Ade Edmondson: Mr Versatile

While at university, the most popular TV programme amongst fellow students must have been Not the Nine o’Clock News.  It seemed different from anything we’d seen before, with stars not much older than we were. Within six months of graduating, even that iconic show was made to look ancient by the arrival of The Young Ones.

The situation comedy rule book had been ripped up, incinerated and buried beneath a mile of concrete, and yet it was hilarious. Still is. The characters, whilst a tad cartoonish, were nonetheless recognisable amongst undergraduate acquaintances, which was down to the observation and brilliance of main writers Ben Elton, Lise Mayer and Rik Mayall and the cast of then-unknowns, Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer and, once Peter Richardson bailed out, Christopher Ryan.

The series was surreal and subversive yet remaining true to both its sitcom roots and the ‘alternative comedy’ circuit which spawned it. When BBC2 first screened it in November 1982, I recognised a few of the actors from another memorable slice of laugh-out-loud comedy shown on Channel 4’s launch night the previous week, The Comic Strip Presents…Five Go Mad in Dorset. In particular there was the psycho-punk Vyvyan from The Young Ones playing Dick. This was Ade Edmondson, and since then he has rarely been off our screens.

For much of the Eighties and Nineties, he was inextricably linked to Rik Mayall, a crazy double-act to complement their mates French and Saunders who had portrayed Anne and George in Five Go Mad…. To be honest, it’s Mayall who stands out the most. He’s the force of nature with the flaring nostrils, boggly eyes, most extravagant gestures and showy delivery, whether as The New Statesman’s Alan B’stard or Blackadder’s Flashheart. And yet it’s Edmondson who enters my personal lounge of legends. It doesn’t help that Mayall died tragically young in 2014, not by an exploding gas oven or head-on collision with a frying pan, but a heart attack. It’s just that Ade has slowly but surely evolved into one of England’s most lovable, quintessentially British character actors and all-round good eggs.

His stage persona has always been a bit bonkers. In The Young Ones, I tended to side with pompous poet Rik rather than the Hawkwind studded double-denim-wearing Ade but, along with Planer’s hippy Neil, they shared out the best lines, as in this classic routine. He always made the most dramatically violent entrances and of course Vyv was the character who literally lost his head after sticking his head out of a train window – as you do – before kicking it along the tracks.

Slapstick violence was very much his bag. Even when arriving for his interview with Wogan in 1985, Edmondson struck a blow for the new wave by crashing through the studio ‘wall’. Let’s face it, with Mayall, The Dangerous Brothers were constantly behaving – well – dangerously on that other showpiece of mid-Eighties alternative comedy, Saturday Live. And then there was Bottom. Yes, it was frequently crude, rude and showed a shameful disregard for the welfare of TV sets and household implements, but I loved it.

A few years earlier, much of the same Young Ones crew had been involved in Filthy, Rich and Catflap which has survived more as a footnote than a chapter heading in the history of British comedy. Personally I think that’s a shame. Written again by Ben Elton, Ade played the alcoholic minder to Rik’s talentless TV personality in a series which cleverly ripped the piss out of the old-school luvvies like Tarby and Spike Milligan who had so vehemently criticised the alternative comedians who were threatening their careers. Perhaps it lacked the loveable and identifiable characters, but the slapstick was ever-present and I preferred it to Elton’s more successful nineties comedy Thin Blue Line which starred Rowan Atkinson. It also gave us the Catflap catchphrase “Oo-er, sounds a bit rude” which I have been known to trot out on occasions. Thanks again, Ade.

Of course, this isn’t the kind of comedy one can sustain well into middle age. He could also do ‘proper’ acting, be it on screen or stage. Though I watched him star in a 1990 BBC Screen One film News Hounds, I can’t remember him as another lead. While contemporaries like Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, Rowan Atkinson et al made it big, dear old Ade has enjoyed an enduring career as supporting actor and entertaining gameshow staple.

In the Noughties, Edmondson claimed a recurring role in Jonathan Creek and, though I didn’t watch it, Holby City and in recent years I have welcomed his appearance in thrillers like ITV’s 2014 thriller Prey and 2017’s Bancroft (in each case almost unrecognisable as a top cop), the Beeb’s One of Us and this year’s Cheat in which we all willed him not to become the villain’s next victim, not necessarily out of loyalty to his character but because he was Ade Edmondson, for heaven’s sake. He can’t die!

Unsurprisingly he has enthusiastically embraced the modern mania for celebrity challenges, demonstrating along the way what an admirable all-rounder he is. Back in the Eighties I watched Ade sing and play guitar in the guise of Vim Fuego in The Comic Strip’s Bad News, which Ade also wrote. I daresay he was no Eric Clapton but he wasn’t miming when they recorded albums (produced by Brian May, no less) and performed genuine gigs, including the 1986 Monsters of Rock festival. As a mockurockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap was funnier but Bad News got there first.

He didn’t only play guitar. I was in the Orchard Theatre audience when his ‘folk punk’ band The Bad Shepherds played Taunton in May 2009. At the gig, Ade introduced himself on ‘thrash mandolin’ which seemed to require tuning every five minutes. Never mind; the pauses were just as entertaining as the music itself. Unfortunately the ensemble has since been disbanded. According to its website, “We'd prefer to leave the whole project as a brilliant memory, rather than flog it to death, and end up being a bit shit”, a perfectly Edmondson-esque explanation.

Apparently he’d also founded a jazz instrumental band in the early Nineties and directed several pop videos, while his latest musical venture is The Idiot Bastard Band. I haven’t heard any of their material but given that it also features Phill Jupitus, Rowland Rivron and Neil Innes, it probably does what it says on the tin.

What I did experience – and I cannot believe it’s fourteen years ago – was Ade’s contribution to Comic Relief Does Fame Academy. His version of the Sixties standard ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ included a manically chaotic chorus which earned him third place in the final. Then-Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman won, but I bet few remember her ‘Champagne Supernova’. I know I don’t! In 2011, Ade was back on the charity night, this time triumphant in a tutu, dancing the Dying Swan surprisingly well for a 54 year-old bloke.

Since then he has gone on to win Celebrity Masterchef, certainly not part of my TV repertoire, and predictably took on and beat ‘The Beast’ for £100,000 in a Celebrity Chase show last year, which is. It wouldn’t have mattered had he got every answer wrong but of course he’s no fool and also carried the audience with him through sheer fun and personality. Sadly, though, I don’t think the team won the huge prize.

But that sums up Ade Edmondson. Like his marriage to Jennifer Saunders, he is such a durable character, full of Olde English eccentricity. The Young One may now be a sixty-something grandad but the anarchic spirit of Vyvyan lives on.