Bottom Page 9

Quote: Sprightly101 @ March 22 2013, 3:58 PM GMT

I first watched Bottom when I was about 13 and I have loved it since! We had to do a slapstick sketch for Drama in school and my friend and I just ripped off the scene in Bottom where Richie and Eddie are minding the corner shop and that man comes in for his paper My favourite episode has to be 'Culture' with the chess game

View original

Yesterday I was watching a Steptoe & Son episode (don't remember the title) and it started with them two playing chess with improvised chess pieces.

My favourite sitcom ever because it was funny with great scenes. I went to the stage show in 1995, the prison one.

Influential sitcom or what, House of Fools was a clear rip off and watching Gas last night, MJ's pilot House of Rooms seems to have been a totally contrived reworking of that episode.

Bottom needs a BBC rerun, I don't think they gave it the credit it deserved.

Personally I think Ade was right to pull out of the new series. Rik may not have mellowed with age but Ade certainly seems to have. You can't get much gentler TV than Ade In Britain. For a new series of Bottom to work we'd really need to buy into the anarchy and violence and if there was even a whiff of heart-hearted twats to the head with a frying pan, the whole thing would feel off. I'd hate that because Bottom is my favourite sitcom of all time, and if they'd f**ked it up I'd have been as disappointed as original Star Wars fans were with The Phantom Menace.

Having said that, if they'd been busy filming, Rik might never have had that run which gave him a heart attack and he might still be with us.

Rik could be a surpsisingly nuanced actor the few chances he got.

He was just so good at swearing, boggling his eyes and hitting someone in the pods.

I hope this also helps draw attention to the life long issues of people with brain injuries.

Bottom is my joint-favourite comedy, period or .

It's joint with Red Dwarf.

Rik Mayall is... sadly... was... no, bugger it, is and always will be my hero and my idol. I've loved the majority of his work, mostly with Ade. I was first introduced to Rik at a young age via Bottom. My love for British comedy stemmed from the fact I used to come home from school and be alone for the evening as my parents worked two jobs. I'd spend those evenings with a vast amount of VHS tapes, just one after the other, sitcom, sketch show, whatever. Bottom and Red Dwarf were the ones I kept coming back to. Rik was larger than life and this real character and I would go to school the next day and be the class clown performer for everyone. Then I would repeat this cycle, almost like I was studying how to be funny.

Anyway, the one thing I will say about Bottom is that the live shows from maybe 2 onwards, after the TV series had finished, they were not Bottom because the characters were barely there, it was Rik and Ade being Rik and Ade. The vast majority of those shows were less plot and just a constant stream of 4th wall breaks, scripted or not. I loved Bottom but more so loved what Bottom became as I grew up with it. Some may say it's toilet humour, immature etc. I'd say it's the very BEST toilet humour you'll find with the kings of physical comedy and some of the wittiest dialogue between two adult males you'll ever see, perfectly disguised behind its juvenile demeanor.

I've just gone and bought all of Bottom (live shows and the film as well), Filthy Rich & Catflap and The Young Ones. Held back on Rik Mayall Presents (I think an episode is being repeated soon so I'll check I still like it first).

It's expensive when a childhood hero dies!

Aww I watched Burglary (Bottom) about two days before Rik died

Little did I know

"DO YOU WANT TO BE SKINNED ALIVE AND BUGGERED?"

"I was sleep-vomitting". Great episode!

I love thinking about how Rik and Ade must have written this. I see them both writing into the night, laughing their heads off, maybe getting a bit drunk.

It must have been them improvising into a recording device and then taking dialogue and ideas from that. The ideas for the dialogue were always so out there, it sounds like two guys having fun and saying the most outlandish things.

Ie;

Ade: 'Remember, we ate his dog?'

Rik: 'Yeah, we bloody won that bet didn't we!'

Ade: 'No, we didn't. That's why we had to eat his dog.'

This is my first post.

I want to share with Bottom fans a bit of trivia.

It was 23 years ago today (Friday 5th July 1991) that Rik and Ade recorded the episode 'Gas' at BBC Television Centre.
How do I know this?
Well I was there in the audience sat in the front row, laughing my head off for 3 hours, as the filming took place in front of me. And yes, Rik really did get an almighty smash on the head from Ade with the famous frying pan.

I have been a Rik fan for as long as I can really remember, obsessively so during my teen years. So at age sixteen seeing him for real for the first time, working his magic there in front of me was an absolute dream come true. The charisma, energy and talent that poured out of him is something that will stay with me forever.
Going to Television Centre, not knowing anything about the show (just a hint on the ticket), was an absolute treat.

For me 'Gas' has always been my favourite episode, so when the BBC showed it a few weeks ago in tribute, I could not have been happier.

I find some of Richie (from Botom) quite similar to Hancock. Especially in episods like Contest where he is so alone and talking to himself.

Anyway, Ade Edmondson had this to say-

"Bottom was mostly Rik and myself, but we had two frequently returning guest characters - the glorious Chris Ryan as Dave Hedgehog, and the fantastic Steve O'Donnell as Spudgun. 18 episodes, written by Rik and myself. Bottom was the programme Rik and I had always wanted to make, and is the show I'm still most proud of. It combined a pseudo piss-take of Waiting For Godot with Laurel & Hardy and the Roadrunner cartoons, and there was a healthy nod towards Steptoe & Son and Hancock's Half Hour (in fact we were half expecting to be sued by Galton & Simpson). I don't think I've ever laughed as hard or as frequently than when we were writing it. When I see clips of The Young Ones it looks a bit dated, but Bottom looks timeless and just... funny!

Our original title for the series was My Bottom. We though it would be amusing if continuity announcers had to say 'And next on the telly tonight - my bottom', or reviewers had to write things like 'I don't think my bottom is very good'. Alan Yentob vetoed it - like Graham Chapman's character in Monty Python he found it 'too silly'. I think the BBC found the whole programme rather embarrassing, but, unfortunately for them, for a while it was the highest rating programme on BBC2 after The X-files, so they had to keep it. The corridors of the BBC Television Centre are festooned with glossy photographs of current hit programmes, but through the whole period when the show was at its most popular there was never a single photo up on the wall... ah, bless 'em.

After the third live show - Hooligan's Island in 1997 - in which Eddie and Richie are found living on a desert island after being abandoned by a cruise ship, we wrote a whole series set on the island... but the Beeb didn't want it.

Series 1 (17.09.91 - 29.10.91)

Smells
Gas
Contest (This was the untransmitted pilot episode)
Apocalypse
's Up
Accident

Series 2 (01.10.92 - 29.10.92)

Digger
Culture
Burglary (With our old Uni chum Paul Bradley as the burglar)
Parade
Holy
's Out (This episode, set on Wimbledon Common, was pulled because of a murder on Wimbledon Common and wasn't shown until April 1995 - after the third series had gone out...)

Series 3 (06.01.95 - 10.02.95)

Hole (This is my favourite episode - it was up for a Golden Rose but didn't win)
Terror
Break
Dough
Finger
Carnival

http://www.adrianedmondson.co.uk/biography/74"

Yes Richie is very Hancock at times - another brilliant comic who died too young.

Here's some more tiny bits of trivia, we were told at the filming that Gas was the fourth episode to be filmed. They also showed us the clip where Eddie pulls out Richie's nose hairs with a pair of pliers.

I remember reading or seeing an interview with Ade explaining how they wrote together, he said they have a pacer and a writer. He was the writer and I can just see Rik pacing up and down - probably throwing his arms around and doing all kinds of gestures!

Can you please tell me how the set changes work for a studio audience?

Ie, in Gas, we see the main living room/kitchen, the door and hallway, the stairs, outside the flat, all of Rottweiler's house.

How do they change the set so quickly for a live audience?

How did Rik and Ade get on between takes?

Any other trivia on the making of the show?

Quote: BusterBriggs @ 9th July 2014, 12:04 AM BST

Can you please tell me how the set changes work for a studio audience?

Ie, in Gas, we see the main living room/kitchen, the door and hallway, the stairs, outside the flat, all of Rottweiler's house.

How do they change the set so quickly for a live audience?

View original

The set isn't changed. It's not like a theatre where there's a limited stage space - it's more akin to being sat across one wall of a warehouse. Set up in front of you will be perhaps two or three different sets next to each other, depending on the demands of the particular episode. There may also be hallways/corridors or other sets altogether behind what you can immediately see. The cameras are on wheels and so can then be moved around for each position. Everything is relayed to the audience via monitors suspended from the ceiling, if a particular view is obscured.

There's also the ability to pre-record scenes on other sets since taken apart, to film out of the studio, and to film tricky/dangerous/big reveal visual gags.