The Essay: Adrian Edmondson - Signs of Life

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Adrian Edmondson - Signs of Life: Smoked Out

Adrian Edmondson - Signs of Life

Smoked Out

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Adrian Edmondson - Signs of Life, Smoked Out

Adrian Edmondson celebrates a long love affair with cigarettes and the moment it ended.

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

“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

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Moments of quiet revolution from the life of Adrian Edmondson: comedian, actor and writer.

Comedian, actor and writer Adrian Edmondson remembers moments in his life from childhood and his early days at The Comic Strip to appearing with The Who.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Essay

Adrian Edmondson - Signs of Life

Smoked Out

Genres

Brand

Series

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3