My review of And This Is My Friend Mr Laurel can be read online here and might be in the paper on Monday.
I should really have learned my lesson when it comes to making plans in advance because nothing ever goes the way I want it to. Today would have been Rik Mayall's birthday and to acknowledge the occasion I thought it would be nice to spend the day at home watching as much as possible of the complete Bottom box set that I received for Christmas and as you can see from the shine on the photograph, was still in the cellophane wrapper. Even though I suggested this a couple of weeks ago we didn't seem able to manage to pull this plan together, if only Hannibal was in our house because it would have come together and he would have loved it.
It was partly my fault as I didn't wake up until noon and decided to take Jack out before making breakfast for the two of us (Mandi I meant, not Jack) and Mandi wanted to do some food shopping. Eventually we settled down and only managed to watch three episodes from the first series, and as we haven't even finished Frasier yet I am getting agitated with box-set chaos. We don't have very far to go with Frasier now, and we had planned to make Bottom our next binge. Because I have a heavy workload I don't always have the time to commit, especially as Mandi goes to bed a lot earlier than I do during the week as I can happily function on four hours a night. With this in mind I plan to watch Bottom on my own to get through it as I can demolish a series in fairly good time; I recently watched the entire first series of Extras in one sitting.
Today was the first time I had made an effort to watch Mayall's work with any depth since his death last summer although at Christmas I watched the tribute documentary Rik Mayall: Lord of Misrule which was followed by an episode of The Young Ones. When he died I resisted watching him in anything as it seemed ghoulish to do so, although today wasn't a conscious decision until a few weeks ago when I realised it was his birthday. Watching the first three episodes of his last bit hit of work with Adrian Edmondson made me realise all over again what a loss to comedy he was.
The chemistry between the two leads is on a par with every great act from Laurel and Hardy onwards, with liberal sprinklings of classic Tom and Jerry. People might have derided the pair for basically playing the same part their entire career but to do so would be to seriously undermine the talent and comic timing displayed throughout. The little looks to camera, quick lines (remembering of course that they wrote all their own material) and stamina makes Bottom, like The Young Ones before it and everything else in between, a work of art. Rik's career never really got back on track in his later years, so while Ade was off playing in a band and presenting ITV travelogues, Rik was a bit rudderless. Radio Four are playing an edition, (a heavily censored version) of his audio book series The Last Hurrah among other things. I recommend giving them a listen.
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March housekeeping
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