Nine things we learned from Adrian Edmondson's Desert Island Discs

The comic actor and musician Adrian Edmondson first rose to fame in the BBC sitcom The Young Ones and as part of the creative team behind The Comic Strip. Along with friends and co-stars, including Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton and Jennifer Saunders, he ushered in a new wave of British comedy. He is perhaps best known for the anarchic chemistry he had with comedy partner Rik Mayall, part slapstick and part Samuel Beckett. In recent years, Adrian has returned to acting, including an acclaimed appearance as Scrooge for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Here’s what we learned from his Desert Island Discs...

1. He thinks all modern comedy can be traced back to one legendary double-act

Adrian’s comedy heroes include Spike Milligan and Flanders and Swann but of all of the greats, he says “Laurel and Hardy have stayed with me the longest.”

Adrian adds: “I judge people by whether they like Laurel and Hardy or not... I think all comedy is just passed on, I think it's all the same and I think Laurel and Hardy’s is the first recorded version of all the jokes.”

“You can watch any comedy today and I could show you where that joke is somewhere in Laurel and Hardy.”

2. His parents shaped his musical tastes – in very different ways

“My dad,” says Adrian “he wanted me to be cultured and civilised and we travelled the world - he was a geography teacher, working for the Forces - and everywhere we went we had this little record player folded up into a suitcase and his little collection of 15 classical LPs.”

“Every Sunday we had to sit down, put a classical record on and play chess. I've hated classical music ever since, and he stopped playing chess with me when I started to beat him.”

“But alongside civilization there was a little pile of singles that I think were my mother's choices, which I found very much more exciting, and amongst them is this record.”

It’s Adrian’s first choice for his desert island, and he says: “I like it even more in retrospect. It's just big and noisy and brash, but there’s a kind of sadness to it... a kind of tristesse to it that I still like.”

The track is Downtown by Petula Clark, recorded in 1964. It reached number two on the UK Singles Chart and topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the USA. It was written and produced by English composer Tony Hatch.

3. His name led to fights at school

Adrian’s family moved around frequently when he was young as a result of his father’s job with the armed forces, and he attended a succession of different schools.

“I had this problem because my name is Adrian,” says Adrian, “and in the 60s in Bradford and at the other schools I went to, everyone thought it was a girl's name... I would have to have a fight at every school I went to about my name.”

“And there's a joke in The Young Ones about Vyvyan being a girl's name that comes from the same stem.”

4. He felt very far from his family when he was sent to a boarding school

Adrian had three siblings, but he was the only one who was sent away to a school in North Yorkshire. His siblings remained with his parents in Uganda. He missed his family and recalls:

“I remember a lot of blubbing when I first got there, but once all the tears dry up, we all became the same people. The school is just full of people who are emotionally repressed, lonely, unloved, and feeling abandoned who eventually get over it and sort of subsist within the world without causing too much trouble.”

“And there was no pastoral care of any sort and absolutely no love. So I eventually established myself, and I sort of found someone to be.”

“But my parents didn't know that person. I was a very separate person. There was a bit when they were in Uganda and Idi Amin was in power... There were people getting popped off all over the place. Bodies in the river and the postal service stopped.”

“And there was a period for about - your brain plays tricks with you, it's either two, three, four, five or six months - I didn't get a letter and I remember thinking they're dead! I might be on my own.”

5. Shakespeare saved him from being kicked out of school

"There wasn't a drama department,” explains Adrian, talking about his boarding school, “but there was a school play and I was in every school play.”

In sixth form he was cast to play Hamlet but in the middle of rehearsals he ran away from school.

“Well, I only ran away because I was going to be expelled for the crime of throwing up in the prefects’ wastepaper bin and the headmaster got me in.”

“I was wearing two pairs of pants as usual for the usual flogging, but he didn't want to flog me this time. He said he was going to suspend me and they were thinking of expelling me.”

“So I did the only sensible thing and ran away. Eventually I ran out of money and gave myself in and I was going to be expelled. But that was when they realised that we were halfway through Hamlet and I was Hamlet.”

“And Hamlet was going to be difficult without Hamlet.”

“So they let me back in on the promise that I joined the army when I left school. I didn’t! That didn’t happen,” laughs Adrian.

6. Samuel Beckett and Brentford Nylons played key roles in his student shows

Adrian met Rik Mayall at Manchester University, and immediately found they shared many common interests: “We both thought Laurel and Hardy were the best of comedy. The other thing we shared was our love of [the Samuel Beckett play] Waiting for Godot. We were the only people who thought it was a funny play.”

Adrian and Rik began performing together, and the university drama department gave them a stage:

“We had the Stephen Joseph Studio, a little German church in the middle of the campus [named after the English stage director who pioneered theatre in the round], and we were allowed to do whatever we liked in it. Every Monday night was studio night and the rest of the department turned up [so] you'd have a guaranteed 100 in the audience and you would do your stuff.”

“I remember we bought a pair of pink duvet covers from Brentford Nylons,” says Adrian of one his and Rik’s productions, “And we were going to string them up from the studio roof and pretend to be God's testicles and talk about the world. Very sort of Waiting for Godot, really.”

7. A cigarette carton played a vital role in his relationship with Jennifer Saunders

Following university Adrian and Rik started appearing at The Comedy Store in London, as part of a growing new comedy scene.

“We were with a group of friends and it all felt very dynamic. You know, Dawn [French] and Jennifer [Saunders] came in, it was Pete [Richardson] and it was Alexei [Sayle]. It was a big family unit,” says Adrian.

The group went on to found their own comedy venue, The Comic Strip, so called because it shared premises with a strip club.

Adrian went on to marry fellow comedian Jennifer Saunders - but it took them a while after they first met to get together.

“Although I think it was love at first sight, we were both in other relationships which failed at different times so there was a kind of overlapping of relationships until we were finally separate people at the same time.”

“Eventually I remember going out to my car and there was a cigarette carton under the windscreen wiper and on it, it said, ‘I love you, love Jennifer’.”

“And that was the first time I knew.”

8. He remembers Rik Mayall with laughter and tears

After years of performing together, Adrian and Rik went their separate ways in 2003 and it wasn’t an easy split: Adrian felt they had done their best work together and, as he puts it: “I thought we'd gone over the top of the mountain. It would become increasingly sadder, and not in a funny way.” But Rik wanted to carry on and continued to put the idea of teaming up again to Adrian, who recalls:

“I hit upon the idea: ‘All right, let's write a couple of episodes of a new series, hand it in, they'll [the TV commissioners] say ‘No’, and then it's not my fault anymore.”

But then the series was commissioned - but they couldn’t complete it. Rik died in 2014 at the age of 56.

“I think of the writing room all the time,” says Adrian when he remembers Rik. “We spent more time in the writing room than anywhere else.”

“And I remember just laughing like drains.”

“His mum... his mum wrote me a lovely letter. I wrote to her after he died and she wrote back, saying all she could remember was us - she could see us out in the garden, a couple of deck chairs just laughing and laughing and laughing - and she could never tell what was quite so funny.”

“It was funny. It was good fun,” says a tearful Adrian of his memories of Rik.

9. His final disc reminds him of family harmony

Adrian selects Wide Open Spaces by The Chicks, formerly the Dixie Chicks, because it takes him back to long car trips with his whole family.

“We spent a lot of our life down in Devon, which is where we call home, and we’ve spent a lot of our lives - because a lot of work is also in London - going up and down the A303 with three kids in the back seat, my lovely daughters.”

“Wide Open Spaces is a fantastic song. It's about kids leaving home, and the three of them would be doing three-part harmonies, belting it out, driving down the A303. It's one of the wonders of my life.”