When we meet for lunch, Adrian Edmondson has spent most of the last five months in Thailand, filming a television series based on the Foreigner Movies. He needs a sense of home, so he’s picked a stand-in before he heads to the real restaurant in Devon this evening. We’re at the Arlington, Jeremy King’s new, converted former favourite Le Caprice in London’s St James’s. Edmondson used to frequent the original restaurant, long before King was forced out of his restaurant group and had to rebuild it.
“What happened to Jeremy was terrible,” says Edmondson. “He’s such a good man. I loved every place he ran, the Wolseley, Fischer’s, but especially this one. All brasseries, not too fussy. I avoid Michelin stars, I always think of them as over-the-top food. I want the 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 cakes.
He and his wife Jennifer Saunders “came here when we were new – is that what you call it? – at least when we could afford it. It was a cool place. Rod Stewart might be sitting 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 plays a supporting role in Edmondson’s hilarious and emotional memoir. Berserker!named after his Viking surname, and his general frame of mind as a young comedian and actor. There’s a poignant section, for example, about how he discovered the possibility of eating out for the first time after moving to London.
“I discovered a whole different palette of tastes,” he says. “I grew up with sardine and tomato sandwiches and eggs and chips. No condiments, not even mustard. Then suddenly there were all these other options.” In contrast to the limited culinary ambitions of his characters Vyvyan in The young or Eddie in Belowhe became an excellent home cook (winner of the Celebrity MasterChef and second in Hell’s Kitchento Linda Evans, Krystle Carrington from dynasty). He laughs. “I showed my mother how to make spaghetti bolognese. And the next time I was there, she served it – but she had used bay leaves instead of basil, and I had about 12 of them on the plate. It tasted like tea bags.”
This scene is emblematic of some of the larger themes of his book, the story of a life spent rebelling against a loveless and alienating childhood. He mentions seeing his mother play the piano once, a few rousing tunes, but only once. His father was a Yorkshire schoolmaster who worked abroad, in Cyprus and Uganda, an angry man whose smile Edmondson barely remembers. He sent Edmondson, unlike his sister and two brothers, to a boarding school in 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 the caning “because I thought it might be funny”; he ended up writing 12,000 words and didn’t find nearly as many laughs in the memories as he had imagined. “But it was like I’d finally won,” he says of the process. “I was happier afterward.”
When he thought about his own parenting style – he and Saunders have three grown daughters – he had a perfect guide, he says. “I just thought: What would Dad do? And I would do the opposite.”
That feeling fuelled his career too. It’s hard to imagine Fred Edmondson approving of his son appearing on the BBC every week, breaking furniture and making fart jokes. Edmondson had a few enduring heroes: Viv Stanshall, the anarchic leader of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and Johnny Rotten.
“I have a very beautiful portrait of (Johnny) in my study,” he says. “From 1976. He looks like an angel, in Vivienne Westwood. I always adored him. I always bought that butter because he did the advert. We were skiing in Squaw Valley in California once and I looked down and there was this guy in an orange jumpsuit who was obviously having a lot of trouble in the snow. And it was Johnny with his wife. I thought maybe he had nothing to do with skiing. But I guess you can’t be angry 24 hours a day.”
That understanding is actually the triumph of Edmondson’s own career. He had to conquer some demons – including intrusive suicidal thoughts, which, he was surprised to discover, not everyone had. He was saved – and thrived – as an actor and writer by the two great love stories of his life. The most enduring is with Saunders.
They kept fame at bay, he says, partly by living on the edge of Dartmoor most of the time. He tells how one of their daughters came home from school one day looking quite distraught. The children in the playground had insisted that her mother was the famous Jennifer Saunders from the TV, and she had insisted that no, she was Jennifer Edmondson. Her mother had finally had to admit that it was her.
The other, perhaps more complicated love story was and is that with his long-time comedic partner Rik Mayall. On his most recent Desert Island DiscsEdmondson was moved to tears as he recalled writing to Rik’s mother after Mayall’s death in 2014. She wrote back to him saying how much she cherished the memory of the two of them in those early days, sitting on deckchairs in their garden, “just laughing and laughing and laughing”.
He remembers that now. “If you can’t make each other laugh as a duo, it’s dead from the start,” he says. He loved the tension they could build between themselves, the inner drama of all duos, starting with Laurel and Hardy. “I once did a one-man play at the Soho Theatre,” he says. “It was so lonely. I can’t tell you.”
He says that sometimes late at night, when he is flipping through the TV channels and comes across Dave or Comedy Central, he is confronted with their previous work. He can’t really The young“It all seems a bit painful,” but with Below he will always stay until the end “and just enjoy it as a punter”.
Their partnership was never the same after Mayall suffered head injuries in a near-fatal quad bike accident in 1998. Over the years, however, there were efforts to get back together and write together. Shortly before Mayall’s death, the BBC commissioned her to write Hooligans Islanda sequel to BelowBut alarm bells started ringing when Mayall began obsessively counting the laugh lines each of them had. Edmondson withdrew from the show. “I don’t think we ever argued,” he says. “But it changed. Things got thinner.”
In some ways, the huge success of his work with Mayall got in the way of other ambitions – he has only recently started getting the acting roles he was trained for – but he has no regrets. Their shared creativity broke the straitjacket of his childhood in unexpected ways. Their shared love of Waiting for Godot – they performed it together in the West End in 1991 – is one example. “I still read it quite regularly,” says Edmondson. “In fact, I’m waiting for a response from Radio 4 to a proposal to do a play called Waiting for Waiting for Godotabout four actors who were supposed to perform the play on the night the theatres were closed because of Covid. Radio 4 makes its own comments…”
Of course, he and Mayall emphasized Beckett’s comedy at the expense of the play’s darker elements. One of their gifts as performers was a frontal assault on English cultural solemnity.
“It’s damned everywhere,” he says. “When I War and Peace We were filming in St. Petersburg and Greta Scacchi and I were watching a Russian version of a Chekhov play. The British versions had taught us to see it as a kind of sad costume drama. What we weren’t prepared for was the bursts of laughter in the theater. Everyone was shitting their pants. The sadness was hilarious.”
At 67, Edmondson is determined to keep that anarchic spirit in his life. He toured for many years with his punky folk band, the Bad Shepherds, but he has hung up his mandolin for now to concentrate on writing and acting. He dreams of hobbies. “I’d like to join the church choir – even though I don’t go to church. I’d like to be a bell ringer. I also have a desire to be a Morris dancer…”
That’s what old berserkers do.
Berserker! is now available in paperback (Pan, £10.99)
