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.
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“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.”
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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.’”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.