Adrian Edmondson: ‘We boomers have made an unbelievable mess for our grandchildren'

Telegraph

4 days ago

'It's an interview,' Adrian Edmondson says, giving a sigh of resignation, 'so at some point I always talk about my problems. It always comes out: what kind of person are you…?' It's a reasonable question. First impressions count.
We meet in the restaurant of a hotel in London's West End. Edmondson approaches the table with a wary gait, unassuming and unbothered, dressed in a corduroy jacket and jeans, his hair closely cropped. He offers a quick handshake and sits down, orders a beer, shoots me a guarded look and waits for me to say something.
So what kind of person is Edmondson exactly? He is affable, quick to laugh and make a joke, as you might expect. At the same time, given to thoughtful silences, as if cautious about giving too much of himself away, but, it will later emerge, incapable of hiding his feelings – an open book, albeit one that's difficult to read.
Adrian Edmondson first came to attention in the 1980s – one of the new generation of comedians that included Rik Mayall, Ben Elton and Jennifer Saunders – with The Comic Strip Presents and The Young Ones, in which he played Vyvyan, a fright-haired, heavily metal-studded punk, prone to outbursts of sudden, furious, slapstick violence.
Since then he has been an actor, an author and scriptwriter, a director of pop videos for artists including Elvis Costello and Squeeze, a musician himself with his group the Bad Shepherds, performing a hybrid of punk and folk – a man who has done his best to escape what he describes as 'the historical version of myself'.
He is now starring in Alien: Earth, the latest spin-off from Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction horror, Alien. The series, soon to start on Disney+, is set two years before the events of the original film, when a space vessel carrying a dangerous alien cargo crashes on Earth, which is now governed by competing corporations.
Edmondson plays Atom Eins, the chief executive of one of them, which is owned by a youthful tech genius bent on transforming humanity – which, given Elon Musk 's bid for political power, may sound familiar.
'Yes, depressing how that's turned out,' he says, with a laugh. 'But don't they always say the best sci-fi is really just an examination of the present day? These scripts are more than two years old… and yet it's played out.'
Edmondson's character, he says, is 'half diplomat, half thug. I love playing the heavy. And he's an increasingly heavy character. Frightening – I hope.'
It's difficult to say too much about Alien: Earth. At the time of writing, the production company had only made the first episode of the series available for viewing, 'and they give you so many strictures about talking about things these days', Edmondson points out.
He admits that the fizzing, hi-tech dystopian future depicted in the show makes him nervous. 'I'm having a very hard time with AI,' he says. 'I distrust it absolutely. These people – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs [Jobs died in 2011] – are my age, and they seem to have done something in their garage, while I was listening to Iron Maiden, that might not be for the good of mankind.
'I don't know whether that's just me being crusty, but I'm having a very hard time with it.' He laughs. 'I'm just glad I'm quite old.'
Edmondson is 68 but jokes that he has no idea what age is. He lives in a house with low eaves, he says. 'When I stand at the bathroom sink to clean my teeth, I just see my chest. I never see myself.
'Occasionally I go to the village and see myself full-length in a window and think, 'Who the f--- is that old man following me around?' And it turns out it's me,' he adds. 'But this feels like a very different 68 than the 68 my parents had. And my grandparents were nearly all dead by my age – [they] looked doddery and ancient, like knackered horses.'
Edmondson was born in Bradford, the second of four children. His father was a geography teacher who worked with British forces abroad, and the family lived in Cyprus, Bahrain and Uganda. At 12, Edmondson was sent to a boarding school in Yorkshire, the only child in the family to be sent away – fostering a sense of rejection that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
The absence of love and the ubiquitous presence of violence are prominent themes in his 2023 autobiography, Berserker!. Twelve pages are devoted to accounts of the canings and other punishments meted out by his teachers at boarding school. He once calculated that he'd received a total of 66 strokes of the cane, as well as frequent slipperings.
He also recounts being beaten up on a bus, and the mother of a friend slapping and hitting him, and washing his mouth out with soap for the crime of shouting out 'booby' over and over between bouts of helpless laughter. All of this left him, by his own admission, 'damaged, essentially'. But it also laid the foundations for the comic characters for which he would later become famous.
He studied drama at the University of Manchester, where he met Mayall, the two men thrown together by an improbable mutual love of Laurel and Hardy and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which both had performed in school drama productions. 'We were the only people who thought it was a funny play,' says Edmondson.
They began performing a comic routine as the Dangerous Brothers, which in 1979 led them to the Comedy Store in London, and a group of up-and-coming comedians, including Nigel Planer, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. From that grew The Comic Strip Presents, a series of half-hour films for Channel 4.
At the same time, Edmondson, Mayall, Planer and Christopher Ryan starred in The Young Ones, a sitcom about a group of students enmired in squalor and bickering – which became a cult hit, setting the bar for manically surreal slapstick humour.
Edmondson remembers that at the time of The Young Ones he would walk around Soho, where the Comic Strip team had their offices, and be constantly running into people who saw him as someone to have a fight with.
''I got Vyvyan to punch me in the face' seemed to be the game, although it never got that far,' he says. 'They saw you as the character you played rather than the person you are. I think people always do that. But they can't know who you are. Even I don't know that.'
But you're not, I point out to him, a violent man.
Edmondson was having precisely this conversation recently with the writer Louis de Bernières – he's not trying to name-drop, he says, but de Bernières read his autobiography and related to his account of how he was treated at school, and they met 'to swap notes'.
'We were discussing where the violence came from… but I don't know if it was violence, it was more excitability. I think I filled what I saw as a vacuum where love should have been. I didn't feel loved by anyone, and I filled that vacuum with a hunt for excitement. I think that's what all those characters are about, which is extremes.'
But what is slapstick if it's not violence? 'What are Laurel and Hardy? It's not just very funny, it's very… charming,' says Edmondson. 'The other day I was watching Laurel and Hardy, and my five-year-old granddaughter appeared and I showed it to her. And she watched the whole reel, 20 minutes, laughing away.'
He pauses. 'I think there's a point where violence – I sound like such a w----r – is quite loving.'
Edmondson has spoken in the past of his belief that Laurel and Hardy provided the blueprint for all double acts. 'Morecambe and Wise stole their act from Laurel and Hardy, in a way.' He quotes the Morecambe and Wise routine: 'Two men in the same bed. 'My wife thinks I think more of you than I do of her.' 'Well, you do, don't you?' That thing of two men stuck together is a constant, isn't it?'
Edmondson considers for a moment, before adding: 'Men have a lot of trouble talking to women…' And can have a singular kind of intimacy with each other.
In 1991, Edmondson and Mayall co-starred in a West End production of Waiting for Godot, and the BBC sitcom Bottom, with Edmondson playing 'Edward Elizabeth Hitler' alongside Mayall's 'Richard 'Richie' Richard' – 'two losers', as Edmondson puts it, thrown together by an unspoken pact of neediness and dysfunction.
'Although they fight all the time, Eddie and Richie couldn't survive without each other. If they were alone, the world would be very sad,' he says.
He doubts that The Young Ones or Bottom would be commissioned for TV these days, but not for fear of cancel culture. 'Our personal politics were quite rigorous, and I don't think there are any worrying attitudes,' he says.
'Sometimes people come up to me and say, 'You wouldn't get Bottom on the television these days because of political correctness.' I think you would. We're laughing that these two people think as they do. It's not what we thought ourselves.
'It was always quite difficult with Till Death Us Do Part and Alf Garnett. I used to watch that with my dad, and my dad would be laughing with Alf Garnett, and I'd be laughing at him. I don't think you'd get that on television now.'
The reason Bottom would not be commissioned, he says, is because these days there's virtually no scripted comedy, apart from sitcoms such as the BBC's Mrs Brown's Boys and Not Going Out, to be found on television at all.
If he wants to laugh, he says, he'll watch Have I Got News For You and Would I Lie To You?. 'And if we're really at a loss, if we've tried yet another box set and haven't got through the first episode because it's so boring, we'll slam on Seinfeld, because it's always funny.'
His collaboration with Mayall writing Bottom was 'the best of times', he says, 'just sitting in a room together writing, just making each other laugh. We'd keep on going until we made each other laugh, and just wrote those bits down.'
Bottom ran for three series on BBC Two between 1991 and 1995, and there were five stage show tours between 1993 and 2003 – at the end of which, says Edmondson, the act was looking 'a bit desperate' and he was ready to move on to other things.
It was a decision Mayall never quite understood, and the friendship grew strained. In 2013 they attempted to revive the writing partnership with a spin-off from Bottom, Hooligan's Island, but it came to nothing.
The following year, Mayall died from a heart attack at 56. Edmondson's friendship with Mayall is the subject every interview inevitably returns to, and he has long grown weary of talking about it.
'If this is just an article about me and Rik,' he says at one point, 'I'll be so bored. I have as-meaningful relationships with other men now – not ones I formed since he died but ones I formed before.
'I know it's easy to look back on our history and think it must have been for ever, but our fertile period was only 20 years…' – he pauses – '…which is quite a long time.'
I don't want to play the amateur psychologist, I say. 'No, do,' he jokes. 'It's cheaper…' But I get the sense he's always been somebody who's emotionally very vulnerable. 'Yes. I would say that,' he agrees. 'I cry too much. I cry in happiness. I cry in despair. Sadness.'
He pauses again. 'It's a very complicated world, isn't it? Especially when you've got kids and everything they bring. Nothing makes you quite as unhappy as when your child is unhappy. I think that's pretty true.'
Edmondson has five grandchildren, 'and sometimes I think we've f----d the whole thing up for them. Our generation in particular, the boomers – we've f----d it up.
'We've had the best of it. The best of the NHS, the best music. We had all the trimmings,' he continues. 'We've all got our houses, when a house cost three times your earnings. Now it's, like, 27 times your earnings. How did we let it get like that?
'It's unbelievable the f---ing mess we've made. We haven't shared it. Most of us in our generation, I think, are Lefty liberals. Well, the ones I know are.'
Many drifting rightwards, I say. 'Well, I don't know. I've got more vociferously Left.' Despite Keir Starmer, I proffer. 'Yes, well, he's not Left, is he? But this is very similar to Margaret Thatcher's time, isn't it, rather than any Labour government?'
He falls silent and reaches for his beer.
Pessimism always came naturally to Edmondson. He tells the story of a friend, Nigel Smith, with whom he wrote a TV series (it was originally a radio sitcom), Teenage Kicks, in 2008.
'He woke up one morning and his tongue felt fizzy,' he says. 'He rang a doctor friend, who told him to go to the hospital straight away. He was in a coma for a few months. Now he can't swallow, so he has to feed himself through a tube. He has a hard life.
'He writes comedy,' he continues. 'There's a great intimacy you can have in a writing partnership; you can talk about each other. I said to him, 'I don't know if I could be you. I think I'd do myself in.' He said, 'Yes, I know you – glass half empty.''
Edmondson tells me he takes mirtazapine, an antidepressant, each day. 'I'm medicated, is the professional phrase,' he explains. 'It's an anxiety stopper, and it works, actually. I got to the point where my body was just completely full of adrenalin. It felt like I was being frightened by a dog 24 hours a day. But I've come through that now.'
At one point, he also underwent therapy, but soon gave it up. 'He didn't f---ing say anything! He just kept asking questions and never making statements. You've made more statements in this conversation than he ever did – and you're a journalist!'
More helpful was a book about stoicism, Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations, by Jules Evans, a philosopher and policy director at the Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions.
'It was brilliant,' says Edmondson. 'So much so, I barely remember reading it, because it worked. The central message is: you can't control things that are outside your control, so don't worry about those.'
For any actor, he says, insecurity comes with the job. There are times, he says, when he wishes he'd just been a carpenter. 'A proper cabinetmaker – nice furniture. Turn up every morning, do the work, go to the pub, go home – and not have any of the other stuff.'
Stuff? 'Constantly worrying about whether you're going to ever get employed. I don't know any actor who's secure. Maybe at the very, very top. And if you're denied the opportunity by not getting through any of the auditions, then you quickly feel low. Because you are, quite literally, being judged and found wanting.'
Nowadays he regards himself more as a writer than anything else. His first novel, The Gobbler, published in 1995, and Berserker! were bestsellers. And he is working on a new novel about a female singer who is a fan of one of Britain's finest ever folk singers, Sandy Denny.
'I sit down at my computer and write every day. Sometimes I think what I write is utter b-----ks, and sometimes I think it's absolute genius, and I don't know the difference between those days; I don't know what the trick is. But you just get through it. Write a load of b-----ks – and then go back and edit it, and you might get a line out of it.'
Edmondson first married when he was 19. It lasted 18 months, before she threw her wedding ring under a passing car as they argued at the kerbside – and that was that. He met Jennifer Saunders at the Comedy Store, but it was three years before they actually got together, 'which I think was a great help. We'd seen each other in the world…'
They have been married for 40 years, and have three daughters: Ella, 39, a mature student about to qualify with an MA in psychology; Beattie, 38, an actor and comedian; and Freya, 34, a costume maker.
They have lived in Devon for 33 years. 'We have a very… sorted life,' he says of his marriage. They read the papers 'cover to cover' over breakfast – him The Guardian, her The New York Times, 'and then we swap notes about what's happening. And later we watch something that's been recommended in either paper, and it's always s--te.'
They do the gardening. 'She does the posh stuff, I do the veg. People used to think we must live in sitcom land, but we actually live a life of, 'What's for dinner? There's five strawberries today on the plants, and we've got to eat more lettuce because it's bolting.''
The family is close. Each year they have a 'sacrosanct holiday' where everybody gathers together. In short, there is no reason whatsoever to think of his life as glass half empty. 'Exactly.'
Edmondson sups at his beer. Alien: Earth, he says, describes a future when there are several different species of human and robotic beings, one of which is a synthetic body with a human mind. And it got him thinking about the fragility of consciousness and the fine line between life and death.
'I was there when my mother-in-law died. She was there, but not conscious. And then Jennifer's brother came [in] and that's when she decided to go, and we thought she must have known that he'd come, and then she was dead. And you think, it's just bizarre – just fall over, bang your head, and you could die. All that consciousness, all that struggle could be… gone. So why do we have it? What's it all about?'
He seems to want an answer. Love? I say. 'That's what Louis de Bernières and I decided. We decided that all my earlier stuff was born of anxiety, and all my later stuff comes from a place of love. Not to be mushy, but that's where it comes from. A place of love.'