Mayall and Edmondson - Dangerous Minds

Written by: Si Hawkins
Published: Monday 16th June 2014

Rik Mayall's tragically early passing made comedy fans of a certain age take a long, hard and heartfelt look at two men being really revoltingly objectionable to each other. Time to dig out a revealing interview with his old partner Ade Edmondson.

Much as I (wide-eyed and slack-jawed) adored The Young Ones, it was the Dangerous Brothers that really floated my impressionable boat. Just Richard and Sir Adrian Dangerous, unrestricted by rigid situation or script, bashing seven bells out of each other in the cabaret style. And in the Bottom style actually, but with the live setting adding extra unpredictability.

Years later I attended one of their Bottom tour shows, and by far the biggest, longest laugh came when something went awry, the stars broke character, corpsed, and set the audience off too. It was only when I watched the live video from that tour, filmed at a different venue, that the penny dropped: they did the same arse-ups and ad-libs every night. And so began a fascination with the nefarious workings of the comedy business.

Fifteen years or so later, during an interview about his folk band the Bad Shepherds, I took the opportunity to chide Ade about how he and Rik had crushed my comedy innocence. The former Eddie Hitler scoffed heartily at my naivety before then backtracking slightly and asserting the authenticity elsewhere: turns out they genuinely did bash seven bells out of each other.

"The Bottom live tour, I think we had a total of seven hospital visits from the way we opened up on each others faces," Ade explained. "When you're doing slapstick fighting live it has to be a lot closer than slapstick on telly, because you haven't got any TV angles to work, so you actually have to swing quite close. When you're holding implements, they can often go wrong. It's always quite weird when you start bleeding on stage because the audience go very quiet and quite scared."

In splendidly candid form throughout our chat, Ade was particularly scathing about the comedy industry he'd recently turned his back on ("I have no interest in 'developing' anything, in those offices with those shitheads who don't know anything about comedy, have never produced a programme or written a gag"). While we didn't dwell on his relationship with Rik at the time, further nuggets were forthcoming about their live/TV dynamic.

"Rik and I earned a lot more money out of live touring than we ever did out of telly. Absolutely. We did mammoth, 100-date tours, it's quite easy to do the maths. And the great thing about live stuff, it's proper art, you can do what you want."

Well, it's art when you can be arsed. The duo "bowed to mammon at one point and did slightly too many Bottom tours," he mused. "Not that they were bad, but I'd lost interest in them, so I was doing them just because that was my job."

Ade also had reservations about another of their long-running collaborations, with Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson in the mock rock outfit Bad News.

"It was kind of semi successful, but the rest of the band weren't really good enough musically to pump it out, which you need to do. Rik used to just give up on his bass and stick his tongue out all the time, which was fairly amusing but you can have too much of that. It was alright but we didn't really enjoy it. It's the only time the four of us have had an argument in all the work we've ever done, and I put it down to drumming soundchecks. It just makes you insane, the constant horrible noise."

What was that argument about?

"We brought out an album, then a Christmas single, and on it was spoken comments at the end, and [the argument] was about the fact that I'd turned down Pete's comments, because I thought they weren't very funny. So we had a stand-up row in a hotel in Birmingham where he tried to throw a pint of beer at me and I ducked and it hit the barman. I put it down to the horrible noise and the uncomfortable boots. They would really make you cross."

To be fair, Ade was glaring back at the comedy world with whatever is the opposite of rose-tinted glasses (Grey? Shit-brown?) having spent four torturous years getting his previous TV project off the ground, and was keen to "just parcel that career to one side and sort of get out while I was still quite good." But while revelling in the new musical departure, he clearly took much pride from the work with Rik.

"I'm glad that I've finally got away from the word 'madcap'. And the other crap word 'zany'. I never thought we were zany or madcap anyway, I just thought we were really funny. In the way Laurel & Hardy was funny, or Morecambe & Wise, or Tommy Cooper was funny. Or Wile E Coyote."

You're not wrong, Sir Adrian.