Adrian Edmondson and Jennifer Saunders may enjoy the best-known and most enduring marriage in British comedy, but they don’t often work together these days. However, their collaboration on a spoof of Downton Abbey produced a strong contender for the silliest and funniest sketch of this year’s Comic Relief.
She wrote the script and gurned away as the Dame Maggie Smith character and her husband directed. Their daughter Beattie appeared as one of the servants doing zany things in the background.
Edmondson also spent a month taking ballet lessons to perform the dance of the dying swan from Swan Lake for Let’s Dance Comic Relief. As 14st, 54-year-old men in tutus go, he acquitted himself well and reached the final. The cameras caught Saunders watching in fond and amused disbelief.
The couple have had a rough year or so. Newspaper claims that Saunders had “won her battle” against breast cancer were premature, but now Edmondson says that she is “very, very well at the minute. The chemo’s finished. Radiotherapy finished. To all intents and purposes, she doesn’t have cancer.”
He hates the way cancer is always described as a “battle”. “Such an awful word isn’t it? Everyone’s a [adopts posh army officer voice] ‘plucky little soldier’.” He resents the implication of “it’s my fault. I’ve lost my battle”. The reality is that “you either catch it early enough and the drugs work or you don’t. It’s as simple as that really.” He doesn’t want to say much more. “I don’t really want to talk about cancer because I start becoming the spokesperson for cancer. And I think I have said all I need to say about it. You just get masses of f***ing mail from people with cancer.” He laughs, not completely mirthlessly. “You know, although I sympathise with them all, it’s not what I am going to be. We’ve all got the chance of getting it. Everyone knows the score.”
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Released from the strain of caring for a spouse with cancer, Edmondson has been scampering around the country expanding his career in all sorts of directions beyond the world of comedy that made him famous, first as Vyvyan in The Young Ones and then as Eddie Hitler in Bottom. For his latest jape, he returned to his native Yorkshire to make a documentary series, The Dales, about the folk who inhabit one of the more remote corners of rural England.
Edmondson was born into a family with deep roots in Bradford, a city that was “very, very dirty. I remember it being black”. His granddad was a wool salesman and he used to help on his aunt’s wool stalls at Yorkshire markets. His father was a teacher who took him hiking in the Dales at weekends. “A good circular walk, up to Malham Tarn and Gordale Scar and back again. Go to the pub afterwards and have two pints of milk. He wasn’t quite teetotal, but almost. I remember it very fondly.”
Returning to the Dales as an adult, he found them “taller than I imagined and I was shocked at how beautiful the Dales are”. But he is keen to make clear that he has no truck with the overt Yorkshireness displayed by some in the white-rose county.
“I am not a professional Yorkshireman. I actually rather hate professional Yorkshiremen. There’s an attitude in Yorkshire that I really dislike: ‘I’m from Yorkshire and I’ll speak me mind.’ Well sometimes you think, I wish you wouldn’t because there’s such a thing as civilisation and sophistication.”
Edmondson believes that Yorkshire people also have “a pride in their supposed welcome which isn’t always true. I think it’s just a rural thing. I don’t really know my neighbours in London but I know all my neighbours in Devon. In the country you need to establish contact and rapport in case you chop your hand off and need to rush next door and say ‘get me to hospital’.”
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For many years Edmondson and Saunders have divided their life between London and Devon, but they have started spending most of their time in London. Saunders had most of her treatment in the capital but they also wanted distractions after the last of their three daughters left their Devon home. “The house got a bit empty. Oh God, I do miss them. I kind of got over it, but we blubbed for ages.”
Beattie appeared in the Downton Abbey spoof with fellow members of her successful all-female comedy troupe, Lady Garden. She and the youngest daughter, Freya, who is working in a shop and trying to get into art school, live together in London.
Ella and her band supported Edmondson’s folk-punk band, the Bad Shepherds, on tour last year, which he enjoyed. Although he says that the band are “sedate” on the road, they were able to drink beer and rely on Ella “to drive us back to the hotel”. He acted as her manager, but “I sacked myself because I wasn’t getting her anywhere. Doing it with my name attached isn’t always good.” Ella was married last year and Edmondson “cried like a baby” through his speech. “Really good fun. I like that kind of catharsis. Everyone was very happy. Most weddings you go to, not everyone is really jolly about it, are they?”
Pity the poor best man making his speech. Not only were the bride’s parents Britain’s best-known comedy couple, but Ella’s godmother, Dawn French, and Lenny Henry were also there. Contrary to a report, Edmondson has not given up comedy. “I do little bits when it arrives, I don’t chase it any more. Can’t be bothered to do the TV pitch again. Scripted comedy is not really popular any more among people who make it. I don’t know if it’s popular among people who watch it.”
He complains that “there isn’t much comedy on telly. Most comedy is quiz shows”. Of the few shows that do get made “there’s a swath of postmodern irony, which is creeping racism, I think. Unpleasant. They think they’re being really clever but they’re actually being slightly racist.”
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Another thing that he has reportedly given up is booze. Any truth in that? “No. I do occasionally. I can take months off. I try and do it quite regularly. I worry about my liver because when I drink, I drink quite a lot. But I don’t think I’m an alcoholic because I can stop almost at the drop of a hat. I took most of February off.”
So he’s still hooked on beer and gags and has turned his study into a mini cinema, where he likes to watch Laurel and Hardy films. Sometimes Saunders joins him and “likes it more than she thinks she does”.
Edmondson is a great enthusiast for whatever he is doing at any given moment, whether it is devouring an enormous pile of Yorkshire scones, tramping across Dartmoor in the rain, as he did last week, or touring with his band. But “sometimes I hanker after a job. Sometimes I think, wouldn’t it be nice to be a teacher. I know it wouldn’t because my dad was one and hated every minute of it. But I sometimes wish there weren’t so many disparate things in my life.”
He talks about his parents, “both hanging on” in Yorkshire, and his mother-in-law in Devon. “Life carries on,” he says cheerfully. “Waiting for grandchildren now.”
It seems extraordinary that Vyvyan is reaching such an age. But funnily enough you can imagine Edmondson as the soppiest, weepiest, prankiest grandpa ever to undermine parental authority. Should give him some good material too.
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The Dales is on Mondays, ITV1, 8pm
My perfect weekend
Pub or candlelit dinner? Pub.
Sartre or Shakespeare? Sartre. I think there should be a moratorium on doing Shakespeare plays for ten years. Stop for ten years, come back and say: “Oh, that’s quite interesting.”
Toner and moisturiser or soap and water? Soap and water. I don’t like any kind of unctuous stuff on my hands.
Prince Harry or William? I’m a natural republican so I suppose at the guillotine Harry would go first.
Pilates or pounding the streets? Pilates
Cat or dog? Dog
Green tea or builder’s? Builder’s
Tweed or leather? Leather
Radio 4 or Radio 2? Radio 4. I only turn to Radio 2 when a play comes on. If Radio 4 could stop doing plays I’d be really pleased.
Art gallery or the EastEnders omnibus? Art gallery
I couldn’t get through the weekend without ... A drink