Love 'em or loathe 'em, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson are survivors, not only in terms of the violence each is happy to inflict upon the other in their various screen/stage manifestations (usually involving domestic weaponry of the frying pan/spade/snooker-cue variety) but in their chosen persona of Richie and Eddie. These nightmare creations first crawled out of Mayall and Edmondson's unconsciousness 25 years ago when the two middle-class boys (parents teachers) met at Manchester University's drama department and are now given big-screen life in their first feature film, Guest House Paradiso.
About the only time the duo's characters haven't been called Richie and Eddie was in the 1980s BBC hit show, The Young Ones, when they were Rick and Vyvyan. In Bottom, the 1990s TV hit, it was back to Richie and Eddie. However, Guest House Paradiso is not a feature-length Bottom, and in case you need convincing, the surnames are different: in Bottom they were Richie Richard and Eddie Hitler. Here they are Richie Twat and Eddie Elizabeth Ndingombaba.
Luckily for my sanity, it's arranged that I meet each of them separately. I hear Rik Mayall before I see him. Screams of derangement announce that he's having his photograph taken with a radioactive fish. Well, that's what he's pretending in order to get the facial expression right for the camera, it seems. The fish, he assures me, is real and market fresh.
Rik Mayall is fractionally less manic in real life than in his Richie screen persona, and although there is little to differentiate actor and character in terms of looks (wild hair, wild eyes, wild trousers), I have no sense that the man flopped on the bed in the film company's hotel suite might really beat his (or my) head against the door if I crossed him.
Although neither Mayall nor Edmondson claim that they set out, 25 years ago, to throw over the traces, the fun both had anticipated in studying drama was threatened by the other students' earnestness - "politicos" Mayall scoffs - intent not on entertaining people and having a good time in the process, but on changing society through theatre. Mayall remembers performances by visiting "agit prop" companies where he and Edmondson would indulge in a spot of "disguised heckling".
With another student they were given a lunchtime slot in a local pub, calling themselves Twentieth Century Coyote, a reference, Edmondson tells me later, to the Road Runner cartoons which they were both brought up on and which he claims are the inspiration for the violence in their work "you know, explosions and big pianos falling on people".
Twenty-five years on, the humour hasn't changed. Fans will be delighted to learn that Guest House Paradiso comes with full compliment of sexual, scatological and bashing-each-other's-brains-out humour. With both of them now in their 40s, doesn't it seem slightly incongruous, I suggest, to be doing stuff that most people grow out of by the time they're 25? Mayall appears genuinely surprised at the question. Now, as then, they do it "because it makes us laugh".
When later I ask Edmondson if Guest House Paradiso was conceived as a parody on all those special effects-heavy, ectoplasm-and-bile movies, he looks equally bewildered, as if I'd asked him to name the capital of Burkina Faso.
The special effects were undoubtedly fun to do, and something that television could never afford. Of the u3.5M £3.5 million budget, three-quarters was spent on special effects. The money, he says, was spent wisely and spread thinly "because we story-boarded everything that had to be done and we changed lots of ideas in order to find one that was affordable and would work". The only criterion for anything in the film was whether they found it funny.
What wasn't at all funny was when Mayall landed in intensive care after an accident on his quad bike while down at his holiday home in Devon. Guest House Paradiso had just been given the green light by Polygram, whose video arm had done very well with video sales of the stage shows that had kept Richie and Eddie busy after Bottom had begun to bore them. All that was needed was to cut the three-hour running time down to 90 minutes.
"My wife found me lying on my back with blood pouring out of my ears," Rik Mayall remembers. "I was going to die. For five days I was in a coma and when I came to, there was a lot of blood in my brain and it took me about six months to get it together again." His greatest fear was that he wouldn't be able to work again.
When later I ask Adrian Edmondson if Guest House Paradiso could have been made with anybody else, he looks into the middle distance for a good while, before saying no, he didn't think so. If Mayall is the hell-fire preacher of the team, Edmondson is the longsuffering curate who gives the most mild question the weight of an existential conundrum. "It was an awful time. But the awful time only lasted about three months. We kind of knew that he was getting better after about three months."
In the meantime, Edmondson completed the final draft and in the process became the film's de facto director, although before the accident, Mayall remembers there had been the usual discussions about who they would get to direct it. "We're moving into a new medium now, and once you have the writer and the director and the two lead actors, you're in charge of everything. It's so obviously Ade. He's the stronger one. He's the more military one. He's braver. And he's stronger. If he makes a decision it's the right one. And I am insufficiently selfless to be a director. I'm too me, me, me."
A few years back the near-marriage of the two nearly fell apart. Edmondson says he genuinely can't remember what triggered the split, but in retrospect it was inevitable. Although appearances might suggest otherwise, he says, they are too alike.
"It's probably just too hard to keep it going, playing so hard. Rik used to be an awful drunk. Not like he was drunk all the time. But when he was drunk he was a horrible person. He would say awful hurtful things." More like his screen persona? Edmondson nods. Was he any different himself. Edmondson releases a rare smile "I would become very jolly. I think I'm a jolly drunk." Not that he drinks as much now. He's grown older and, he says, "I've got a different kind of joy from my kids and things like that." Adrian Edmondson is married to Jennifer Saunders, and their children are now 13, 12 and 8. But, he adds, "I can still be wild".
As for criticism that their humour is puerile, Edmondson says all that means is that it is boyish and what's wrong with that. "Does everything have to be of a certain intellectual standard? I'm not saying it's not intellectual really, because the reason Richie and Eddie work is that they're so completely recognisable. Two enormously gargantuan monster-type comic characters having all the basic instincts of everyone in the world. That's why everyone likes them. They want what everyone else wants. They want the basics. They want sex, they want money, they want a good time. That's all anyone's after isn't it?"
Guest House Paradiso is now showing