Jennifer Saunders, a queen of comedy and an absolutely fabulous British TV
export, has another, hitherto unheralded, role. She runs a shuttle service
home from the pub.
“I do a lot of walking because that’s what we live there for,” says Adrian
“Ade” Edmondson, her husband of 24 years, of their life in rural Devon. “My
brother-in-law owns a pub about five miles away. It’s a not-inconsiderable
walk up and down and you feel very earnest when you get to the end. It
doesn’t feel like you are punishing your liver. Feels like you are restoring
it.”
And then does he work off all the beer by walking home again? “Nah,” he
smirks. “Get the wife to pick me up.”
For 15 years the couple have divided their time between London and the country
but have “more or less” been living in Devon while the youngest of their
three daughters finished school this summer. “I love the country and I love
the town,” says Edmondson. “I love the arriving. Really exciting.”
They have a 16ha (40-acre) farm with sheep and eight cows. Edmondson says that
he “used to do all the cooking in our house, then after about 10, 15 years
with the kids and everything I just got completely f***ing bored of it. I
kind of held up my hands and Jennifer took over and she’s obviously much
better than I am.” He emits one of the wheezing laughs that punctuate his
conversation. “I’m still very good at roasts. It’s just the mind-numbing
thing of having to go shopping and arrange so many meals.” Marco Pierre
White enjoyed Edmondson’s home-grown beef when the comedian had to make him
a sandwich in Hell’s Kitchen this year. The two got on well and
Edmondson finished the reality TV series as runner-up to Linda Evans.
“It’s just telly. It’s entertainment,” he says of reality TV, but concedes it
can be stressful. “It is amazing how quickly you feel emotionally raw,
generally through lack of sleep and too much work. Fun to be in the middle
of that, isn’t it?”
Edmondson is cheerfully frank about being part of a showbusiness marriage in
which one half inhabits a different stratosphere of stardom. “Oh, she’s a
lot more famous than me. It’s human nature to be competitive, but I don’t
let it ruin my day. Rather be married to a successful person than an actress
who was struggling. That would be hell, wouldn’t it? We kind of got over all
that. I was a year ahead of her until about the late Eighties and then she
overtook and shot off.”
They are tucked away in Devon, but choose their holiday destinations
carefully. “A thing you have to bear in mind, if you are slightly famous and
you go on holiday, is to go somewhere where there aren’t any British people,
because they are f***ing boring. So dull. ‘You look just like . . . ’ All
the time. She gets it a lot worse than I do.” They hide in Italy and America.
At boarding school in the Vale of York he “broke as many rules as you could.
That was the name of the game”. At Manchester University, during the age of
punk, his act of rebellion was to get married, aged 19. The union lasted
four years. “I think that was — emotional immaturity is too nice a word for
it — an emotional problem I had to solve by proving someone loved me.”
At Manchester he also began a more durable relationship with his longtime
professional partner, Rik Mayall. “We had been the same people at different
schools: the ones doing Waiting for Godot and edging towards sketchy
comedy, and our parents were both teachers and our mums sent us with the
same dressing gowns. We had the same references to draw on, which is why we
made good gags.”
The pair became stars at the Comedy Store and then set up the Comic Strip club
with Alexei Sayle, French and Saunders and others. The TV shows Comic
Strip Presents ... followed, and then The Young Ones and Bottom.
Eventually he and Mayall “stopped because they wouldn’t have us on telly any
more as a double act. They didn’t want us. The steam had run out of that. We
were left with Bottom Live. I’m very proud of Bottom Live
but I just got tired of doing it, which is a shame because it was very
remunerative.”
The pair have “an idea for a couple of old gits in an old people’s home”. At
the age of 52, Edmondson still takes a slightly studenty delight in
swearing. “If we’ve still got our wits about us in 10 or 15 years it could
be very funny to have proper pensioners lamping each other and hitting each
other with sticks and walking frames. And there are all those injections and
things. We like slapstick.”
He is trying to write another novel, although he admits that he has been
working on it since his first, Gobbler, was published in 1996. “I’m
slightly aware that I’m a jack of all trades and perhaps the master of none
and that’s kind of just tough because I like changing. I loved my time in Holby
City, for instance. Most people think, ‘You were Vyvyan in The
Young Ones, why did you do Holby City?’ It was one of the most
enjoyable times of my life, that. Fantastic, doing two hours of telly every
three weeks.
Many years ago, when he was “courting” Saunders, he dabbled with cocaine “for
about a year. She said I was being a t*** and I stopped.” Now he says: “The
older I get the more I like working. When you’ve got the money to piss your
life away, drinking isn’t as much fun as it used to be. When you’re young
it’s ‘Hey I’ve got a tenner. Let’s spend it all on lager.’ Now it’s: ‘I’ve
got a million quid. Let’s spend it all on lager. Oh, perhaps not.’”
He is looking at some other projects but his main focus at the moment is his
hobby: The Bad Shepherds, a folk-punk band currently on tour, in which he
plays “thrash mandolin”. Punk has been a “leitmotif” in his life. “What punk
did for Rik and I in an oblique way, because we were at university ’75 to
’78, was show that you didn’t have to do what people had done before.
Comedians wore dicky bows and dinner suits and the live circuit was working
men’s clubs: racist, generally, and mother-in-law gags.”
Vyvyan was an affectionate send-up of punks, but now he is paying homage to
the music. Punk and folk are “very similar; both three-chord wonders and
have the same sort of feel, running off into a jig or a reel. When you go
past an Irish pub in Manchester or Kilburn where a Celtic band is coming on
it is very exciting, like punk used to be.
“Everyone in the world wants to be in a band. I’ve always had bands. I have
always just wanted to be a musician. It’s just very hard to do it. And I
finally found something that people accept is a good enough hybrid.” But
what would Johnny Rotten think? “I think he’d hate me because I’m a
middle-class w*****.”
The band play 300-seat venues, have done the festival circuit this summer, and
have an album out called Yan, Tyan, Tethera, Metheral (which means
one, two, three, four in an ancient Cumbrian dialect, and is used by
shepherds to count sheep). “I would like it to be my job, but I don’t think
it could be really, not full-time. I’m too old to make a real go of it. It’s
a really healthy hobby which is actually the same sort of spirit that Rik
and I had doing comedy.”
His other big preoccupation is acting as manager to his eldest daughter, Ella,
a singer-songwriter. “Well, I’m trying to manage her. It gets more and more
complex. I wonder if someone else might be better doing it. Awful lot of
secretarial work, which is deadly boring.”
His second daughter, Beatrice, is a member of Lady Garden, an all-female
touring comedy sextet who have had interest from the BBC. “I don’t give
advice on being funny, I give support. It’s so different from what it was.
People are so much sharper, so much more experienced, more clued-up.” His
youngest, Freya, 18, is planning a gap year.
He would love to see his daughters’ success eclipse his own. “Bloody hope they
overtake me, that would be great. Think of the pension.” He believes
children “like you more when they get beyond 20. There’s a period in
between: they don’t dislike you, but they are looking the other way because
it’s more interesting.”
When he doesn’t have his girls all together at the weekend he likes to catch
up with the other members of the Comic Strip team, all of whom live
in some style in the South West, except Nigel Planer, “who has three lots of
alimony to pay”.
He has been a season ticket-holder at Exeter City for years and although he
goes to quite a lot of away games he insists: “I’m not committed. I’m never
going to kiss my badge. It’s entertaining. It’s a very nice crowd.” He used
to watch Chelsea but, “Chelsea is a vicious horrible crowd, full of overt
racists. It’s really quite nasty sitting at Chelsea these days. Lower league
football is played with much more Corinthian spirit than the Premier League,
which is full of people falling over.”
I innocently ask if he enjoys going to the theatre. “I like the idea of
theatre but it’s always rubbish. I’m so often disappointed. I can’t remember
the last time I went because it’s such a hit-and-miss affair. Plus, if you
go and watch them at the National,” (evil smile spreads across face) “you’re
with such a horrible group of people. Oh, they are! Oh, the most precious
and middle-class.” But you are middle-class. “I know, but you
don’t have to be that way about it. They think they are so clever for going.”
Ella has said that he has a short temper. “I try not to be angry at people,”
he says. “I tend to vent my spleen on inanimate objects. Farm machinery is
made out of very big lumps of metal and not only gives a satisfying noise
when you hit it with another bit of metal, it doesn’t really get hurt. It’s
a good way of letting loose.”
He doesn’t watch much modern comedy these days. “I only like Harry Hill. I
watch a lot of Laurel and Hardy. It’s just so modern. You can see almost
every gag that we use now.”
He and Saunders like to end their weekends quietly. “Sunday nights we sit down
in front of the telly with our food and enjoy carping at costume dramas.”
For more information on the Bad Shepherds UK tour contact www.thebadshepherds.com
My perfect weekend
Couch potato or gym rat?
Couch potato
Beer or wine?
That’s difficult. I make the mistake of drinking them both the same day. Beer.
Spotify or CD?
I prefer iTunes.
Jeans and trainers or suit and brogues?
Jeans and brogues
Candlelit dinner or takeaway?
Never takeaway because there isn’t any. There’s a chip van that comes to the
square on Thursday.
Cornwall or Caribbean?
Caribbean’s horrible. Cornwall. Or Devon.
Laurel and Hardy or Curb Your Enthusiasm?
Laurel and Hardy.
Bedtime book or TV?
Book. My wife watches TV which is very annoying. There is a constant little
battle for the volume control.
I couldn’t get through the weekend without ...
My girls. I don’t see them every weekend but I love it when I do.
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