“We struggle through power cuts, algebra and the three-day week and the only constant is cigarettes. We sit in Jasper’s Folly, a café at the end of Market Place, thinking up new words for ennui and seeing how long we can burn our fingers with a lighter before we can’t stand it any more... Cigarettes were just a replacement for everything that was missing in my life.”

Adrian Edmondson celebrates a long love affair with cigarettes that came to an end when he found everything he had been missing.

Across this set of essays Adrian Edmondson considers moments of personal and social change.

His career has taken him from 20th Century Coyote (punk meets comedy) to The Young Ones to Malvolio at the RSC via Eddie Hitler in Bottom.

Adrian Edmondson studied drama at Manchester University where he met his comedy partner Rik Mayall. The influence of the absurdist dramatists he studied and his early love for The Goons, The Muppets and Monty Python are all reflected in his comedy practice. He and Rik were part of the first wave of Alternative Comedy where their glorious pursuit of laughter and anarchic performances changed the comedic landscape forever. He starred as Vyvyan in The Young Ones, the series that blasted its way onto our screens tearing into our preconceptions of what television comedy could be.

Adrian has since had a very significant career indeed. A career that has taken him in later years into 'straight' acting as well, at the RSC, BBC TV’s War and Peace and EastEnders, and as a writer of books for adults and children. He has also had an award-winning music career with his band The Bad Shepherds which fused punk and folk. In September 2023 he published his autobiography, Beserker!, the wellspring of which was this series of essays for BBC Radio 3.

Written and read by Adrian Edmondson
Produced by Caroline Raphael
A Dora Production for BBC Radio 3 Show less