|
Stultifying boredom, sexual frustration, rage, pain and destruction
characterised the lives of the charmless unemployed bottom-feeders Richard
Richard and Edward Hitler in Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson's self-penned
Bottom.
Richie and Eddie are best friends but, having lived in each other's pockets
for most of their lives, they loathe each other with a venom that commonly
results in extreme domestic punch-ups. They delude themselves that they are
fantastically attractive, suave and sophisticated, but in reality they are vile,
socially inept chauvinists with appalling personal hygiene and no redeeming
qualities. They are continually surprised by their repeated failure to attract
women despite their relentlessly enthusiastic endeavours, including a dating
agency and a dubiously-named aphrodisiac spray.
Episodes also centred on their pathetic attempts to make money by gambling,
stealing, swindling or waiting for relatives to die - anything but actually
working. Most of the comedy lay in the cartoonish slapstick violence that Richie
and Eddie would frequently inflict upon each other, and the perennial recourse
to toilet humour and jokes about body parts. Another recurring gag was Richie's
implausible claim to have fought in the Falklands conflict.
Unashamedly crude, vulgar and infantile, Bottom tended to divide audiences, but the two leads have a gift for physical comedy that has often been
undervalued, and television has never before or since seen a pair of such
irredeemably grotesque 'heroes'. Richie and Eddie's violent interplay was a
culmination of a succession of previous Mayall-Edmondson double acts: 'The
Dangerous Brothers', their stage act from their early Comedy Store days, Vyvyan
and Rik in The Young Ones (BBC, 1982-84), and namesakes Richie and Eddie in
Filthy Rich and Catflap (BBC, 1987).
The last episode of the second series, 'Bottom's Out', in which Richie and
Eddie attempt to camp on Wimbledon Common for a week as a bet, was withheld from
broadcast following the murder of Rachel Nickell there. It was eventually shown
more than two years later (tx. 10/04/1995).
A big-screen adaptation, Guest House Paradiso (d. Edmondson, 1999), with
Richie and Eddie disastrously attempting to run a hotel, was critically mauled,
but a stage version toured British theatres to appreciative
audiences.
Hannah Hamad
|
1. Gas man (1:49)
