'I went to every celebrity-owned pub in London and one drink was absolutely disgusting'
But not all celebrity pubs are created equal, and YouTuber Ed Chapman set out on an epic trek to find out which was the best, and worst, of the big-name boozers. And along the way, he sampled one drink that was as unpleasant as it was expensive.
Sipping a frozen Aperol Spritz in one upmarket King's Cross bar, he said: 'This is probably one of the worst drinks I've ever had, truly. It's half a glass. God knows how much it's cost… and it's absolutely disgusting.'
Ed started his jaunt at The Grapes, in Limehouse – a short walk from Canary Wharf. The historic pub owes its notoriety to the fact that it's owned by Sir Ian McKellen – star of the Lord of the Rings and X-Men franchises, as well as several West End stage productions.
The Grapes serves a decent Guinness, Ed discovered, but it's far from roomy: 'There's a nice outside area, but there's only two tables. It is a very small, very tight pub.'
He also had one or two questions about the friendliness of the service, saying that the bartender appeared to 'slam the drinks down on the bar.'
Next, Ed and his cameraman hopped on a couple of Lime bikes and pedalled up to Shoreditch, where Eighties star Rick Astley co-owns the Mikkeller bar. It's focused around quirky craft beers, including the rather odd-sounding Strawberry Krush – a fruity £6 concoction that 'just tasted like lager,' according to Ed.
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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.'
