Comedy Series Review: Bottom

Eddie Hitler and Richard Richard

Bottom is a British sitcom in alternative comedy created by and starring Rick Mayal and Adrian Edmondson, famous from the London stand-up scene from the late 70s and the BBC hit-series The Young Ones. Similarly to The Young Ones, this series had the two actors portraying two house-mates, although no longer students. Richard Richard (Mayall) has many similarities to the Rick characters from The Young Ones whereas Eddie Hitler (Edmondson) shares many traits with the Vyvyan character. The main difference is in that the Bottom characters are much, much more violent toward each other than in The Young Ones.

Since Richard (Rich) and Eddie are two bachelors living together, they have few interests. Cleaning is not one of those, which results in their apartment being consistently disgusting. The interests they do have include women, sex with women, booze and smashing each other's brains in.

The comedy in this series is generally relatively simple; there is a lot of slapstick, a lot of violence, quite a bit of blood and gore, not nearly as much sex as the characters would like, although it can't be said they aren't trying. A lot of the humour is derived from the contrast in personalities and the absurd situations they get themselves involved in. An example is the episode when they have found a sex tape starring the prime minister. When they subsequently try to blackmail said prime minister their flat is shot at by (presumably) armed police. Of course our anti-heroes survive but they loose the tape.

There is some semi-clever word play here, an example of which is the episode where the guys think there's a burglar in the house. Rich tells Eddie the burglar is in the drawing room, to which Eddie responds “we have a room just for drawing?!”. There's none of the really witty stuff found The Young Ones though.

Bottom ran for 3 seasons, consisting of 6 episodes each and also 5 live shows and 1 film were made. It's an entertaining series, but it's nothing ground breaking nor is it a work of genius. This is just simple, harmless slapstick being simply amusing.