Teenage Kicks is hardly revolutionary - it is ITV, after all - but it does tap into the modern predicament of adults refusing to grow up. Could he ever imagine his father, a teacher in the Armed Forces, going to see the Clash? “He wouldn't even let us have Radio 2 on in the car. I left a Led Zeppelin album out once and he left a note saying: �Yes, but what does it all mean?' I don't think my dad ever had a pair of jeans. It was all Marks & Spencer slacks in his day.”
After a life in showbiz, Edmondson, who also appears in Holby City as the maverick surgeon Abra Durant, is mellowing just a little. He certainly likes himself more. “I used to be an arrogant t***. I'm a lot more tolerant, but within me there is a rage that sometimes comes out.” Back to the taxi-kicking again. Anything to do with boarding school? “Yes, that kind of deep psychological wounding scars. You don't have to go much further back than that.”
As a result of his upbringing he was a very hands-on parent. “I think of all the things I've done, being a father is what I've tried to be the most successful at.” His two oldest daughters recently left home and he and Saunders have filled the void by returning to London (keeping their Devon farm for weekends) and throwing themselves into work. “I really miss them, since they left home it's been miserable. One week there were chats around the table, the next week there was no one there.”
While Saunders is winding down her performing partnership with Dawn French on their current farewell tour, Edmondson got there first, splitting reasonably amicably with Rik Mayall in 2003. He just wanted to move on. “It's not that I'm not proud of our work together, I just didn't want to do so many w**k gags any more.”
Maybe he really is finally acting his age. Then again maybe not. “We've got a plan that if we both survive into our late sixties we will play a couple of bastards in an old people's home. There are so many things there to hit each other with - Zimmer frames, walking sticks - it could be really funny.”
While he waits for decrepitude, would he ever consider writing with his wife? “No. A lot of comedy writing is about resolving one's own issues and I don't think that it would be right in a marital partnership. In comedy you chew the cud over who you are and pull things out of that, and I think it would be exposing too much. Look at John Cleese and Connie Booth. They wrote Fawlty Towers and then divorced.”
Our year of hell: Adrian Edmondson on the anguish of struggling to help his wife Jennifer Saunders through her cancer ordeal While his wife Jennifer Saunders has been enduring a 'brutal' course of treatment for breast cancer over the past year, Adrian Edmondson has been desperately trying to support her and their three daughters. And the hardest part, he reveals here, is how helpless he feels.
Rebecca Hardy
23rd October 2010
Ade Edmondson wants to get something off his chest. No one, he says, 'battles' cancer. Neither is it 'a rollercoaster ride'. 'It's just a long, slow, miserable grind,' and he wants me to quote him on that verbatim. Oh, and while he's at it, no, his wife Jennifer Saunders, who is suffering with breast cancer, has not been given the all-clear.
'No one gets the all-clear,' he says. 'The treatment lasts five years and we're only a year into it. The big chemotherapy's finished and the radiotherapy's finished. There's this low-level treatment that carries on for five years, but you know from the beginning of the treatment when it's going to stop. So, there is no battle. I hate the word battle. You just get battered with a load of drugs. People want the words "trauma", "battle" and " life-changing", but it's not a great three-part TV drama full of moments, it's a long grind, like a slow car crash that will last five years and then, hopefully, we'll get out.'
Jennifer, the brilliant creator of Absolutely Fabulous, was diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago, but neither she nor Ade have spoken about it publicly. Indeed, Jennifer, 52, says she never will. Ade doesn't really want to either. But he's sick to the back teeth of the nonsense that has been written, particularly reports that his wife has 'won her battle' and is 'cured'. He wishes like hell she was.
'Something like 140 women a day learn that they've got breast cancer,' he says. 'If they knew more about the disease, rather than having to read all this nonsense about battles, then they'd be able to accept what they're in for and be better prepared to face it. I personally know five people who have had breast cancer and it's just miserable. It happens slowly. You don't suddenly ring someone up and say: "I've got cancer. I'm going to die." You ring up and say: "They've found a shadow. I've got to go and have another test."
'It's hard to bolster someone and say: "You're looking great today," when their hair's falling out. It's hard to convince them they do look great, even though they do to you. You don't find out the worst until...' he pauses. 'They find a shadow in a picture. Then people look at it a bit more. They test it and say: "We think it's this. We'd better do another test. They grab a bit and think it might be bad so you might have to have a bit of radiotherapy. It's all very incremental.'
Ade was on tour with his folk band, The Bad Shepherds, when Jennifer phoned to tell him that doctors had found a shadow on her breast during a routine mammogram last October. Tests eventually revealed the shadow to be several malignant lumps, so Jennifer was started upon a 'brutal' course of chemotherapy. She lost her hair and, at times, her sense of humour; she felt wretched, sick. Ade, 53, and their three daughters Ella, 24, Beattie, 23, and Freya, 20, tried to be supportive. But it wasn't always an easy undertaking.
'It was horrible for her and for us, because it's very hard to support someone and make them feel better through that misery,' says Ade. 'It's hard to keep them cheerful. She tried to stay positive, but it's hard to bolster someone and say: "You're looking great today," when their hair's falling out. It's hard to convince them they do look great, even though they do to you. But neither of us ever really thought death was a likely prospect. They were quite small lumps and were of a certain grade - and the prognosis was very, very good from the start. It's just that the amount of treatment grew as they found slightly different grades of this or that. So, no, we weren't blubbing, thinking: "Oh no, she's going to die."
'I've had other friends die. I know what dying is. This was just a really inconvenient, horrible kind of treatment. It was a miserable business and extremely undignified.'
Brutal treatment: Adrian Edmondson with his wife Jennifer Saunders, who is suffering from breast cancer
I first met Adrian almost a decade ago and I know that he absolutely adores Jennifer, his wife of 25 years. Indeed, the last time we spoke, he said: 'The nightmare scenario is, what would happen if Jennifer divorced me?' I'm sure he never imagined this. 'You do have time in between all the tests and treatment to imagine the worst, the best and the in-between,' he says. 'Of course, you think of everything.'
Jennifer's cancer finally became public in July when she attended her close friend Tracey Emin's 47th birthday party in the south of France without a wig. 'She just decided it was so fucking boring putting a wig and hat on the whole time,' says Ade. 'And it was really, really hot. She had also got used to what she looked like. By that time she had some hair back and wasn't as bald as she had been. She looked lovely, didn't she? It was a nice soft way for it to come out - and we were so used to it by then. It's a bit like trying to get a series on the telly. By the time it gets there everyone is surprised, but you think you've been working on this for years.'
Ade doesn't intend to be glib, but he's said all he's going to about his wife's cancer. We're actually here to talk about the ITV series Monte Carlo Or Bust, in which he heads off across the channel with Jack Dee in a VW camper van competing with Jodie Kidd, Julian Clary, Penny Smith and Rory McGrath to discover what makes the French tick.
Close family: Ade with Jennifer and their newly-married daughter Ella
Ade's not supposed to tell me who won, but let's just say he's looking rather pleased with himself. He's also looking astonishingly fit. It turns out that this several-bottles-of-wine-a-night comedian is on the wagon. And no, he tells me, it's not because Jennifer's 'battle with cancer' has been 'life-changing'.
'My daughter [Ella] got married last weekend. I didn't want to look like a porker walking down the aisle,' he says. 'I stopped drinking about two months ago - not entirely, but I stopped it being my main hobby. You reach an age where you have to make a decision: am I going to be a slightly chubby-faced person who feels ill in the morning, or am I going to wake up thinking: "Hey!"
'I don't think I was an alky, but I was just drinking too much and having fun doing it. It's when you have children that you start drinking. You have that large gin and tonic when you put them in the bath - which is large enough for your weekly allowance. Then, when you've got them to bed, you uncork a bottle of wine. Match Of The Day comes on and you crack open another. That would make you an alcoholic in the eyes of the medical profession, but it's just regular living for most people. And then, well, you know I've got a band?'
I didn't until he tells me this. The last time we met two years ago he'd found a new writing partner, Nigel Smith, after ending his long partnership with Rik Mayall - with whom he appeared in The Young Ones and early 1990s sitcom Bottom - and was firing on all cylinders having written the ITV1 comedy series Teenage Kicks. It wasn't re-commissioned.
'The band started as a hobby,' he says. 'Now it's a big hobby. We do about 100 gigs a year. It feels like it did when Rik and I started because you're doing what you enjoy doing, you're able to keep doing it and eventually it becomes your job. Touring is a nice way to earn a living. Our family's always been very close. We didn't need cancer to know we all love each other. The girls have always been there, but they did come round a lot more and were a great help'
People pay to come through the door to see you and you get a cut off that. There's no advertising revenue, no BBC licence fee, no Arts Council. It's just a clean deal.' Which seems to suit him.
He tells me he doesn't want to sound like an 'old git' but he's had it with telly. Jennifer, who is currently writing the script for Mamma Mia! producer Judy Craymer's Spice Girls musical, seems to have, too. 'She's having a ball,' he says. 'Who would write for telly when it's so bloody difficult. She was hot property when she was doing Ab Fab - although that wouldn't get made these days - but was treated very badly over her WI sitcom, Jam And Jerusalem.
'They kept on changing the slot - moving it from an hour to half-an-hour. She was bending over backwards to make it work, then it was: "Can we have the same again but cheaper? Do you have to have everyone in every episode?" The audience was still growing despite all this, and then it got cancelled.
'Writing for telly is mind-numbingly humiliating and undignified. You're never told anything. You feel like a naughty schoolboy. At the BBC things get made and broadcast, but no one tells you if it's liked or disliked. I don't have the patience any more to come in and out of the door of executive TV land. It's a blur of idiots.
'When we first made The Young Ones there was only one person who had to say yes or no. Now you have to go through about ten people, and because they're changing channels so quickly, the executives are all just whizzing around trying to make a name for themselves. They hate anything that anyone who was there before had going. They have no interest in TV at all. They're all career people.'
A while ago, I suspect, discussing his TV nightmares would have sent him flying off the handle, or spiralling into one of his 'gloomy' moods. But he doesn't really do gloom any more. And although he'd probably be furious with me for saying it, I suspect his wife's cancer has had its part to play, in making him keep things in proportion.
Not remotely funny: Ade wishes there was something he could do to take the misery away from his wife's suffering
And one mustn't ignore the importance of his daughters, either. After being sent to boarding school himself at the age of 11, he was determined their childhoods should be different to his, so he pretty much built his life around them when not touring.
The last time we met, the girls were leaving home and Ade was missing them desperately. He said it was like 'a bereavement' and, yes, it made him sad. So he and Jennifer, whom he met in the early 1980s when they were both working at the Comedy Store in London, began to spend less time in the family's 400-year-old home in Devon and more in London, until the 'miserable grind' of cancer intervened.
'Our family's always been very close,' says Ade. 'I don't think we needed cancer to know we all love each other. The children have always been there, but they did come round a lot more and were a great help.
'It's weird the thing that happens with sisters. Between the ages of eight and 14, they're giving each other the evils at breakfast, but by the time they get into their late teens they generally get on with each other. It's a lot nicer.
'I do still miss the girls. I miss the ordinary things: cups of tea and sticky buns after school - just sitting round the table, chewing the fat and bitching about their teachers. But it's a lot better now than it used to be. You find yourself useful in other ways.
'I suppose we all want to feel important - that's the thing. When you have a little baby, of course you're the most important thing in the world to them. When you leave the room they cry and that's lovely. But when they grow up and are able to choose who they like, then you've got to fight for them a bit more. They leave home at 18, then return and find out you're not as bad as they thought you were.'
Which takes us back to his daughter's wedding. 'It was a cracker. We had it at home in Devon with about 200 people. It was very happy. There's also this idea that there might be grandchildren, which we'd like some of.
'It was the best wedding I've ever been to. I drank a steamboat full of liquor and my speech descended into a blubbery mess. I made myself cry and I made everybody else cry, by telling the truth in a beautiful way.'
Then he looks up from his lunch and says: 'I do hope you'll quote what I've said about cancer. When you have it, you actually feel quite well. It's the chemotherapy that knocks you out and that's just brutal. You're hooked up to drips and things for three or four hours once a week.
'It wasn't remotely funny - there isn't even any black humour in the situation. It's just grinding. It's horrible. And, the hardest thing was, there's nothing I could do to take that misery away from her.'
The big interview: Adrian Edmondson
28 March 2011
yorkshirepost.co.uk
BRADFORD-BORN Adrian Edmondson presents a new ITV series on the Yorkshire Dales. As he returns home, he tells Grace Hammond why Rik Mayall is the man to thank for his journey of rediscovery.
Adrian Edmondson is many things. Alternative comedian, who, along with Rik Mayall, Alexi Sayle and Ben Elton, caused Mary Whitehouse many a sleepless night during the 1980s; husband of Jennifer Saunders; punk revivalist with his band, The Bad Shepherds, but champion of the countryside? It seems unlikely.
However, the next time Edmondson appears on television it will be as presenter of a new series on the Yorkshire Dales. From the remote village of Ravenseat, in the north of the county, where shepherdess Amanda Owen runs a 2,000-acre farm with her husband, Clive, to Hardraw Scar and the biggest brass band concert for miles, Edmondson pulls on his walking boots to tell the stories of the people who make the place tick. He’s even invested in a flat cap for the occasion.
While Edmondson recognises he may not be a man instantly associated with rural issues, the programme was something of a homecoming. The second of four children, Edmondson was born in Bradford, and while with a father who worked as a teacher for the Armed Forces he spent a lot of his early life on Army and RAF bases in Cyprus, Bahrain and Uganda. In between postings the family came back to Britain, returning to their home in West Yorkshire.
“I remember the buildings were all covered in thick, black soot; as a child, I never thought they were ‘dirty’; I thought they were just naturally black. It wasn’t until the big clean-up campaigns started (long after I’d left the area) that the natural beauty of the York stone was revealed. There are some magnificent buildings in Bradford – City Hall being the best. We were always told the tower was modelled on one in Florence, and it has a very different feel to a lot of municipal buildings.”
While Edmondson left Yorkshire to study drama at Manchester University, where he first met his long-time comedy partner, Mayall, at 54 he still looks back fondly on his childhood and the freedom he was allowed.
“There were still trolley buses when I was at school, and it used to cost me one old penny to get the trolley bus to school. I remember life as a kid being very different to the way it is today. I’d get home from school and I’d go straight out of the door again. There was a bit of disused land behind our house, full of craters, which kept my friends and I happy for hours and hours. If we weren’t there, we’d go up to the recreation ground and play cricket or football. We had a lot more freedom than the kids do these days; there was no fear and nothing much on the television.”
While the industrial skyline of Bradford provided the backdrop for much of his childhood, with open green space just a short drive away, the family regularly ventured out into the countryside and his memories of that time are unashamedly idyllic.
“My parents were very keen on days out and picnics. We spent a lot of our time visiting Bolton Abbey and Aysgarth Falls, and we used to walk across Ilkley Moor about once a week. As I got older, my dad and I would leave my mother, my older sister and my younger brothers behind and go for a romp around Malham Tarn, I remember going to the pub in Malham afterwards where we’d have... a pint of milk. The Dales is also like a geography text book. I spent a lot of time going there on school field trips. As I got into my mid-teens, the Dales became a regular spot for me and my mates to go camping/hiking/chasing girls/trying to get served in pubs...”
While London is his main base, Edmondson has spent much of his marriage to Saunders, with whom he has three daughters, Eleanor, Beatrice and Freya, in Dartmoor. He first fell in love with the area when he was cementing his trademark for violent slapstick in The Young Ones and filmed various Comic Strip Presents... on Dartmoor, and when the cameras stopped rolling, Edmondson couldn’t have been less like his anarchic alter-egos. He may never have made it as a gentleman farmer, but he gave it a good go.
“I still have a home in Dartmoor. We filmed a lot of the early Comic Strip Presents... series down there and developed an affinity with the place, and eventually just moved there full time, so I’m no stranger to country living. In fact, I even went as far as to own a few cows and sheep. I must say though, I do also like the city, and when my children grew up and left home we started spending more time in London again. Most people either prefer you to be one or the other, but I’ve always enjoyed both. I love arriving in the country – the fresh air, being able to see the horizon and the pitch black at night – but then I love arriving in the city with the noise, the bustle, the excitement. I’m lucky to be able to enjoy both.”
With his own family life based in the south of England and the demands of television work, Edmondson admits he gradually lost touch with the county of his birth and only became reacquainted with it by chance when he was out on the road with Mayall and the pair became desperate for an antidote to an endless series of anonymous hotel rooms.
“I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been to the Dales with my family; in fact, it’s a place I lost touch with for a long time. It wasn’t until touring with Rik that I eventually rediscovered it. We did a lot of touring in the ’90s and early 2000s. Touring generally consists of travelling from city to city, doing the gigs, and holing up in your hotel in-between. After 10 years of it, I got a bit bored of being stuck in my hotel and started renting cars and driving out into the surrounding countryside of whichever town I was in. I remember being in Leeds and driving out into the Dales – it was a revelation; everything seemed new and somehow part of my memory at the same time. We’ve all seen the calendars showing the long vistas broken up with dry stone walls, but once you’re actually in the view, it all seems much bigger and more dramatic.”
When he was approached to front The Dales, the 12-part series which begins on ITV next week, Edmondson grabbed the opportunity, partly to dig a little deeper into the memories of his own childhood and partly because it gave him the chance to again dip his toe in the water of documentary making.
“I was glad of the opportunity to go and have a good look at the Dales, which seems silly I know, because I could have gone at any time. I also wanted to explore the idea of documentary film making. I’d done a couple of documentaries before, with Comic Relief, but it was something I’ve wanted to have a go at for a long time. It sounds glib to say I’m fascinated by people, but I am, and I really loved the idea of being able to ask people about their lives. If you go up to people in other circumstances and start asking them about their lives, you can easily be mistaken for being ‘a bit weird’. I’ve written a lot of stuff over the years, comedies mostly, but understanding motives and behaviour has always intrigued me. This series gave me the opportunity to explore that.”
Certainly his time in the Dales provided him with a rich resource of material. Aside from the Owens and their five children – the youngest of whom was only four weeks old when the film crew arrived – Edmondson also follows the fortunes of farmer Alex Wilkes preparing some of her cows to compete in the Great Yorkshire Show, Tom Orde-Powlett, manager of Bolton Castle, in Wensleydale, as he tries to reintroduce falconry displays and a wild boar park to the historic attraction, and the Reverend Ann Chapman, who runs four rural churches in the Dales and is a woman forever saddled with the title, the real Vicar of Dibley.
“I really loved Amanda Owen – the shepherdess I met out in the wilds of Ravenseat. She’s a terrific person, endlessly popping out babies in the remotest part of the Dales and running a sheep farm with her husband – she’s living her own dream. To some of us her dream might seem like hard work and not much fun, but she loves every minute of it, and it was great to be in the presence of someone with that kind of spirit. Remote communities, isolated farms, lush green valleys and limestone pavements – it’s a landscape that challenges the people who live and work there, but it’s the warm spirit of the people who live there that keeps the heart of the Dales beating.”
The series may have its focus on people, but even when there was no-one else around, Edmondson found much to absorb his interest.
“There are lots of ‘hotspots’ in the Dales – places where everyone goes, like Aysgarth Falls or Grassington, and although they are undeniably beautiful, there’s something else that I find more brilliant, and that is the light. The extraordinary thing is how the weather and the light change the landscape; you hardly need to move around at all. If you stay in the same place, the Dales will change around you. I remember being on the top of the Buttertubs Pass in a thick fog – suddenly, a small tunnel cleared, and down this clear tunnel we could see a village in the distance, lit up in brilliant sunshine. It was like a Whistler painting.”
It’s been a few months since Edmondson was in the Dales, and he has kept himself busy playing with his folk/punk band The Bad Shepherds, and The Idiot Bastard, a comedy band, with Phill Jupitus and Neil Innes. It’s almost 15 years since he last went on tour with Mayall with the stage show, Bottom, and while he’s often asked, he has repeatedly dismissed any idea of a reunion, going so far to say that he has quit the comedy game. Instead, he says he’s working with Jack Dee – with whom he teamed up for Monte Carlo or Bust, which saw various celebrities travelling round France in search of objects which summed up the heart, mind and stomach of the country – on a couple of ideas for documentaries. For a man equally as comfortable in the city as he is the countryside, Edmondson’s own personal highlight of the series, an industrial feat of engineering set in one of the Dales’ most dramatic locations, should perhaps come as no surprise.
“The Ribblehead Viaduct is one of the most stunning pieces of architecture, only matched by its extraordinary location. It looks like something not from this world – like a special CGI effect for a movie. While we were there filming the sun kept going in and out, and the shadow play on the arches was ethereal and magical, like being in a giant cathedral.”
• The Dales starts on ITV on Monday, March 28, at 8pm.
YOUNG Ones veterans Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall are working on a new sitcom - set in an old people's home. The anarchic comedy duo are promising to do for geriatrics what they did for students - with a show that's just as violent, slapstick and gross as their 80s classic.
Cult hit The Young Ones, about four anarchic undergraduates, also starred Nigel Planer and Christopher Ryan - and now TV bosses hope the new show will bring them all back together. Adrian, 54, told TV Biz: "Rik and I have an idea for a sitcom for when we are very, very old. We want to set it in an old people's home 30 years hence. It will be like Bottom, but we will be hitting each other with colostomy bags!"
Adrian and Rik, 53, created award-winning sitcom Bottom about two flatmates on the dole after The Young Ones ended. They then went their separate ways for eight years, but were recently reunited on BBC1's Let's Dance for Comic Relief. Ade got to the finals with his version of the Dying Swan - which ended up being beaten to death by Rik. Now they're ready to write again - and it sounds like their ideas are just as crazy as ever.
Last night a top TV source said: "It's a genius idea to have Rik and Ade playing anarchic old fogeys. Fans and telly bosses would love to get Nigel and Christopher involved too. But they could need persuading."
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