Berserker! by Adrian Edmondson

Author:Adrian Edmondson [Edmondson, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2023-08-31T17:00:00+00:00

He gives us a small but positive review, remarking on Rik’s ‘rubbery-faced intensity’ and describing me as ‘the eternal little man’. Though remembering those phrases again, I’m not sure if it is a positive review . . . but we think it is at the time, and look on it as validation that we are ‘professionals’.

Another member of the tiny throng at a church hall in Kennington is a large, fiery Welshman who’s the manager of a venue called The Tramshed in Woolwich. He’s only recently taken over the organization and he’s a man on a mission to turn it into a place of daring artistic excellence. He wants to create a new kind of cabaret on Friday and Saturday nights and offers us a residency. We grab it.

Should have gone to Egypt . . .

The Tramshed, it turns out, is as much a community centre as an arts centre, and it’s a positive thriving asset to the local area: it’s busy all week long with community events and youth theatre projects and on weekends they create their own fun night out – which attracts quite a few squaddies from the local barracks – a jolly sketch show called Fundation, led by a guy called Joe Griffith, which features, among others, another comedy double act called Hale & Pace.

But the fiery Welshman has taken against Fundation – he considers it too lowbrow – and wants us to replace it (!). He also wants to revolutionize the artistic output and we get bit parts in his production of Macbeth set in Vietnam with soldiers smoking dope through shotguns.

‘I want it to be really relevant, really punk you know – like . . . GREEN HAIR’ becomes a phrase of his that we remember forever. We use it whenever we want to describe something that is catastrophically misguided.

So every weekend he puts on a kind of variety show and we come on in between the jazz band Greenwich Meantune and the speciality act of the week. It’s not our milieu – we’re doing our Sam Beckett piss-takes and the locals and the squaddies want Cannon and Ball. We end up doing the few sketches from The Wart! that work in that environment. We do them over and over again, separating the wheat from the chaff, until we’re basically just doing the Dangerous Brothers.

The Dangerous Brothers are like this: Rik plays Richard Dangerous who looks as demented as Ron Mael, the mad keyboard player from the band Sparks, but on amphetamines. Like Ron he appears to have a hidden agenda but he’s wired, anxious and hyperactive. I play Sir Adrian Dangerous who is fundamentally a berserker – he is furiously violent and out of control. He’s the obvious foot soldier in the relationship, but is too stupid to understand his position. There’s always a suspicion that they are being watched by a higher power – Mr Cooper – and that if they fuck up they will suffer serious consequences, so there’s a frenzied urgency to get everything right.

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