How Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson’s big screen spin off from their popular TV sitcom unfairly hit rock bottom with critics…
During the 1970s, almost every major British sitcom transitioned to the big screen, with varying degrees of quality. Yet come the post-modern 1990s, this trend was much less in evidence. Especially with alternative sitcoms such as Bottom, which aired between 1991 and 1995 on BBC2 and swiftly cemented itself as a ratings hit and cult favourite.
Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, both writers and stars of all 18 episodes across three series of Bottom, had a friendship born in the 1970s studying at the University of Manchester and honed via the alternative comedy surrealism of The Comic Strip Presents… and Ben Elton and Lise Mayer’s The Young Ones in the early 1980s. The latter, memorably, took fourth wall breaking anarchy to a whole new level.
Waiting
Both performers, adept at verbal and physical comedic techniques, loved the classic Samuel Beckett play Waiting For Godot (which they would co-star in the same year Bottom started), a text that heavily influenced the writing of their characters Richie and Eddie. Flatmates in the London suburb of Hammersmith, both exist in a squalid, jobless, sexless hyper-reality of cartoonish ultra-violence and one upmanship, where each episode they seek to either con the other, try to get laid (always failing) or simply bemoan their desperate existence. That lay at the heart of Bottom.
What might sound bleak was pitched as witty, filled with random non-sequiturs, occasional fourth wall breaking asides, inside jokes, cultural references and weird, perverted flights of fancy. As a teenager growing up at the time, Bottom was the funniest show on television, and by far the most quoted and aped on the playground. During the series and after it ended, Mayall and Edmondson transferred the show to stage across four comedy plays, all two handers, which met with great success.
Less so the arrival of Guest House Paradiso, a title that aped the 1988 Italian film Cinema Paradiso.
Cinema
Guest House Paradiso, then. A big screen translation of Bottom in 1999, it’s a film that critic Jon Robertson describes in an essay that puts it into cultural context. He wrote that “among that decade’s big hits of warmly reassuring sagas of everyday people – Four Weddings And A Funeral, The Full Monty – or the disreputable fringes of society remodelled into edgier mass entertainment – Trainspotting, Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels – Edmondson and Mayall’s vaudevillian rhythms and steadfast low-browness were treated alternatively with condescension, pity and disdain, brutally out of step with the ‘Cool Britannia’ cultural wave of its era.”
The response, which we will return to, sounds unusual given the popularity of Bottom. The stage adaptations had grown in popularity and scale, with the third – Hooligan’s Island –sporting a bigger and more complicated set (the concept being Richie and Eddie stranded on a desert island in the Pacific with a ‘nuclea bomb-ba’), saw Mayall and Edmondson begin to play with the idea of these characters on a broader canvas. On tour across the country, both stayed in quaint English hotels, filled with all kinds of eccentricities, and they began to wonder how funny it would be if Richie and Eddie ran such a place.
There’s little doubt another major inspiration on Guest House Paradiso was Fawlty Towers, the classic BBC comedy that barely a sitcom in subsequent decades did not owe a debt to. Richie as Richie Twat (pronounced ‘Thwaite’) has significant Basil Fawlty DNA, while Eddie’s Eddie Elizabeth Ndingombaba (changed from Hitler, his surname in the TV show, surely with one eye on international markets less keen on such a joke) is a twisted combination of Sybil Fawlty and Manuel.
Various other characters evoke archetypes from that show, be it Fenella Fielding’s batty long-standing resident Mrs Foxfur, or Steven O’Donnell’s grotesque immigrant cook Lardy Barsto, who bears more than a resemblance to a drunken Greek chef in one episode of that show.
Edmondson admitted the connection around the time, if denying the direct influence. “We decided on a guest house not because we wanted to slavishly copy Fawlty Towers – that was so unassailably funny that anyone who does anything in a hotel can’t escape it – but because rude service has been a mainstay of farces for centuries. And we’d hit each with everything that was in the flat.”
Control
When the actors approached Phil McIntyre, the producer behind their stage adaptations, he saw the value in a hotel-based big screen translation and, very quickly, Edmondson realised he wanted to direct. He had previously helmed several pop videos and episodes of The Comic Strip Presents… in the 1980s, so he had some experience.
As he told Empire: “It was always going to be me. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, I love it. And I’ve always been the bossier person in terms of making sure what we originally thought of happens. You need fascism, I think – well, a sort of benevolent fascism.” He and Mayall liked the fact they had a shorthand, and didn’t have to answer to writers or directors along the way. It helped craft Guest House Paradiso into a pure realisation of what they both saw a Bottom movie to be.
Many big screen adaptations of popular sitcoms place their characters in spaces different from their TV origins, such as Are You Being Served? through to The Inbetweeners going on a package holiday, and in this respect Guest House Paradiso is no exception. The flat – the primary location in the TV series, and in two stage versions – had run its course, but Mayall was aware that sustaining the 30-minute energy of a Bottom episode would hold its challenges: “We were aware of that and got a range into it. You see, farce is kind of an abused word, and I don’t want to give the impression that it’s just a breakneck speed thing. I wouldn’t like it to be called ‘a farce’, although there are people in their underwear slamming doors.”
Scribbling
The first draft of the script clocked in at three and a half hours, with a subsequent revision coming in still at two and a half. Mayall continues. “We did another draft and were thinking, “We’ve got to get under 90 minutes.” Then I was fortunate enough to fall off the bike, which gave Ade very little else to do – when he saw I wasn’t dead – than tinker with another draft.”
Mayall nonchalantly referenced a life changing moment there, when in April 1998 he crashed a quad bike near his home in Devon, leaving him with two haematomas, a fractured skull and no memory of the incident after spending four days in an induced coma.
It was touch and go, with his family warned he could experience brain damage if he survived, but Mayall thankfully emerged well and was able to return to work. Edmondson ensured he had afternoons off while filming Guest House Paradiso to rest. Though fuelled with gallows humour about it – with both actors even joking about it in subsequent Bottom stage plays – it clearly influenced the rest of Mayall’s life, despite his blase description of it: “pretty much made a full recovery now; nothing worth mentioning, anyway.”
With Mayall on the mend, work could begin on Guest House Paradiso, taking the elements people loved from Bottom as a show, adding Mayall and Edmondson’s schtick honed since their days as the Dangerous Brothers and translating all of this into a 90 minute feature.
The film itself is set around Richie and Eddie working as hoteliers in Britain’s worst holiday spot, on the edge of a cliff next to a nuclear power station belching out fumes, treating their varying array of guests with everything from disdain (such as Bill Nighy’s nervous adulterer) to outright psychotic violence. Then they end up caught in the stormy relationship between Italian film star Gina Carbonara (Helene Mahieu) as she flees her abusive race car driver boyfriend, Gino Bolognese (Vincent Cassel). It was the kind of broader narrative the TV series would never have sustained.
Mahieu was best known in the late 1990s for an innuendo-filled series of adverts for Renault’s New Clio car, uttering suggestive penis gag lines in classy fashion, while Cassel was and would continue to be one of France’s best-known exports, both domestically and in Hollywood.
Alongside Fielding, fondly remembered for her turn in Carry on Screaming, and a young Simon Pegg (as family man Mr Nice), here in the wake of his fame on TV with Spaced and before his own successful film career, Guest House Paradiso surrounded Mayall and Edmondson with a cast of talented players all of whom, often as straight foils to the anarchic comedy duo, helping keep the film on the straight and narrow.
Drubbing
Guest House Paradiso is full of such hyper-real, intentionally puerile set pieces, be it slamming heads into fridges, candles in the eye (for which Mayall sported an impressive prosthesis) or being hoisted by your nipples (as Pegg was, his body in a prosthetic cast). All are the kind of moments Bottom might have done had they the budget or scope, even if some work less successfully than others.
Around this, Edmondson presents the hotel as a Gothic-style redoubt, with a visual influence being Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1991 film Delicatessen, and its sepia toned broken down Parisian apartment building. Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday from 1953, Edmondson’s favourite movie, also influenced scenes such as kitchen door sounds or when Richie and Eddie strangely almost glide down the stairs to greet guests.
Edmondson, then, had a clear visual and aesthetic idea behind the uber-violence of Guest House Paradiso, but it was a fact lost on many critics when the film was released in December of 1999 to a critical drubbing. The Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker described it as “the worst British film I have seen in 1999” while Australian critic Matt Buchanan said Mayall and Edmondson had “bugled out one blithering, methane-fixated vulgarity after another” since they began writing together, castigating the film. Audiences responded in kind, the film delivering half of its £3m budget at the box office, making it a critical failure.
And yet
Over the last 25 years, as of writing, many have written Guest House Paradiso off as among the failed, paper-thin translations of celebrated British sitcoms that plague many of the great shows, from Dad’s Army to Steptoe and Son, but age tempers these perceptions. As Jon Robertson states about Mayall and Edmondson: “Their vision of comedy plagued with cultural status, doubles entendres, an obsession with and intense shame around sex and, when words fail, deeply unsporting fight tactics, all set within an England in which post-war dreariness has extended to the end of the century, may have felt passe to some in 1999.”
This is not to suggest audiences were unready for Guest House Paradiso back then. We cannot reconsider it as high art, or even work that matches the writers’ best, but it does transpose the filthy, comic-strip anarchy of Bottom, fuse it with the cultural awkwardness of Fawlty Towers, and provide a translation that is unashamedly within Edmondson and Mayall’s unique wheelhouse.
Indeed, the plan was to write another adventure for Richie and Eddie, as Edmondson described: “It’s set in space, in about 2050. You know those barges that carry shit out of the Thames and dump it in the Channel? Well, Earth’s become full by then, so we’re on a spaceship that drags it to the edge of the solar system and fires it off … And we’re cynically hoping to get a script ready quick so that if this does any kind of business, they might pay for another one.”
His words proved prophetic. It was not meant to be. And despite rumours into the 2010s of a potential fourth series of Bottom being written and developed, years after their final show in 2003, Weapons Grade Y-Fronts, the sudden and tragic passing of Rik Mayall from a heart attack in June 2014 aged just 56 meant the end of one of British comedy’s greatest comedy partnerships. It allowed Bottom to become preserved in amber as something special, a legacy Guest House Paradiso might not always match, but far from dishonours.
Perhaps Mayall, in discussing his relationship as actor to Edmondson’s director, summed it all up best. “He says action and I put my nuts in a nutcracker.” Amen to that.
