How two drunken halfwits and their exploding bottoms topped the ratings
Full marks for honesty. ‘It was a long time ago — 30 years,’ said actress lisa Coleman, with a smile and a shrug. ‘I can’t really remember.’
lisa, best-known for the longrunning Tracy Beaker series in the Noughties, played Doreen Hedgehog in a single episode of the cult BBC2 sitcom Bottom.
Her only recollection of the show, on the retrospective Bottom: Exposed, was that the gags all involved explosive flatulence. Anyone who ever caught five minutes of the sitcom, written by its stars Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, could have guessed that.
Running out of things to say, lisa admitted, ‘I’m just making this up for biscuits and a travelcard.’ If only every contributor to these combinations of hindsight and rose-tinted reminiscence were so frank.
Ade was taking it all more seriously. Sitting on the sofa in a mock-up of the duo’s squalid flat, he compared Bottom to the seminal Steptoe And Son, and said he used to worry that its creators, Galton and Simpson, might sue him for plagiarism.
I know what he means — I fret constantly that readers will notice how similar these TV columns are to the short stories of Anton Chekhov.
Not that Bottom went unnoticed in the 1990s. Drawing audiences of six million, it was the biggest comedy on BBC2 until Ade’s wife, Jennifer Saunders, launched Ab Fab.
Ade insisted its success stemmed from the relationship between the characters, two drunken halfwits locked in an endless competition to outdo each other in pointless violence.
That’s overthinking its appeal. Really, each gag amounted to a whoopee cushion being battered with a sledgehammer. The enduring popularity of this can be gauged by the five sell-out stage tours, which continued long after the TV show ended, until even Ade was bored of the joke.
The producers of this two-hour documentary should have taken heed, and cut by at least 30 minutes. There was too much emphasis on the long, slow decline, after Rik suffered serious head injuries in a quad bike accident. The most entertaining clips were outtakes, including footage of the stars doing their own warm-up routine for the audience.
A succession of fans and comedians declared Bottom could never be made today, because its blend of crude schoolboy humour and sadism is so very 1990s. To which you might answer: it’s dated — so what?
The reality is that whatever charm the show retains is due to Rik’s charisma. There’s an unrestrained animal magnetism to his comedy — he’s so pleased with himself, so exuberant . . . and this quality is so fragile that, in an instant, it can vanish, revealing his uncertainty and vulnerability beneath the bravado.
Ade, who was forthright in his autobiography Berserker! about the difficulties of their relationship, became tearful as he remembered how the friendship frayed.
‘I miss that love,’ he said. And then he perked up: ‘Rik would have hated a programme like this and would have told you to f*** off. I mean that quite sincerely.’