‘Close the curtain, I’m trying to watch the TV.’

Hello to all you smashing-blouse-wearing pledgers. If you’re in the UK right now then chances are you’re smothered in ‘low calorie’ sun tan lotion and perhaps looking forward to the return of the need for drizzle oil, gloom juice and WIND SMEAR! Either that or you’re sick to the gold teeth of hearing people banging on about the heat.

Either way, we thought it was high time to send you a summer update on how the Talking Bottom book is progressing. We know many of you have been asking and we appreciate your patience. It turns out penning an intelligently-written, well-researched and (at times) humorous book takes quite a while. And the book we’re writing is taking some time too.

As three of us are scribbling this massive tome, we are each giving every chapter a ruddy good seeing too before we feel confident that the final version is ready to submit. Honestly, you can SEE our nipples we’re working so hard! Once it is delivered, it will be subject to a robust editing process by Unbound (i.e the publishers will make sure it isn’t a load of old b*llocks like War and Peace).

We promise to inform you the moment we can share news of an expected publication date but it is likely going to hit the shelves in 2023, rather than 2022 as first hoped. Apologies that we made a slight miscalculation on the timings but, rest assured, the research stage is complete and large swathes of it are written. We are excited to share our 100% unofficial guide to the greatest sitcom ever made with you all, and we are enduringly grateful to each and every one of you for pledging your hard-earned cash to support the project in the first place.

It’s not too late for others to pledge and get their name printed in the back, and receive exclusive rewards, so do keep spreading the word to other Rik and Ade fans. As a bonus for your efforts, ‘stretch goals’ mean that if the project reaches 150% funding then every reader will receive a set of Bottom postcards and, if we reach 175%, a PDF chapter ‘A-Z’ of Bottom will be unlocked for every pledger, too: https://unbound.com/books/bottom/

Meanwhile, please follow us on social media (@TalkingBottom) for upcoming podcast updates and Bottom-heavy funny content.

Yours sincerely (and sweatily),

Paul, Angela and Mat xxx

Bottom fans! ‘Have you ever seen such glorious sunshine?’

Bottom is 30 years old today! A rather bumper crop of cards this year! 

To celebrate, we thought we’d ‘have everyone round from the pub for bit of a drink and a dance’ and then give you an update on the Talking Bottom book! It’s gonna happen!

Thanks to all you FAAAAAANTASTIC pledgers we are currently furiously writing it, researching it, then stopping and having a fag, and then writing it a bit more. It’s a work in progress and it should be out in 2022 (we don’t know the date yet but we promise, and we mean it - look we haven’t got our fingers crossed or anything – that it will be with you as soon as possible to study. While you’re alone in the house.)

In other big news - to mark Bottom entering its dirty thirties (oo-er) - we’re launching a special anniversary podcast series delving into themes like ‘physical comedy’ and ‘class and poverty’ to honour Bottom’s comedy legacy. There’ll also be exclusive interviews from many of the cast and crew that worked on the show. To find out who you’ll have to search ‘Talking Bottom’ wherever you usually download your podcasts from. It’s free so do try being a bit more Buddhist about it and have a listen!

And, as this is a special occasion, we also have two great new pledge levels being unveiled today:

*‘The gaudily stained loveblob containers’ - A pair of Richie's underpants, complete with their unique "lived in" look. Handle with care (and rubber gloves and tongs).

*’Did you just hear the letterbox flapping?’ - A bundle of post intended for the residents 11 Mafeking Parade has found its way to us. We'll keep the contents a surprise but we did steam one open and saw that Rumbelows REALLY want their TV back…

If you’ve already pledged your support by pre-ordering a copy of the book then that's perfectly OK with us. BUT if you want to upgrade your pledge level or one of your great mates would like to get your hands on these nice bits of objet d’art then share the news quicker than you can say Vote Labour! Here’s a handy link to guide you through the process of upgrading: http://help.unbound.com/en/articles/3159595-how-do-i-upgrade-my-level-of-support

Thanks for reading and for all your backing so far. You really are the GUYS. Now go away.

Love from,

ABBA, General Pinochet and all the lads on the Ark Royal.

(Mat, Angela and Paul) xxx

Happy Birthday to Bottom - new reward levels available!

"Good morning world! You b*****d!" 
 
New year, new horizons, new update on the Talking Bottom book! 
 
“What d’you mean ‘where’s the rest of it?’” 
 
Sorry we've been quiet of late. We know it’s been a while since you backed our great idea in good faith and we wanted to let you know that it's very nearly done. We only get one go at getting this right and want to make sure it's as good as possible. We're aware you had likely hoped it’d happen inside a year! So did we! It’s truly amazing how much time it takes to write an entire book, especially while fitting it in around our vital new hobbies. Ange has started bus surfing, Mat’s printing his own obscenely pornographic currency and Paul’s… well, he’s mostly been w**king so no change there. 
 
Apologies for being quiet on the socials but we didn't think it would be a good look to spend time posting memes and videos that's better spent researching and writing (so we’ve just been sending them to each other on whatsapp). 
 
We are marking each other's homework as we speak and will soon deliver it to Unbound, who will then decide on a publishing date. We’re writing as if Skullcrusher Henderson, Mad Dog Patrick 'Do You Want Some Of This' O'Fist, Geoffrey The Psychopathic Penis Remover and Horace Big are all eagerly awaiting their copies, too. We honestly really haven’t eloped to the Bahamas. We don’t get your hard-pledged cash until the book is out in print so it’s in our own interests to finish ourselves off as soon as possible. 
 
Sincerely - thank you so much for sticking with us. We promise it isn't going to be crap. Come on out of the corner, follow us on social media (@TalkingBottom) and if there are any Bottom fans that you think will love getting their name in the back of a book that’ll need some heavy fingering then do share the project link with them before it’s too late: https://unbound.com/books/bottom/ 
 
Must dash, the dusky maidens have finished carving us a nice bit of objet d’art and have poured out three large Malibus. We need plenty of lubrication to get our juices flowing… 
 
Lots of (nothing sexy!) love, 
 
The Sad Old Gits 
 
(Mat, Angela and Paul) xxx


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Scarpering_with_your_cash.jpg?v=1690915857" width="500" height="323">

Happy ruddy new year!

‘I thought I heard sleigh bells… has he been?’

It’s the season of goodwill and peace on earth, so we thought we’d give you an update on the Talking Bottom book.

We don’t want to deliver anything half-arsed so we’re currently researching, and interviewing cast and crew, to inform each chapter we're writing. Paul’s been down the BBC Archives to thumb through some seriously fascinating original scripts, photographs and correspondence to give us great insight into the process Rik and Ade went through to bring Bottom to our screens.

You have hopefully been listening to our Bottom 30th Anniversary celebration podcast series. Talking Bottom released one-off episodes exploring various themes in everyone's favourite ever sitcom, such as Physical Comedy, Class and Poverty, Base Needs, and Costumes. We have also shared exclusive interviews with Bottom stars including Mark Lambert (The Gas Man!), Helen Lederer (Lady Natasha), Lee Cornes (Dick Head), Lisa Maxwell (Lily Linneker) and Roger Sloman (Mr Harrison). We have also had incredible chats with legendary BBC Executive Producers Jon Plowman and Paul Jackson, and series one and two's Director Ed Bye. (If you haven’t heard the podcasts yet, despair not, search ‘Talking Bottom’ wherever you get your podcasts or go to https://talkingbottom.podbean.com/ ... do subscribe so you'll know when we share more!)

We must reiterate a big festive thank you to each and every one of you for pledging your support to the project and making our commission to write it a reality. Once it is complete, the book will be going through a vigorous editing process via Unbound. We will keep you updated as soon as we have more news on a potential publishing date.

For now, this is no time for fun and games - it’s nearly Christmas Day! Lordy Lordy, look at the time - we’ll let you get on with scrubbing your sprouts and discussing if you’re a leg or a breast man. (Would you like some magazines to read while we go through our entire repertoire of Christmassy Bottom quotes?)

Happy Christmas 1973!

Love from,

ABBA (i.e. Angela, Mat and Paul) xxx

Merry Christmas, Bottom fans!

In September 1991 a new comedy graced British screens – at first glance just another sofa-based sitcom – but Bottom was like no other show that’s gone before or indeed since. It skewed viewers’ expectations by being juvenile, crude, violent and very, very funny. Two of life’s losers, trapped on the fringes of society, endured miserable existences and sought solace wherever they could get their kicks; booze, birds and each other’s b*llocks.

Written by and starring prolific comedians Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, Bottom set itself apart from their already celebrated previous work, such as the iconic The Young Ones, and merged cartoon-style slapstick with nob gags and Beckett-style nihilist humour.

Bottom won a British Comedy award and ran for three series, five live stage shows and feature film, Guest House Paradiso. Today fans make do with repeated viewings and, thanks to various streaming platforms, Bottom continues to delight and disgust new audiences.

But that wasn’t enough for some sad old gits. In 2018, three comedy vultures – Mat Brooks, Angela Pearson and Paul Tanter – jumped on the podcast bandwagon so they could pick over their favourite sitcom. Piggy-backing off Rik and Ade’s success, the podcast found fellow die-hard fans that were surprisingly keen to listen to three nobodies’ discussions.

Every podcast forms one-hour portions analysing each Bottom episode. Now, lazily using the same title as the podcast, Talking Bottom: A Guide to the Cult Sitcom will not simply parrot what you can download for free. It will be the first and only critical study of Britain’s best-ever comedy series.

The first episode of Bottom - Smells– was unleashed onto an unsuspecting British public at 9pm on Tuesday 17th September 1991 on BBC2. Arriving with its gloriously filthy mix of absurdity and mundanity, the first Bottom instalment (ooh-er) was laden with the whiff of desperation, the stench of Swarfega-soaked underpants and the reek of inadequacy. In short, Smells was the perfect introduction to ‘sad old gits’ Richie and Eddie. A new double act that built upon the palpable chemistry Rik and Ade had honed as co-performers. Fans were almost guaranteed to take these characters eagerly to their bosom (unlike any sane woman Richie and Eddie attempted to woo with their out-dated sexist, homophobic and perverted view of the world).
Richie and Eddie are vile characters and yet a compelling likeability never waivers for the audience watching their often grotesque, always hilarious, escapades. A warmth and familiarity is brought to the pair by Rik and Ade’s performances. They had, by their own admission in several interviews, been honing playing the same characters in various guises for years in The Dangerous Brothers, The Young Ones and Filthy, Rich &amp; Catflap, with the characters representing periods of their lives.
“The Young Ones was your teens. Then let’s say Filthy [Rich &amp; Catflap] was about your twenties. Bottom was about your thirties where youth has gone, it’s just shit and life is fucking nothing.”
 The discerning British comedy viewer’s awareness of Rik and Ade’s act helps sell the disgusting duo’s desperate behaviour as movingly pitiful, almost playful, rather than abhorrent. Rik and Ade went further than the recognisable ‘love to hate’ relationship we have come to appreciate in British comedy. In their new sitcom, Bottom, the situation was to be most foul and the comedy beyond absurd. Crucially, throughout the show, the bleakness of Richie and Eddie’s circumstances is counter-acted to hilarious results by the characters’ eternal optimism and, when that fails - ironically enough – they use violence to resolve most conflicts.
Before the show utters its opening line we’re gifted a playful pun steeped in toilet humour; the first of what would be a running joke that each episode title works as a double entendre when following the word ‘bottom’ (Bottom Smells. Bottom Gas, etc. Get it? “Great gag!”).
Our first impressions of the characters if we base them solely on appearances, i.e. their costumes, don’t immediately marry up to the wretched pair of unemployable losers lying at the bottom of the heap that we’ll come to understand. Whereas The Young Ones firmly placed the geeky would-be anarchist Rick and brash punk Vyvyan in the 1980s, Richie and Eddie’s outfits have a timeless quality to them given that 90s fashion (or lack thereof) would have aged the show more hideously than its many dated references to celebrities and politicians.
Rik and Ade almost certainly deliberately chose to have Richie dressed smartly in a clean trench coat while Eddie’s brown trilby hat tops off a thick woollen overcoat. It gives their characters an inherently British, somewhat respectable appearance to the outsider. (However, it’s also possible that Richie’s trench coat’s purpose is to subconsciously remind us of its link to a stereotypical perverted ‘flasher’ outfit.) Brown and grey are the characters’ prominent colours, there’s no brightness to be found in their drab silhouettes. Distinctly masculine, both wearing shirts and ties - Richie’s complete with a shiny tie clip while Eddie’s tellingly splays out in slobby disarray – each nods to the aspiration of being counted amongst the middle classes for whom capitalism has been a success.
Even though Richie’s the one more focused on how people see him, keener to appear ‘better’ than others, surprisingly, he wears jeans. They are the giveaway that he’s very much working class, lower down the ranks than he sees himself. Richie possesses delusions of grandeur and his clothing choices both reflect and betray his class fantasy from the very moment he steps on screen.
There’s a lot to analyse (for eagle-eyed over-analysers such as ourselves) within seconds of the opening episode. As the series continues their world opens up to varying levels of filth and despair. Within the first few moments on screen, beyond the actors’ attire, we notice their surroundings… it’s a shit hole. A dimly lit squalid flat with filth on the walls, the set looks very lived in and instinctively you can tell it’s just the two of them living there.
It’s never overtly explained but as the series goes on there’s a heavy inference that Richie came from a family that once belonged to the middle class; as we hear in the original pilot episode Contest (S1 Ep3), his aunt Mabel is revealed to own the London flat he and Eddie share while, in Apocalypse (S1 Ep4), another aunt, Olga, dies and leaves him an inheritance he’s long been waiting for. In Contest we learn that Eddie pays rent – or at least, he owes rent to Richie. Presumably this money is how Richie’s supposed to sustain himself, as he has never worked a day in his life. He’s the housewife, he is the one who attempts to make the ‘Friday night fry-up’; his role is at home cooking the meals. Although, judging the state of the flat, he rarely cleans anything (beyond giving his own penis a good polish several times daily).
They may within the course of the episode be revealed to live on the lower rungs of society but they do at least own a suit – we see Richie in much smarter trousers and braces later on in the episode – and these are the outfits they choose to go out ‘on the pull’ in to impress women with. It will be explained, as the show develops, that each character is wearing the only outfit he owns. In the wrong actors’ hands this fact could be desperately upsetting but, thanks to Rik and Ade’s talent for writing and performing, we accept Richie and Eddie as a disgusting pair that we are to have limited sympathy for. Much like Albert and Harold in the classic BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son- they are a filthy duo just about managing to scrape through existence - trapped with each other through necessity and, deep down, love. They never wash, their living conditions are grotty, and they almost certainly struggle with body odour (which Richie of course mocks when Eddie returns home in Contest (S1 Ep3). Indeed the parallels with Steptoe and Son were numerous. As Ade generously said when asked if Galton and Simpson had been an influence on their work:
“I remember when we sat down to watch the first episode of Bottom go out we thought ‘Oh Christ, they’re going to sue us.’ We basically nicked their act.”
This episode is called Smells for more than the double entendre. They both stink physically and figuratively speaking. They are the sort of drunken, lecherous creatures you would give a wide berth if you encountered them in real life. Yet, in the land of sitcom, we are drawn in to their depressing world-view. We enjoy laughing at their attempts to triumph when we know only misfortune will be ultimately served to them. We relish in their trials and tribulations because they aren’t happening to us. There’s always hope but it’s always dashed and British comedy thrives when its characters are at their most despairing.
Smells opens to a backdrop of a rain-soaked window opposite the front door as Richie and Eddie return to their squalid flat. Immediately it’s established that they’ve had an unsuccessful night attempting to seduce women and Richie is lamenting their failure.
Pre-the dawn of the ‘unsolicited dick pic’, we discover Richie and Eddie’s main ploy has been to draw the ladies’ attention to their penises; Richie attempted to make his wad look bigger by stuffing toilet paper down the front of his trousers. Meanwhile Eddie performed his party trick of shoving a bottle of Vimto down the front of his pants, earning him a kick in the knackers and a drink in his face. This, to Eddie, is considered a result (“Always keep your mouth open when insulting a lady.”)
As with all great sitcom characters the audience is quickly given an insight into their desires and their comedy conceit. Richie wants a woman to have sex with him but he’s hopelessly unable to charm any ladies because of his desperation.
Richie’s quickly established as a virgin, bemoaning the fact as he declares that he wants to have sex just once to ‘see what it’s like’ before openly perving on a couple kissing in the opposite flat through the kitchen window. However, Richie can’t even achieve this act of voyeurism as they spot him and close the curtains.
We later witness that his inability to admit that he’s nervous when talking to women leads to a crass approach combined with his woeful lack of social awareness. Eddie meanwhile is similarly coarse but usually too inebriated to see through his plans to cop off with a woman and turns to the bottle instead. (To drink alcohol, I mean, not just give the birds his impression of the Eiffel Tower.)
Having acquired several first draft scripts including Smells, we can reveal that the original script for Smells opens with Richie and Eddie in the back of a taxi. While Richie racially abuses the clearly white, English driver, they discuss their desire to ‘get a shag’ and shout out the window to women in a passing car. The scene culminates in a stunt that would’ve seen Eddie clinging onto the roof of the cab before being thrown off as it veers around a corner. Perhaps it was considered too dangerous for Ade to attempt but, knowing the BBC, it was probably too expensive.
 In this opening episode Eddie’s focus is on this other base urge; he copes with his boredom by drinking dangerous amounts of booze. Coupled with his ‘free drink’, Eddie’s alcoholism is seeded from the off, drawing big laughs as he has the ‘fantastic idea’ to drink his pint and later his penchant for substance abuse is made starkly clear when he ingests the entire bottle of pheromone sex spray.

Talking Bottom

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 On the publication day we will meet by the famous bench in Hammersmith and then all go together to the pub!

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A tea towel with a specially designed menu for the Lamb and Flag

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A brand new specially designed Talking Bottom A3 print

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A t-shirt featuring the Talking Bottom logo.

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A pair of Richie's pants, complete with their unique "lived in" look. Handle with care (and rubber gloves and tongs).  One size XXL novelty underwear

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Happy birthday to me! A bundle of post intended for the residents of 11 Mafeking Parade has found its way to us. We'll keep the contents a surprise but we did steam one open and saw that Rumbelows REALLY want their TV back...

Mafeking Parade Post Bundle

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