Off Air... with Jane and Fi - I don't want to see you when you're hangry (with Ade Edmonson)

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Jane and Fi are very excited about their Christmas dinner, so they take a whistle-stop tour through topics including cats as neckwear, sophisticated frozen yogurt and being 'Britain's favourite natterers'.They're joined by comedian and actor Adrian ‘Ade’ Edmondson to discuss his memoir 'Berserker!'If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] us on Instagram! @janeandfiAssistant Producer: Kate LeeTimes Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

VoiceOver describes what's happening on your iPhone screen. VoiceOver on. Settings. So you can navigate it just by listening. Books. Contacts. Calendar. Double tap to open. Breakfast with Anna from 10 to 11. And get on with your day. Accessibility. There's more to iPhone. Welcome to Off Air, she said,

being slick and professional. Now, we've just got to be honest, it's roast dinner, well, it's Christmas dinner day in the county and so we, there's a very long, there was a long queue, wasn't there? Well, from the studio that we're recording, we can see that the queue has gone down. Has it gone down?

Because when I came in today at about midday, it was stretching all the way back past the tech bar. If you think the tech bar is something really exciting where you can, I don't know, get some special kind of... Tech. Super digital Yorkies. It's not. It's where you go when you've't know, get some special kind of super digital Yorkies. It's not. It's where you go when you've lost your password and stuff.

But the queue was stretching out of the dining room and now it's gone down, so we should be okay. But it does mean it might be a slightly shorter podcast as neither of us have had very much to eat. And I think in your case, Jane, that means imminent collapse. Well, that T-shirt, hangry, is one that I do own. Yeah, I don't want to see you when you're hangry. So this is a return to kind of normal podcast

because we do have a big guest in the podcast. On the last two occasions, we've just had emails. And thank you for all of them, actually. We bobbed along nicely, didn't we? It was lovely. It was actually really nice. I know the guests are often very interesting, but they're in a moose bo nicely, didn't we? It was lovely. It was actually really nice. The guests are often very interesting, but they're a kind of they're in a moose boosh, aren't they?

That's what the guests are. Often terribly informed, sometimes very famous. And we've got a really interesting guest today. But everybody really knows that this is really just about human twaddle, twaddlery. Yeah. And the sharing of it. We have Adrian Edmondson as our guest today.

He's got a memoir out called Berserker, which is extraordinary, actually. If you think of Adrian Edmondson as just being a comic and, you know, a guy who can turn his hand to serious acting sometimes when he wants to, I don't think you'd know anything about his hinterland, which is quite dark in places, and he'll explain a bit more about that in a sec.

Yes, I've read a bit of his book, and I didn't do the interview, you did it, but his parents, well, I mean, you tell me, his mother sounds, well, what? Well, I don't think it was as much his mother as his dad. So his dad was part of a church, and it meant, I don't know their home life was quite strict it was quite brutal in parts his dad also traveled um a lot um for work

and by travel i mean went to you know live in kenya and so him and his three siblings uh were either carted around with him or very much left at home with their mum who was and he was went away to he was the only one of his siblings to be sent away to boarding school which is quite a weird thing within a family set up too and the boarding school that he was sent to particularly his secondary school place called Pocklington Hall just sounds terrible everything that you could imagine about the cold, callous nature of an all-boys boarding school in what would have been the late 60s, early 70s, probably well into the 70s,

is true in Adrian's recollections about it. So we will hear from that in a minute, but also please don't worry because he's just such a delightful man. We talk about lots of other things in the interview too. But we've also got hot news about Taylor Swift and Katzer's shoulder wear. And this comes in from Kath who says, My gorgeous cat Edward used to wrap himself around my shoulders sometimes when I was sat on the loo.

He'd purr loudly in my ear. I had Edward till he was 18. That's a good innings. He was much loved and I think he loved me too. Well, I'm sure he did. Everyone should have a cat, loved Adora, Barbara and Brian. And that's absolutely lovely of you, Kath. I have to say, though, there is cool cats as well at home

who doesn't often get a mention, and I do feel for him. He's my big old hackneyed Tom. How old is he now? He's 14 now. He must be about 14 stone. He's huge, isn't he? Well, no, judging by that photograph he took the other day. He's mahoosive. I mean mean i'm tempted to say record breaker uh i wonder whether you could enter him into some sort of contest it's like a

beanbag he's like yeah he's like if you sat on bagpuss that's what you'd get um right uh greetings to uh now what is the name of this contributor? It's Pam, who's in south of Boston. She's in south of Boston, in Massachusetts. Thank you so much for what you do. My favourite British natterers, she says. Oh. Natterers? Are we OK with that? I'll take natterers.

Yeah. All right. She's got a question for us. Should I book a place in Kensington or Notting Hill or Hampstead Heath for my husband's very first visit to London? I've been before. I stayed in some fifth-floor hostel, God knows where, and a distant cousin's lovely house in Richmond.

Both of these options no longer available. I want someplace central but not super touristy or super loud at night where do you recommend oh gosh so out of those three choices it would have to be hamster teeth i would say so because i think notting hill is going to be quite busy and it's stratospherically expensive yeah i would imagine um notting hill is a fascinating place isn't it because it's now something it's not like the movies it's now something it would never have dreamt of being about 80 years ago. I mean, this is just extraordinary.

Kensington has always rated itself. I, for one, have never understood why the station is High Street, Kensington and not Kensington High Street. I've asked people and no one can tell me. What is the answer? Well, does it follow the pattern of South Kensington? Because that could also have been Kensington South.

That's another tube station. Yes, for our listeners outside of the London Metropolitan Network. Okay. No, sorry, that doesn't explain it. Why is it High Street, Kensington? Someone tell us. Hampstead Heath, of course, as previous correspondents have alluded to, is a place that all of us who live in London regularly walk along across.

We yomp there. And it's always empty. It's always completely empty. We meet the love of our life when we go for a hot chocolate overlooking. You can just see London in the distance, can't you? That's exactly what, that's what Hampstead Heath is. So I think the difficulty of Hampstead Heath, and it depends whether or not you're trying to find a hotel for your husband

or he's capable of looking after himself in an Airbnb. But there aren't actually an awful lot of hotels up on Hampstead Heath. So you're going to find all of the hotels in Kensington. That's true. Yeah. But you would probably find some really lovely little Airbnbs and all rental apartments in Amsterdam. There was a hotel in Kensington that was widely used by BBC executives and they would sometimes just pay for

an hour. That's shocking. I know. There used to be a few what we call affairs going on in the, I'm not going to name it. How do you know? Someone told me. Okay. Someone told me. Interesting. So I hope I'm really interested to hear actually, Pam,

how your husband gets on. As Fee says there, we don't know whether he's travelling alone or whether you'll be with him to guide him through London's beautiful streets. I think you'd have a really lovely, you'd get a really lovely, he'd get a lovely feel of London if he was in Hampstead. I think more than Kensington, which is now quite, I think, just bland.

It's rich and bland. And Notting Hill is rich and maybe a little bit less bland. But I'd go Hampstead Heath. I think that'd be lovely. And also, yes, you too can yomp across it and something romantic will almost certainly occur. Something romantic happens to lots of people who visit Hampstead Heath.

Stop it. Depending on which part of the Heath and what time of day. No, don't, don't, don't. But you know, I wish that Pam had been available to us because I went to stay in Boston. I was making a programme at the University of Massachusetts, Jane, a while back, and I did that thing in Boston where I checked into a hotel that was completely the wrong part of Boston so I only had two nights there to kind of get over jet lag before going

up to the university campus to make this program and I realized after night one that I was just in the wrong part of Boston all of the fun of Boston was across the water from me and I didn't ever really get to see it or enjoy it. So were you in the St Albans of Boston? Well, I think I was just in the kind of, I think I was in a great big corporate hotel, you know, that probably lots of people went to on conferences. Right. But I definitely wasn't in the heart of Boston

and I didn't really find the heart of Boston. I found a very good outlet store, but that was about it. And it was one of those things where I just regret it because I probably won't go back to Boston now, but I definitely didn't get the vibe of a city that lots of people really, really, really love. Yes, they love it. Well, do you know, I've never been to Boston,

but I have been to the airport. It was the very first place in America I ever touched down in. I was en route to somewhere else and I was going via Boston and I was so excited that I was in America. I'd finally arrived in America and I bought a frozen yoghurt on the concourse of Boston Airport. Get you. It was very, very sophisticated.

Yes, I bet it was. I think it must have been in the early 1990s. But it's such a humdinger of a city now. Oh, I'm sure it's beautiful. With obviously all of the tech around it and MIT and stuff like that. So, Pam, where were you? Where were you, Pam? She's got a good story here.

Many years ago, says Pam, an English exchange student called Sally went to my high school when I was a senior. Sally's friend, Adie, from Croydon, came to stay and we put him up for a couple of weeks. Now, Adie was a great kid, but a major pothead. He was also completely in love with the orange tree in our backyard. I lived in my hometown of San Diego, California,

and we also had lemon and lime trees. And every morning, Adie would wake up before the rest of the house, California, and we also had lemon and lime trees. And every morning, Ady would wake up before the rest of the house, crazy because it's up until dawn anyway, smoking weed on the patio. Then, I hope you don't think every British person is like this, Pam. I mean, Ady sounds very much the exception, doesn't he?

He'd pick oranges and make freshly squeezed juice for the whole family. Then later in the day, he would do the same thing for tea. I asked him why, and he said, well, in England, we only get satsumas at Christmas time, which launched a whole long discussion about oranges, satsumas, navels, tangerines, and mandarins. That's when I first heard the term satsuma. We were also very embarrassed about being so blasé about the fact that we had an

orange tree in our backyard. So when Adie left, my dad decided to continue making freshly squeezed juice in the mornings when the oranges were in season until we moved away from that house. I can understand Adie's enthusiasm because to an English person, and Croydon was his hometown apparently, it would be incredibly exotic. Very exotic. To be able to have an orange tree. Yep. Most of us have to make do with be able to have an orange tree. Yep. Most of us have to make do with a rather minging crabapple tree.

You can't eat the fruit. I've got a fig bush in my garden. It's absolutely no use at all. The figs are disgusting and it's incredibly fast growing. It is a fig tree. I know. It's enormous. It takes over everything else.

It's almost like it's fecund. Oh, it's a lovely word. Don't you? No no it's one of my favorites that actually is the definition of it fecund is very fertile it's very fertile oh i thought it meant already up the duff no no okay to be fair i think that would be pregnant if you were looking for the right yes i think it's basically just a rearranging of some of the words in Fagund. But I don't think it's Fagund.

Right, enough. Jane says, with Jane with a Y, talking of driving London tube trains the other day on a recent trip to Copenhagen. We made, gosh, we have such international listeners, Jane. We made good use of the excellent Scandi-designed metro system. We hopped into the front carriage one day and were surprised to discover there was no actual driver.

Instead, there was a large front window and you could look out into the tunnel with all its twists and turns and see the lights of the approaching station. It was thrilling, as though you were driving the train, a bit like sitting up front on a double-decker bus. Well, all of these things are going to come to us, aren't they, the self-driving trains? Well, yes, they are on the Docklands Light Railway, aren't they? Yes, and I

think they're also at Gatwick, aren't they? You get a little... Oh, yes, when you go between the Gatwick North and we have as an alternative Gatwick South. Thank you. Anna just wants to say that she is drinking Ribena.

She drinks it quite a lot and she says, I'm writing this in the hope that multitudes of others will also be mailing to say it's not weird to drink squash and unfortunately, Anna, it's you and another person but it's not everybody. But I don't

think that means that I'm right. I personally just find it weird in adult life. I don't like squash. I left squash behind when they invented carbonated water. Yeah. And you very kindly gifted me a soda stream, which is doing great service. Is it?

Yes, absolutely. Well, that's good to know. No, we absolutely love it. But life before bubbled water was a very, very difficult place to be. Do you remember? Because it was grim. And then we suddenly got Perrier. Oh, gosh.

But I don't even remember getting a... We had a soda stream. Oh, no, you you see i didn't have one in the in the house it was amazing absolutely just incredible so we went from not being allowed sweets of any kind ever to having basically just a sugar tap you just plug your mouth in i remember that we had a kind of own brand iron brew that we could make. Woof. It's just such a happy memory. It really does. Can we just bring in briefly the public transport system of Glasgow?

And then we'll get on to Adrian. Because this is, I have been to Glasgow, always a great place to visit. Eleanor says, if you ever visit Glasgow, we have a very special tube system here. It's unaffectionately known as the clockwork orange because it goes in a loop you've got two options clockwise or anti-clockwise riding the whole thing would take under an hour and as it does just keep going you could almost make a day of it the subway opens at 8 30 in the morning the last service is on a sunday night on a sunday night is at 8 30 which i'm sure you'll agree is plenty late enough for a night out, I would agree. The trains are ancient, from the 70s, barely enough headroom to stand up and nothing prepares

you as a newcomer for that first trip. The screeching and careering is so intense that you feel certain it will derail or smash into the tunnel walls. There are supposedly new trains on the pipeline, in the pipeline, that are still being tested. But I imagine there'll be a certain amount of nostalgia for those terrifying commutes that just add a certain frisson to your morning. That's Eleanor up there, which really irritates people in Glasgow. People who are listening in Stornoway will be fuming.

Yeah. Because to them, Glasgow is the barmy south. Right. Adrian Edmondson is probably best known for his contribution to the comedy of the 80s, 90s and maybe into the early noughties of this country. So you might know him as part of the comic strip. You would certainly know him from The Young Ones

and from Bottom, the series that he did with his partner, his comedy partner and really close friend Rick Mayall. But there's lots and lots of things that I don't think you will know about Adrian Edmondson. He is a serious actor, very much enjoys doing that now, has no intention of returning to comedy at all. He is married to the complete legend that is Jennifer Saunders. And he came in to talk about his autobiography, which is called Berserker, in which he charts a difficult childhood, quite a difficult journey through school. And he's incredibly honest about what all of that has taught him in life. And just to warn you that some of the content in this interview is quite sensitive and does discuss childhood abuse.

So this isn't for little ears. And if you've been affected by any of the issues, then please do email feedback at times.radio. And we will point you to the right place of support. Now, the day that Adrian came in on, we were very, very grateful to him because he was doing an urgent errand for one of his adult children which involved moving some furniture around i think so he ended up having to drive into london bridge and anybody you know central london nobody ever drives to london bridge so uh he was a little bit late and flustered arriving in the studio because he couldn't find anywhere to park his car and he'd done such a bold and crazy thing jane he just left his car and he'd done such a bold and crazy thing, Jane. He'd just left his car

and he came in to do the interview. Oh, that makes me feel very tense. But it was also the day that Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, was presenting evidence at the Covid inquiry and that's where our conversation started. Personally, I had a brilliant lockdown. It was the first time in my life that I stopped. I just stopped. I felt like I'd been going at it like a bull since the age of 12. And there was a huge amount of white noise in my head. And during that lockdown, I'm lucky I live in the countryside

and got a garden, grow a lot of vegetables. But I just had a release of pressure that I've never felt before in my life. How much of that pressure was because nobody else was able to do anything either? I'm not sure if that was it. I think it was my own personal inability to get anything done apart from just sit there. I started looking at books about household birds. How had I never learnt all the birds in my garden? I'd never learnt them. And I remember feeling...

I started to learn the bird song as well. And there was one point where I was in my new bit of vegetable garden and I could hear a song thrush in a bush and I couldn't see it and I stood for 20 minutes on the spot doing nothing other than trying to see a bird in a holly bush and it was it was like enlightenment I've always thought enlightenment was it was kind of climbing a distant mountain in the Himalayas and finding a guru and being told the secret of life.

But in effect, what I found out was that it was just a complete emptying of your brain. How much of that have you been able to carry forward to still do now? It's there sort of of a powerful reminder i think it's diminishing obviously because life got hectic again uh but i did come to terms with a lot of because i wrote my biography uh sort of not at that time but that was the start of thinking about myself and wondering why I mean my book's called berserker and I I became a berserker at the age of sort of 12 and I didn't really stop being a berserker until till that moment in the garden and so I was thinking about it so and I've I've come to terms with a lot of my past so I think think I'm a more equable, biddable human being.

Tell us a bit more about the term berserker. A berserker is... Well, I kind of use that because a berserker is a kind of Norse warrior of legend, off their heads on sort of henbane and large quantities of alcohol, and they sort of fight their way through everything in a berserk fashion. I mean sort of wild and untamed and unstoppable. People who think they're impregnable. And I think that's what I was.

So much of that comes from what can only be described as a really brutal and difficult childhood. And you bounced around so much, didn't you? You were never in one place for very long. Yeah, my dad was a teacher and he taught forces kids. So he was essentially sort of in the army and the RAF at the same time because he got contracts from different people. So we lived in Cyprus, Bahrain and Uganda.

And we went to sort of different schools every year until I was 12 when I was sent away to a boarding school. And that was the first time I lived anywhere for longer than two years, you know, at a stretch. But school was a horrendous experience, was not nice I don't understand why anyone would send their kid to a boarding school can you tell us a bit more about yours um it was it was uh it was a place without love I think that's the main thing I mean everyone knows the stories about being beaten we we got beaten a lot we got sort of fiddled with.

And that was sort of all par for the course. But I think the real damage was the lack of any kind of pastoral care at all, any kind of feeling. The housemaster I had was a sadistic bully, you know. Was he the guy that you gave the nickname Guy Browse? No, he was the rather kinder headmaster. I mean, my only interaction with him was when he used to formally beat me. And he was the kinder one. Yeah, yeah.

So you say it's par for the course, Adrian, but actually, A, it shouldn't be. It should never have been. And, I mean, I don't know whether that's just quite a successful coping mechanism to be able to say that. But it was really horrible and really sadistic and these elements of, as you know,

sexual pleasure that these men were getting from hurting you. I mean, it's so, it's so, so very wrong. Yeah, it absolutely is. But there comes a point where you can't, you can't sort of just say, cry, oh me and my poor life and everything. You've got to kind of make terms with it.

And because you are the sort of product of what you've been through. And if you hate what you've been through, then you start sort of hating yourself. So I've sort of product of what you've been through and if you hate what you've been through then you start sort of hating yourself so I I've sort of realized that I turned everything that happened to me into comedy basically I uh I I think there were two ways of dealing with it one was to buckle and cry which is what they wanted uh and the other was to laugh at them and just do it again. So, yeah. Yeah. And that was more fun. Have you ever had any desire, though, in adult life to try and pursue the men who did these things to you

through some form of public justice? I mean, there are quite a few cases that are being attempted to be tried at the moment, which would be of men of a similar age, actually, in their kind of 70s and 80s now. I've sort of become friends with Louis de Bernier, you know, who wrote Captain Crow's Mandalorian, because he's sort of making a list of people who were attacked,

because he was too. He was the sort of same age. I don't really know. I got a letter from the current headmaster of the school where I went and saying it was a very different place, you know, and I'm sure it is. And it made me think about those institutions, and you think they're always very proud of their history, but actually their history has nothing to do with what those places are.

It's the people who are in them at the moment. And I'm sure the people there at the moment are decent human beings. But I can't go back till my one tormentor's dead, I think. My chief tormentor. Right, fair enough. So tell us about comedy and what it meant to you, because it's so clear reading the book that you say when you met rick male that the thing that

that that bound you two together was this almost desperate desire to laugh to kind of mainline comedy it had to be quite manic it had to be you know really beyond the normal kind of i've said something funny and an audience has just ditted yeah Yeah. I mean, I think, I can't quite speak for Rick because Rick's family upbringing was very different to mine. But I think I filled the gap where my family should have been with a search for adrenaline. And that's certainly true of the kind of comedy I liked and the comedy we tried to pursue.

We didn't... We became comedians by accident, I think, because I think if you'd got us when we got to uni, we'd have both said we wanted to be an actor, you know. But the state of the equity, the actors' union at the time, was such that it was all kind of catch-22 and you had to have this and that and the other. One way of getting in was to get variety contracts,

which we thought we could get through doing pub theatre, which turned into our act, which sort of... And our act sort of transcended the approach to being an actor until sort of 20 years ago, really. And you were very successful, I'm going to say very quickly, but perhaps it didn't feel quick to you, but you became such a thing, didn't you, within that kind of troop of talent?

You were the new wave of comedy. You were the alternative comedy. Yeah. How did that feel to you at the time? How did it feel? It felt like a party. That's what it felt like. When we finally gave up our day jobs,

you know, I used to do motorcycle messaging and filling car batteries with acid and making pork pies in a factory. When we gave those up and... You washed your hands in between those jobs. Just like Boris. As thoroughly as Boris. That's how I washed my hands.

You know, we just... We got this residency with the Comic Strip Club and it was the first time we were earning our money from comedy properly, not just ten quid at the weekend. And it was joyous. It wasn't a lot of money. It was enough to sort of stop signing on. And we just loved our lives.

We didn't really care about success at the time. I think we started caring about success about 10 years later. Once you've had success, you realise that everyone else is kind of measuring you on the first bit of success you've had and then you all have to start talking about it all the time. And you're interesting on that, actually, because you make the point several times in the book not just the chapter about the young ones that people focus on this thing about you but

you keep on saying it was just basically 14 weeks 14 weeks this is my little mantra move on move on and i had such a problem with it i never used to watch it at all you know well no it's the same with anything it's not because i've got a problem with it. There are some people who sit at home and watch their own videos 20 years on, and there are others who think, well, something better might be happening around the corner, and I'm heading this way. But everyone else pulls you back. Whenever you have any chat with a researcher to go on any programme,

they always say, what were they like, David? They're young ones. And I've talked about it for much longer than I spent making it. You've written very movingly about your double act with Rick and obviously your love for him and your incredibly close friendship. You say a double act is like a marriage. It's an effort to explain the closeness of the partnership, the abiding love and affection,

the telepathic anticipation of what the other might be thinking. But it also acknowledges that, like in many marriages, the love and affection can be taken for granted, people can feel suffocated, and they can sometimes yearn for divorce. And yours and Rick's is like a beautiful love affair, isn't it? So we know the successful bit, I think we can all understand that. But it would be interesting, I suppose,

to hear a bit more about what happens when something changes in that working partnership and how difficult that became for you. Well, there were two ways it changed. One I've kind of alluded to already, saying that we wanted to be actors when we went to uni. And I never kind of lost that. I've always thought of myself as an actor and a writer.

I mean, I think the parts that I write for myself, the comedy parts, are acting roles. I mean, I don't look or seem anything like them, I hope. So that was one thing and i and i i sort of i i perceived when we when we got into the early 2000s and we were doing our last live tour uh that that we were we we had perhaps peaked and we we were looking we reached the top of the mountain and we were looking over the other side and it didn't seem as sunny over there and I thought it was a good time to stop what we were doing.

And it was a kind of decision that Rick never understood. And, you know, we'd been... We'd both cheated on each other to carry the marriage analogy through, you know. We'd both gone off and done a lot of other things. But I kind of called a proper stop to it. And it was a thing he never got over. And partly because he enjoyed the comedy we made, but partly because he'd also hit his head in a sort of famous accident in the late 90s.

Fell off his quad bike and was sort of three days in a coma. And he was never really entirely the same person after that. Voice Over describes what's happening on your iphone screen voiceover on settings so you can navigate it just by listening books contacts calendar double tap to open breakfast with anna from 10 to 11 and get on with your day accessibility there's more to iPhone. You're listening to Off Air with Jane and Fi and we're talking to Ade Edmondson and we're discussing his comedy partner, Rick Mayle, and their relationship.

And I pointed out to him that although their comedy was really similar and all of the stuff that they laughed about, they'd come from very different backgrounds well they're both sort of middle class i suppose but yes but i don't think his mum tried to throttle him no no and his dad was a drama lecturer and uh was very kind of supportive of everything he did whereas mine never came um i really i really wanted to keep the amateur version of us going the sort of, the studenty side the kind of, just the joy of knocking about together going but it was bizarre, there was a pressure on it always

whenever we met after the kind of decision not to do it anymore to kind of say, well should we make another series? Should we do this? Should we do that? And eventually I kind of, I sort of called his bluff. I said, all right. I mean, because I was pretty sure the BBC wouldn't want it because, you know, they'd happily cancelled after the third series of Bolton.

They didn't want any more. So we eventually sat down and dashed off this really slapdash script. And they said yes. I thought they would easily say no and then it would be the BBC's fault, the rotten BBC. And, you know, I would be off the hook. But then it just got more complicated and we tried to write it

and it was just too different and too long after the event. Your other marriage is to the gorgeous and wonderful and extremely talented Jennifer Saunders. Have you been together now for, is it 38 years? I believe it is. Yes, well, congratulations. Well, thank you very much. Massive, massive congratulations.

It is quite rare for a couple who share the same profession in front of the big lights to make it all the way through so how does that work has it ever been competitive between the two of you who's kind of out in front doing better getting better ratings whatever do you know i know people find it hard to understand and they think our lives must be a kind of living sitcom and, you know, kind of... that we live in some kind of celebrity bubble, but... Don't burst it too much, OK?

She basically spent... She would love... If she could get a job sweeping leaves, that's what she would love, if it paid as much as her present job. Really? Yeah. Oh, she loves sweeping. And I love growing tomatoes.

You know, and we kind of love sitting with our tea on our knee and carping at the television. But presumably you could both do that. You don't need to still be out there, do you? Well, I enjoy my other stuff too you know and uh and we enjoy we enjoy the company of people you know uh it's a bit harder to know how to play brilliant football if you've never seen brilliant football so if you've had a difficult and nasty childhood how do you know how to make your children's childhood better?

I don't really know. I've only ever used one rule, which is think of what Dad would do and then don't do that. You know, and, you know, it's... I recognise I'm tricky and I think I'm less tricky than I was. But I had anger issues, I think what people call them, sort of 20 or 30 years ago.

And I think the kids were not the recipients of that but were the audience to some of it, which must have been unpleasant. the audience to some of it, which must have been unpleasant. So, you know, I try. I love them and I tell them I do. And do you feel that you are in quite a kind of peaceful place now? I mean, I have to say, I think your book is one of the most honest autobiographies that I've read in a long time. So do you feel that you have come a kind of circle?

I do. And I also feel the book is about, it's not entirely about me. I know it is. But it's about everyone else. It's about the world we live in, I hope. It's also got some cracking anecdotes along the way, people that we all recognise and stuff like that. I don't think I can let you go without asking you if you wouldn't mind just retelling the night at Mick Jagger's house. Yeah. I mean, this starts with the fact that our kids used to go to the same school as Mick Jagger's kids.

And there was a plan at one point to make Ab Fab, remake it in America with Americans. Why, no one knows, because the English version was perfectly successful in America anyway. But anyway, Geri Hall got wind of this and she stopped Jennifer at the school gates and sort of buttonholed her and said, she expressed a wish to play Patsy. And Jennifer ummed and aahed. And Gerry said, well, why don't you all come round to dinner and we'll talk about it further.

I've got rubbish accents. And we turned up and Gerry opened the door dressed as Patsy. You know, with the hair up and everything and the costume. And we went in and she told us that Mick was upstairs having his eyebrows dyed because he was about to go on tour. And we sat making kind of small talk for a bit. And then their maid invited us down to a rather dingy basement. I mean, you think rock stars might have nice dinner tables,

but this one was rather... Maybe it was the second one, I don't know. And we had a sort of school dinner. And then Mick joined us, and his eyebrows looked fabulous. Bit out of place but he looked fabulous and um he was he was kind of he was kind of he he presented as a grumpy school boy you know he didn't want to be there um which i really liked about him i thought that was great because uh you know you want you i mean i have to tell you, I mean, he was one of my absolute heroes as a teenager. I loved The Stones.

First album I ever bought was Gimme Shelter. And so I liked his grumpiness, and he was aware that Jerry wanted to impress Jennifer, who he thought was a writer or something, and he thought I was her manager, and he called me Andrew. And Jerry said, no, no, no, no. That's not Andrew, that's Adam. And anyway, you don't get to be Sir Mick Jagger.

You don't get there without knowing that, you know, some dinner party etiquette. And he noticed that there was no wine on the table. And he asked us if we drank wine. He said he didn't, but if we wanted some, we should have some. And we said yes, because we're quite keen on the imbibation of wine. And Jerry looked very worried and left the room and came back about five minutes later with a half-full bottle of wine

with a kind of clean film wrap on it and said does wine like kind of go off and we we impressed on her that good wine you know can last for hundreds of years so we she poured us each a glass of this what turned out to be cooking sherry and uh we drank it and that was that was more or less the end of the evening, and pretty much the end of my absolute adulation. Oh, that's a shame. There's only, you know, the standards, this is the, you know, the god of debauchery.

Yeah, so you really can't... There's no standards to keep up to. You can't listen to it in the same way. Adrian Edmondson with, I think, one of the great showbiz anecdotes of all time i will never ever be able to listen to a rolling stones track in the same way again and i'm going to be really concentrating on mick jagger's eyebrows as well how old is mick now 972 still rocking yeah uh and proof that know, good wine can last for hundreds of years

if you just put a bit of cling film over the top. Oh, it's glorious. Just glorious. So Adrianne Ebenson's book is called Berserker and I would hard recommend it, as you say, just because it contains, I think, a very thoughtful perspective and honest look back at life well lived.

I enjoyed meeting him. Yes, he seemed that really, really interesting man with self-awareness. Yes. Which is always very good. Yeah, and it is what you want from a decent memoir. You don't want to just read about all the glory days and all that kind of stuff. You need somebody who's come... You're not going to enjoy mine.

...to some conclusions about their own life, both the good and the bad. Well, I've kind of read yours. Glory days. And obviously, obviously, I look forward to your second volume enormously. Who have we got on tomorrow? I've got no idea. Oh, I'll show you who it is.

It's Catherine Jakeways tomorrow. Catherine is the person who has written The Buccaneers for Apple Television. But before that, she had a successful career at, well, she did work for Radio 4, the BBC. I'm not sure they entirely realised how talented she was

and what a wonderful person they had on their books. She's also been in lots of bits and pieces. She was in Miranda, wasn't she? She was in The Archers and we'll discuss that in huge detail never mind her hugely successful show The Buccaneers we're going to mainly focus on the role she played in The Archers I'm going to be in the laundry room for half an hour everybody

feel free to join me I do love the fact that one of our talented producers on the team insists on referring to that programme as The Buccaneers I think it benefits from it it's The Buccaneers for me to producers on the team insists on referring to that programme as the bouquineers. I think it benefits from it. It's the bouquineers for me. Good night. But she's not well today,

so we don't know. Anyway, there'll be no stuffing balls left. Goodbye. We're bringing the shutters down on another episode of the internationally acclaimed podcast Off Air with Jane Garvey and Fee Glover. Our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Henry Tribe. But don't forget that you can get another two hours of us

every Monday to Thursday afternoon here on Times Radio. We start at 3pm and you can listen for free on your smart speaker. Just shout Play Times Radio at it. You can also get us on DAB Radio in the car or on the Times Radio app whilst you're out and about being extremely busy. And you can follow all our Tosh behind the mic and elsewhere on our Instagram account. Just go onto Insta and search for Jane and Fee and give us a follow.

So in other words, we're everywhere, aren't we, Jane? Pretty much everywhere. Thank you for joining us. And we hope you can join us again on Off Air very soon. Thank you. I'm