Adrian Edmondson: Live Ade

The former 'Young One' is now a country boy. SAM MARLOWE talks to Adrian Edmondson as he prepares to star in a thoroughly local production

Apart from the odd crazed soap fan, few people have trouble distinguishing actors from the roles they play. Even so, Adrian Edmondson takes me by surprise. I didn't expect him to sport studs and bovver boots like Vyvyan, the psychotic student in The Young Ones. Nor did I anticipate the gravy-brown suit and glassy-eyed lechery of Bottom's Eddie Hitler. But Edmondson couldn't be more different from his alter egos. He has a pleasant, open face, distinctly unlined for his 46 years, and the dome of his head is covered by strawberry-blond fluff. Softly and meticulously spoken, he sometimes veers abruptly from an almost sombre intensity to delighted, ribald laughter, yet he's unfailingly polite. All in all, it's a disconcertingly civilised experience.

We're talking in the rehearsal rooms of the Northcott Theatre, in Exeter, where Edmondson will star in the title role in The Life and Times of Young Bob Scallion. The play is a dark comedy by Mick Martin, whose theatre-writing credits include The Immigrant's Song and A Weekend in England, as well as TV work on Ballykissangel, Dream Team and Crossroads. Bob Scallion follows the misadventures of a young man released from a borstal in 1975, only to spend the next 25 years careering from one disaster to the next, through brothels, prison cells and the criminal underworld.

Comedy may be what he's famous for, but Edmondson says that he has always regarded himself first and foremost as an actor. Born in Bradford in 1957, he was sent to Pocklington boarding school aged 12. He played Hamlet there, and knew then that he wanted to perform. After school, he went to Manchester University – he says that he couldn't face a drama-school audition – where he met Rik Mayall. The pair shared a disdain for the actorly pretensions of their earnest fellow drama students, and found that, together, they were funny.

So they formed a comedy duo, and after graduating from Manchester they went to Edinburgh, filled with youthful optimism, to perform their latest creation – a piece entitled Death on the Toilet. They imagined that fame would beckon, but, over the next year, they managed just four gigs. "It was very barren," Edmondson recalls. "We spent a lot of time working in exhaust-pipe warehouses and doing dull office jobs. We tried phoning a few agents, but they didn't want us. We wouldn't have fitted in with Keith Harris and Orville."

Eventually, Edmondson and Mayall joined a plethora of other rising talents at the newly opened Comedy Store, where they became part of the early Eighties "alternative comedy" wave. But the tag was a gross generalisation. "There were a lot of frankly awful political comics during that period who were torture to watch. And great play was made of the fact that we were all non-sexist, non-racist – non-funny, some would say," Edmondson chuckles. "There was so much funny stuff already around. I mean, who can say whether Morecambe and Wise were old or new school? They were just funny. But we did attract a new, younger audience."

The original Comedy Store venue was a London strip club, complete with topless waitresses. "It was gorgeous! We were strictly 'non-sexist', but we could look at the jugs!" Edmondson roars with laughter, then adopts the attitude of a swooning, salivating youth. "Hello, I'm a non-sexist comedian. I'll have two of those, please!" Despite the distractions, the gigs led to cult status with the comedy collective the Comic Strip and the BBC sitcom of squalid student life, The Young Ones. The latter was a huge hit and gave Edmondson and Mayall the opportunity to develop further the characters that they were already working with on stage. Edmondson admits that not much about their double act has changed since. So, what's its perennial appeal?

"There must be some truth in the characters that people recognise," he muses. "I mean, you might think that we only do fart gags and hit each other – but isn't that what a lot of life's about?" Ah, yes. Fart gags. Having never seen the appeal myself, I wonder if the problem is that I'm female. Is Mayall and Edmondson's comedy a bloke thing? "Yes, its audience would suggest so," he replies, adding mock-regretfully, "which is a shame. I'm sure women could enjoy farting more if they would just try harder."

What else makes Edmondson laugh? He says that most TV is crap, but thinks The Simpsons is "blindingly brilliant". When I suggest that he and Mayall may have been a formative influence on some of today's television, Edmondson comes over all bashful, mumbling that it would be "too big-headed to say". But he does feel that an element of cruelty and unpleasantness has crept in. "There's a lot of yobbism in popular entertainment that I feel, rather guiltily, I may be the father-in-law of. I think it borrows from what we used to do, but they've read it wrong. It's like a Dante's Inferno of filth and nastiness, and there's no fun in it. It's just all about sex, which is actually rather dull. They just want to offend. I mean, obviously, we liked to offend, but that wasn't the purpose of the whole thing."

Edmondson and Mayall will be touring their brand of fun-filled offence around the country this autumn, as the stage version of Bottom hits the road once again. Mayall has still not completely recovered from a quad bike accident in 1998, which caused a brain haemorrhage. The accident has left him epileptic, and reliant on medication that makes him drowsy. None the less, Edmondson says that on last year's Bottom tour, he and Mayall "rediscovered the joy of performing" and "enjoyed hugely" the experience of working together.

Edmondson is currently on our screens as a "crap TV producer" in the BBC comedy drama Jonathan Creek, but theatre is uppermost in his mind right now. He'd fancied doing a play for some time, but the ones he was offered were all in London. He and his wife, the comedian Jennifer Saunders, live on a small Devonshire farm with their daughters, Ella (17), Beattie (15) and Freya (12), and Edmondson felt that a return to the metropolis, away from his family, was too high a price to pay for a West End role. Saunders and Edmondson met working at the Comedy Store in the early Eighties, but both were attached at the time. Over the next few years, though, their friendship became more intimate, and they married in 1985. It was Edmondson's second marriage – he had been briefly and unsuccessfully married to a fellow student while at Manchester.

He and Saunders moved down to Devon two years ago, settling permanently into what had been their holiday home. Here, they share a contented rural existence, where favourite leisure pursuits include gardening, feeding the cows, and watching Changing Rooms with the kids. Work, says Edmondson, is something that they regard almost as a hobby – a luxury that they can afford, since they are reportedly worth a combined £11m. They keep a small London flat for the occasional foray into urban life, and as a base for Saunders when she's working on her hugely successful sitcom, Absolutely Fabulous. But both are happiest at home in the country.

So, Edmondson approached Ben Crocker, the artistic director of the local Northcott Theatre, who suggested The Life and Times of Young Bob Scallion. The play's action takes place against a backdrop of changing Britain, finishing with New Labour, and doesn't offer a happy ending, which Edmondson says is apt. "Since Thatcher, there's been a shift in British society. Life is much more selfish, and there's no sense of a safety net or a community. It's very much about looking after number one. Which is fairly horrible, isn't it? At the end of this play, it's quite clear that the world is bleak."

He says this with such conviction that I wonder whether, as a man who has achieved not only material and artistic success, but, by all accounts, personal happiness, too, he really does regard life as bleak. "A lot of it is," he says. "I've always enjoyed gallows humour. When we write, Mayall and I like to sit and think about how small we all are, and how funny that is. If you think anything through to its conclusion, it's always quite bleak, isn't it? Things become pointless. And the only way to get out of it is to turn it into a joke." Viewed from that perspective, even the fart gags start to make sense.

'The Life and Times of Young Bob Scallion', Northcott Theatre, Stocker Road, Exeter, Devon (01392 493493) 20–29 March