The Young Ones' Nigel Planer says Adrian Edmondson "regrets" falling out with late Rik Mayall before death
Nigel Planer discusses his role as Neil the hippy in The Young Ones and much more in his new memoir.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Even Nigel Planer’s own mum used to confuse him with Neil the hippy, the character he created for The Young Ones back in 1982. “She usually got my name right, at least,” he sighs, admitting that his friends sometimes don’t, “but she did think I was vegetarian, simply because he was.”
He’s not the first actor, of course, to become indelibly conflated with a part he’s played. But with a career that’s also taken in TV shows from Blackadder to Blackeyes, West End musicals, writing poetry and plays and more than 100 episodes of The Magic Roundabout, it must annoy him, no?
“Should I be like a lot of comedians, and go, ‘I don’t want to talk about that’? My colleague Adrian [Edmondson, who played punk Vyvyan in The Young Ones] has an attitude that’s done him a lot of good: saying, ‘That was two months of my life, 45 years ago. Why should I be talking about it now? I want to move forward.’ That works for him, and all power to him – but I can’t seem to get away from it.
“When we’re going around together, he avoids people but I always end up chatting to them. Maybe it’s because I’m 6ft 3in, or because I’ve got a stupid face: he can just walk past people and they don’t notice, but I still get 'Neil, Neil, orange peel' [one of the show’s many memorable phrases] three times a day.
"But why be mean to them? I just think about my favourite series, Dad’s Army, and the people in it: the actors might think, ‘I’ve been cornered now,’ but I love those characters. And if I can generate in other people just a quarter of what I feel about Ian Lavender – ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ – I can die happy.”
Certainly Planer’s new memoir gives a satisfyingly significant chunk over to his most famous role (and takes its punning title, Young Once, from the show, too). But the multi-hyphenate has many more stories to tell: married three times, a grandfather at 29, with stints as bellringer, gravedigger and Top of the Pops performer on his CV, he describes the book as “a coming-of-age story” as well as a love letter to his third wife (and first love) Roberta, whom he met when he was 25 and she 38, and finally married in 2013. (“I’m 72, so it’s about time I came of age, really,” he adds.)
Meanwhile, the misspent youth is a lot of fun to read about. At the height of their fame, Planer and his castmates were at what he calls the “knicker-throwing” level of celebrity (though the book reveals it got a lot weirder than that: people would write to them, sending polythene bags, asking for them to be filled with certain bodily fluids and posted back).
There were famous fans, too. Al Pacino, Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson, Sting… they all came to watch Planer and his colleagues at Soho’s Comic Strip revue – so zeitgeisty was its new “alternative comedy” scene in the 1980s – though “Robin Williams was our main contact with the stars”. Planer recounts taking the latter to “a sort of junkie party in Brixton, and he wasn’t too happy about it. But we had no idea who he was, because Google hadn’t been invented. It took us a week to work it out, asking around, saying, ‘What was his name, that bloke?’”
Planer remembers the lows as vividly he does the highs (another reason, perhaps, why people mix him up with the lugubrious Neil). An anecdote about buying little Christmas presents for the team – which none of them even bothered to take home – makes even Planer concede his “Neil-like” nature. But, playing against character, the overall arc of his book (and life) is a cheerful one, tied up neatly with his marriage to Roberta after decades apart. “My life is cheesy,” he says with no shame.
For readers, the wedding means a lovely story about Edmondson and comic partner Rik Mayall: “Double acts do fall out – the only ones who never did were Dawn [French] and Jennifer [Saunders] – and at this point Rik and Ade weren’t speaking to each other. But Roberta and I deliberately sat them together at the wedding, and we saw them laughing their heads off together.
“Unfortunately Rik died while they were in one of their falling-out periods, which left Ade with a lot of regret, but we’ve got photographic evidence of them making each other laugh even in that phase.”
And for Planer, meanwhile, the wedding means a happy ending – a “romcom”, he calls it. “I interviewed plenty of other candidates for the role of partner. Even apart from my two other marriages, I certainly put it about in the interim period,” he says.
“I think I was born with a real deficit of what they call ‘emotional intelligence’, but I finally managed to maybe pass my O-levels in it,” he adds – slightly Neilishly.
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