Bottom (TV series)

Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall had been a double act since their first meeting as 20th Century Coyote, while they were students at Manchester University in 1976.[7][8] They developed the Eddie and Richie characters over the course of their career, which were loosely based on their own friendship. The names themselves come from Edmondson's and Mayall's own nicknames for each other; many of Mayall's characters are referred to by some variation of the name Richard, and Edmondson's character is taken from Eddie Monsoon, his nickname since university. The duo had portrayed characters similar to Eddie and Richie in their past television comedy shows The Young Ones, The Dangerous Brothers, and Filthy, Rich & Catflap.

Bottom was developed while Edmondson and Mayall planned their West End production of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot at the Queen's Theatre. According to Mayall, it was the first project that the two wrote in "some time", and it was their best work, marking "a new chapter in their relationship".[8] The title was initially as a joke, and originally intended to be "Your Bottom", giving viewers the fun of saying things like "I saw Your Bottom last night", and "I love Your Bottom"; Mayall said that Alan Yentob, then head of BBC2, took a dislike to the name and so he and Edmondson went with it. He added, "It's about two guys at the bottom of the heap ... we called it Bottom to make people think we were doing bottom jokes".[9] "It's rude, stupid, and a waste of license payers' money".[10]

Each episode was filmed in front of a live audience at 35 minutes in length, then edited to 30 minutes. The original-length scripts can be found in the published script books, and several completely removed scenes were included in the VHS release Fluff that consisted mostly of bloopers. Several (but not all) of these scenes, as well as some smaller sections of dialogue also removed for timing reasons, are included in DVD releases.

The final episode of the second series, "'s Out", was not broadcast as part of the original series, or as a part of the first repeat airing of the series. This episode was set on Wimbledon Common involving the antics of a flasher, and prior to broadcast on 15 July 1992, after the episode was filmed but before it had aired, Rachel Nickell was murdered on Wimbledon Common. In consequence the BBC delayed the episode's broadcast before the VHS release of the second series. The episode was first broadcast as part of a rerun of the second series on 10 April 1995.

Between the second and third series, Edmondson and Mayall pursued other projects, including the Bottom theatrical productions.

On 19 August 2012, Edmondson tweeted that he and Mayall had begun writing a new project together, possibly a series based on their 1997 stage show, Bottom Live 3: Hooligan's Island. On 23 August the BBC announced that they had commissioned a series of Hooligan's Island to be aired on BBC2 in 2013.[14][15] However, the project was cancelled that October prior to production as Edmondson said that he wished to pursue other interests.

Edmondson and Mayall toured Bottom across five UK tours. The first tour, Bottom Live, lasted 43 dates across 10 weeks in 1993.[16] The stage shows were often cruder than the television series with stronger language and new elements such as Richie's latent bisexuality and occasional desire to have sex with Eddie, such is Richie's desperation to have sex with anything. A show from each tour was recorded and released for home video.

Following the 1997 "Hooligan's Island" tour, Mayall and Edmondson wrote a spin-off movie together, which Edmondson directed. Entitled Guest House Paradiso, it was released in December 1999. When released on DVD it was advertised as the "Bottom movie"; this had been denied in an interview on UK breakfast show The Big Breakfast the week prior to its British cinema release.[17] Nevertheless, despite the characters being given new surnames ('Richard Twat' - which he insists is pronounced 'Thwaite' - and 'Eddie Elizabeth Ndingobamba'), they are effectively the same characters, running a grotty remote guest house next to a nuclear power plant. The style of humour is very much in the same vein as Bottom,[18] with a storyline of the pair feeding guests radioactive fish, causing massive amounts of vomiting.

'*' = Episodes featuring only the two main characters
'+' = Episodes where no part of the episode is set in the flat

DVD releases of Bottom have an audio edit made to the fourth episode of the first series, Apocalypse. At the funfair when Richie realises that his wallet is missing, he originally called the fair staff "thieving bastard gyppos". In the DVD releases the word 'gyppos' has been replaced with 'yobbos'.