Gold orders Bottom Exposed, as Adrian Edmondson recalls Rik Mayall
- Adrian Edmondson will speak about the end of his double act with Rik Mayall in the Gold documentary Bottom Exposed
- Production on the programme began earlier this year, 20 years after the final Bottom live show
- Of Mayall's fatal heart attack, Edmondson has written in his forthcoming autobiography: "His death is a dreadful shock to the world, and to me. My head fills with a kind of white noise. It's difficult to comprehend that he's dead."
Adrian Edmondson films Bottom documentary
Adrian Edmondson will share memories of working with Rik Mayall in a new documentary about Bottom for Gold.
The feature-length film, Bottom Exposed, will also include new interviews with other collaborators on the classic sitcom, 20 years after Mayall and Edmondson's final stage show together, and ahead of the 10th anniversary of Mayall's death, aged just 56, next year.
Made by retrospective specialists Studio Crook (Tony Hancock: Very Nearly An Armful, One Foot In The Grave: 30 Years Of Laughs), production on the documentary began this summer.
Running for three series on BBC Two between 1991 and 1995, the slapstick, nihilistic Bottom starred Mayall as Richard "Richie" Richard and Edmondson as Edward Elizabeth "Eddie" Hitler, two unemployed, incompetent, pathetic and depraved idiots sharing a disgustingly run-down flat in London, where they derived great pleasure from scheming about having sex and inflicting excessive physical violence upon one another.
Having worked together since the mid 1970s, Bottom evolved the on-screen relationship that Mayall and Edmondson showcased in the earlier BBC sitcoms The Young Ones and Filthy Rich & Catflap, and was adapted for five stage tours between 1993 and 2003. They developed the sitcom into a feature-length film, Guest House Paradiso, released in 1999, and a spin-off series, with various Bottom characters, called Hooligan's Island, which was set to air on BBC Two but cancelled in 2013.
In his forthcoming memoir, Adrian Edmondson: Berserker! An Autobiography, extracts of which have appeared in the Daily Mail, Edmondson recounts how his comedy partnership with Mayall deteriorated, with the writing of Hooligan's Island proving to be the death knell.
Recalling how the pair's drinking became an issue during their first live tour of Bottom in 1993, he disclosed that they were boozing hard every night to celebrate "the sheer joy of conquering the panic".
But, he wrote: "It turns out, in the long run, that Rik isn't very good at drinking. As students, we couldn't afford more than four pints of cheap lager of an evening, and four pints made Rik amiable and fun to be with.
"But now we're earning good money, we can drink as much as we like, of anything, even spirits, and half a bottle of Scotch makes Rik, by turns, belligerent, morose, and then unconscious. It's no fun for either of us."
Writing the second Bottom tour in 1995, Edmondson spotted Mayall nipping into the pub opposite their office before they started writing.
"I eventually challenge him," he writes. "We finally have a friendly, truthful and rather tearful discussion. Rik doesn't appear for a week, and when he finally returns he says he's come to accept that he has a problem with booze.
"So from the second tour onwards Rik doesn't drink at all, and to make it easier for him, and because drinking alone is a bit sad, I stop drinking too."
Further issues lay ahead on the tour itself, when Edmondson perceived Mayall thinking that the crowd were laughing, not because his character Richie is funny, but because he "is a comic god". So he began to "cut huge sections of carefully written jokes" and started playing up to his "sex god" status on stage.
"He starts being more Rik than Richie," Edmondson writes. "Unfortunately, Rik the comic god isn't quite as funny as the character. The character is humble, nervous, insecure, scared and desperate. Rik isn't.
"It's hard to explain the difference between a good laugh and a diminishing laugh. The audience will not be aware of it, but all comedians will occasionally come off stage saying: 'What a shit audience.' But once you start thinking the audience are shit every night, you're in trouble.
"There's always a point a few weeks into every tour when he'll say: 'None of the stuff I have is funny, let's cut all my lines.' And I'll try to point out that if he stayed in character the laughs might come back."
At the end of their 2003 tour, Edmondson came to the conclusion: "I don't want to do this again."
He recalls that "Rik never gets his head around my decision to quit. For the next decade, whenever I ring him up to suggest we have lunch, just to chew the fat, just to be friends rather than colleagues, he always assumes I want to get the act back together again."
Eventually, Edmondson had an idea: write an episode of show that he didn't think would ever get commissioned, so "now it will be the BBC's fault that we are no longer a double act, not mine".
Yet to his surprise the broadcaster ordered Hooligan's Island, about Richie and Eddie marooned on a desert island, which they started to write in 2012.
But when Edmondson read back what they had written, playing both parts, he noticed Mayall counting things off on his fingers.
Asked what he was doing, Mayall replied: "I'm counting your jokes and my jokes. And you've got more jokes than me."
Edmondson recalled that his partner was "apologetic", but did the same thing the next day, then went through the script line by line.
"And I realise that the double act is properly over, Edmondson writes: "There's no trust left. It was glorious when it was alive, I'm immensely proud of everything we did together, it still makes me laugh, but I'm glad we didn't do a dodgy final series."
And of Mayall's fatal heart attack, he writes: "His death is a dreadful shock to the world, and to me. My head fills with a kind of white noise. It's difficult to comprehend that he's dead."