Withnail and I 9781839025488

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Foreword to the 2022 Edition Bharat Tandon I am watching Withnail & I with a ghost: an acoustic spectre, the voice of a dead friend and neighbour. And yet … Kevin’s here; Moose to his friends; Moose to everybody, he doesn’t have any enemies, at least none worth speaking of. ‘About ten years ago,’ notes the voice of his 2014 Blu-ray commentary, ‘I wrote the BFI Modern Classic on Withnail & I, and at the time I called it one of the greatest English comedies, one of the greatest British comedies; and I will revise that opinion now, only to say that it is the greatest British comedy.’ And here we are, back with that original book, the greatest introduction to the greatest British comedy – the book which, even eighteen years later, when it might reasonably be expected to be settling into responsible adulthood, still, wonderfully, disappoints such starchy expectations. Moose’s account of Withnail, and of his and others’ experience of it, pulls off the rare feat of teasing to the surface the sheer literacy of Bruce Robinson’s masterpiece – a literacy which is as much cinematic as it is textual – while never losing sight or hearing of the way in which Robinson’s screenplay and direction repeatedly undercut any such literary or personal pretensions. So much of the film’s comedy and pathos works by strewing the characters’ paths with existential banana skins, with the result that Latin puns and Baudelairean soundbites alike inevitably finish up face down in the beastly mud and oomska. As you will discover when you read on, Moose is often drawn to a particular quality of the oddly poetic language that Robinson puts in the foul mouths of his characters, notably Withnail himself. ‘Note that curiously formal vocabulary,’ he remarks of Withnail, ‘… his most typical mode of expression is not so much stately as that odd, forcible yoking together of street language and the diction of the incunabulalined study which has been dubbed “yob baroque”.’ At one level, this

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observation pinpoints accurately an essential quality of Withnail’s comic aesthetic, a quality which links it to a long and dishonourable tradition in British and Irish comedy. Robinson has famously recalled his ongoing run-ins with the hierarchy at HandMade Films, over the perceived ‘darkness’ (in every sense) of his work in progress, especially what the suits saw as an absence of overt, capital-G Gags – whereas his attitude to comedy in Withnail displays a steadfast belief that something is only funny if not played for laughs (‘They’re not meant to know that they’re funny, not in any way’).1 Viewed in that light, for sure, the film is short on the set-up/payoff structure that one finds in American vaudeville or British sitcom – and yet what is it that makes practically every line in the film (as is the case with Hamlet, one of the film’s great intertextual ghosts) not only quotable, but also sound like a quotation one already knows? One answer is that, while Withnail may not be structured around jokes as such, the characters’ language is constantly performing energetic and gymnastic feats of linguistic slapstick: pratfalls of syntax and register, as turns of phrase from one area of life collide unexpectedly and felicitously with locutions from completely different areas. Hence ‘the fucker will rue the day’ (a line which Moose not only writes about here, but which he would constantly repurpose in real life, as a weapon against petty jobsworths, ‘hottake’ merchants and celebrity idiots), and, of course, ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake’, a combination that, as Robinson points out, ‘can’t possibly happen’2 to someone who’s inward with the unspoken rules of English idiom. As a result of this stylistic disposition, Withnail sits alongside Robinson’s acknowledged literary heroes, Shakespeare and Dickens; but it also belongs in the company of the great, indecent absurdists of the sentence, the genii of rhetorical disproportion, taking in the teenage Jane Austen (‘Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint’), Samuel Beckett (‘She stood there, smelling’), Ivor Cutler (‘Then, with a wild curse he had learned in an agricultural magazine he subscribed to …’), and Joe Orton (‘You’re fucking nicked, my old beauty’). In addition, take the details of

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HERE HARE HERE

Monty’s memory of Norman (‘Probably wintering with his mother in Guildford. A cat and rain. Vim under the sink. And both bars on.’). The combination of suburban bathos (‘in Guildford’), class signifiers (‘Vim under the sink’), and austerity filtered through nostalgia for pre-war plenty (’both bars on’) could almost come from Alan Bennett; and let us not forget that it was the Bennett-scripted A Private Function (1984) that convinced Bruce Robinson that he had his perfect casting for Monty in the shape of Richard Griffiths, even before his own film properly began to take form. Over and above this, though, the way in which Moose homes in on such moments points to a central quality in his own oeuvre: a willingness to let unpredictable conjunctions happen, and then try to understand and rework them creatively. That impulse is all over his extraordinarily diverse body of work, and you only had to be in his company for a short while to recognise how fundamental it was to his personality as well. This was someone who walked part of the route of the M25 motorway (which of course doubles up, anachronistically, as the motorway location in Withnail) with Iain Sinclair for London Orbital (2002); who turned a fleeting dream about Greta Garbo and her dog into a melancholically comic, Carrollian poem; and whose

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many collaborations with the artist Hunt Emerson include Dante’s Inferno reimagined as a comic strewn with thigh-slapping puns, a three-volume graphic novel inspired by the life and work of John Ruskin, and a long-running series of biographical sketches about famous occultists for the Fortean Times, featuring Aleister Crowley and his Indian restaurant, The Order of the Golden Prawn. Martin Amis once described the cinema of Brian De Palma as ‘an art that appeals to the purist, the hooligan, and nobody else’.3 Conversely, one reason why Moose writes so well about Withnail’s ‘yob baroque’ in this book is that his own work, like Robinson’s film, is an art which accommodates the purist, the hooligan, and everybody else – often at one and the same moment. ‘Like almost all comedies since Plautus,’ Moose writes, ‘and certainly the vast majority of British comedies, it draws some of its biting exuberance from the friction of class against class.’ Seen in this light, one might think of the yob-baroque style – in which highfalutin’ turns of phrase are forced to slum it in disreputable and more demotic company – as playing out at a small level the class frictions which are writ more largely across the film. Now, I don’t want to indulge too much in posthumous speculation: it’s in questionable taste, and moreover, Moose doesn’t have a right to reply – or, more likely, to yell, after the manner of John Thaw in The Sweeney (1974–8), ‘Shuuuut it, you slaaaaaag!’. Nonetheless, I can’t help feeling, especially when reading this book over again, that another aspect of Withnail which must have chimed with him is its depiction of storytelling, the anecdotal, the raconteurish (and was he ever the spellbinding raconteur himself). For one thing, you’ll notice in what follows that Moose’s sequential account of the film’s action is intercut with anecdotes from the histories of its conception, production and reception; you’ll also notice his drawing our attention on numerous occasions to the subtle, nuanced and often profoundly equivocal ways in which Withnail approaches its characters and subject matter. And one of the activities with which the film is most fascinated, but about which it is most equivocal, is anecdotal storytelling – not

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least because it seems so bound up with those class frictions which Moose identifies as being central to its comedy. ‘Never discuss your family, do you?’, Marwood asks Withnail as they mope amid the squalor of Crow Crag; yet the irony is that it’s Marwood’s own family that never gets discussed, barring that glancing mention of his father just before the end. In contrast, witness that first visit to Monty’s, where everything seems calculated to push Marwood into silence, in the presence of the storied lives of the Old Harrovians, Withnail Major and Minor: whether it be Monty’s root crops, the memory of the ‘I will never play the Dane’ epiphany, or the spitefully anti-Semitic verbal sketch of Raymond Duck, these are characters to whom privilege has given the confidence to think that their lives and histories are not only worth remembering but worth recounting (‘Those with the money are eccentric. Those without. Insane.’). Then again, the fact that, by the time the drama has relocated to Cumbria, Marwood’s own notebook-voiceover is relating ‘yet another anecdote about [Monty’s] sensitive crimes in a punt with a chap called Norman’ suggests that he is at least a fast learner. Looking back over Withnail’s cultural afterlives, one aspect of the film which Moose handles with particular subtlety and tact is its treatment of masculinity. My mind goes back to a Private Eye cartoon, from the heyday of Britpop and Loaded, featuring ‘Blokémon’: a collection of little anime monsters walking around with bottles of alcopop and copies of ‘lads’ mags’. When you go on to read here about the infamous drinking game, or about Loaded’s championing (or, ahem, appropriation) of Withnail as a totem, at this distance from the 1990s, you may find it hard to believe that the film (even if it does fail the Bechdel Test by light-years) could have been so easily co-opted as the poster-film for the kind of leery laddishness that was so prevalent in areas of the media at the time. I mean … Baudelaire? Hamlet? Huysmans? That’s perfumedponce reading, that is. In contrast to the simplistic branding and commodification that the 1990s inflicted on the film (and, in retrospect, on so much else), Moose’s reading rightly points out that

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it is, in fact, ‘an outstandingly touching yet witheringly unsentimental drama of male friendship (friendship in all its full horror, one might say)’. And so it should: someone would have to be interpreting Withnail very selectively in order not to notice the ways in which it highlights the desperate neediness that underpins certain kinds of masculinity, as typified by Withnail’s attempts to place himself at the centre of any story that might benefit him, while recoiling from any conventional idea that he might be responsible for anything he says or does. If anything, this is a film which doesn’t uncritically celebrate masculinity as much as dramatise its more wheedling and self-centred demands, the finest whines available to humanity. Some of Moose’s most sensitive writing in this study is reserved for such subjects, taking in Withnail’s ‘truly Augustan disdain for the countryside […] a zone of chill, hunger, mud, psychotic peasantry and potentially lethal wildlife’, and the unspoken, un-narrated subtext of Marwood’s smart haircut (‘Parts of Marwood are going to have to die if he is to succeed: his fecklessness, obviously, but also some of the things which make him worthy of love’). Perhaps only someone who valued and understood friendship the way Moose did could write about it as precisely (and unsparingly) as he does here; it was at the heart of so much of what he did and how he thought, almost as if those unexpected connections of ideas and words which so fascinated him in art found their natural corollary in fresh connections between people. It would be impossible to count the number of friendships – and, I dare say, relationships – that only exist because of Moose’s connective and catalytic personality; indeed, as I wrote in the immediate aftermath of his death, one reason that he took to platforms such as Facebook like a duck to water (or a duck going to Moscow), was that he had himself long been a flesh-and-blood social network avant la lettre. And yet this is a film about a friendship which, as we realise by the end, has been in its last moments all along, in parallel with the last breaths of the 1960s themselves. Seen from one angle, Withnail and Marwood can be compared to Beckettian double-acts such as Vladimir and

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Estragon and Hamm and Clov (just imagine what Withnail’s delivery of ‘Can there be misery … loftier than mine?’ would have been like), as well as to their televisual cousins, Galton and Simpson’s Harold and Albert Steptoe. However, the dynamic of all those earlier double-acts revolves around the assumption that these situations are fundamentally inescapable: there’s no getting out, there’s no getting away from it, so the only recourse is to bicker, kvetch and wisecrack one’s way through it all. In contrast, while Marwood might ask himself, on Danny’s arrival, ‘Will we never be set free?’, what he doesn’t know is that the ending is already unfolding around them, only none of them have noticed yet; all it will take is a couple of phone calls and a telegram, and that will be that for the friends. As Moose points out here, the final farewell in Regent’s Park works as ‘a tender revision of Hal’s terrible casting off of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part II’, and by introducing this element into the mix, Robinson reminds us just how vulnerable and ephemeral all these experiences are – something which, of course, strikes home with particular force when reading the book again now, of all times … especially Moose’s account of the final shot: ‘Walks out of Marwood’s life, out of our lives, out of life.’

Chin-chin

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This is all, I suppose, a roundabout way of saying that, re-viewing Withnail today through the lens of Moose’s account of it, I see all kinds of things which he found fascinating and valuable, but which Robinson subjects in the film to perpetual comic scrutiny, sometimes affectionate, but often savage. Storytelling, the way in which ideas themselves often arrive in the form of stories (just ask my children, who owe their fascinations with Young Frankenstein (1974) and Night of the Demon (1957) to conversations with Moose), intellectual aspirations, friendships: they’re all there, but Robinson asks us to consider them afresh by seeing them as objects of comedy. And before we go, it would be remiss not to recall Moose’s own qualification: ‘I will want to make some fairly large and high-toned claims for it, but I will try never to lose sight of the fact that it is a shaggy, smelly, disreputable beast’. Or to put it another way, if we are to take Withnail seriously, we need to recognise how much of its seriousness happens in its comedy, not in spite of it. As there are moments when all satire needs to do is point at something and ask ‘How stupid is that?’, so there are times when both the least and the most a critical appreciation can do is to stand back and let the work do its thing. Some of the finest moments in Moose’s audio commentary are those where he pays Withnail the ultimate compliment of simply collapsing into helpless laughter at what’s unfolding on screen; and in what follows here, while there’s no direct equivalent to the uncanny consolation of hearing him crack up again in real time (I almost typed ‘corpse’ there, which would have appealed to the sick end of his sense of humour), and while you’ll often encounter him being dazzlingly articulate about the film and everything to do with it, please take a moment to appreciate the times when he simply points us in the direction of one or other of the film’s masterstrokes, as if to ask ‘Isn’t that just marvellous?’. I shall miss you, Moose; chin-chin. If you’re familiar with the first edition of this book, then you’ll be aware of the treats you have in store; if you’re not, prepare to see, hear and understand afresh the movie that you thought you knew, off by heart and backwards. Kevin’s a genius.

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Acknowledgments Withnail & I is a film which can precipitate new friendships and enrich old ones. My thanks, then, to all the old friends who have watched and talked about it with me over the years, and especially to: Alastair Brotchie, Peter Carpenter (who also kindly granted permission to quote from his poem ‘The Guilt Trip’), Mark Godowski, Glyn and Evie Johnson, Claire Preston, Michelle Shepherd-Barron, Dean Stein, Peter Swaab and (obviously) Martin Wallen, to whom this book is dedicated, in memory of all those evenings we can’t remember. And thanks, too, to a new friend: Rob White, who had the vision to commission this essay, the editorial skill greatly to improve it, and the wit and good humour to make the whole process a pleasure instead of a chore. Mike Hall of the Withnail & I Multimedia Archive website was helpful and reassuring; Ralph Brown accepted my gushing and somewhat inarticulate encomium of his performance as Danny politely, and stressed his loyalty and gratitude to the film despite years of putting up with clumsy banter about Camberwell Carrots. Bruce Robinson gracefully declined to be interviewed, in a letter that made me laugh as hard as any scene from his masterpiece. If he ever reads this, I hope he likes at least some of it.

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Introduction: Withnail & Me Almost all of the essay which follows is written in a reasonably impersonal, approximately academic manner. Still, it seems priggish, ungenerous – cowardly, even – to discuss such a nakedly autobiographical film without at least briefly owning up to the part it has played in my own life. Most people enjoy Withnail & I (1986) because it is blissfully funny, but they only love the film if they feel that it directly addresses their own memories, real or fantastical. So, for what it’s worth: I, too, have been painfully close to a few blustering, egomaniacal, feckless, bitingly rude Withnails – have, God help me, even been a bit of a Withnail myself. At other periods, I have played the timid, gauche, easily led Marwood. I have squandered countless irrecoverable hours of my youth hanging out with weirdos, wasters and losers. I have lived in places that were bone-numbingly cold and eye-offendingly squalid, my nearest equivalent of the Camden flat being a ramshackle, formerly grand house in the northern suburbs of Cambridge, where ice formed on the inner walls, the lavatories froze solid and lumps of catshit were left alone for months to grow mould. (Let’s not go into the flea problem.) I have, all too often, woken up with a Bastard Behind The Eyes. I have drifted aimlessly for weeks and months and years, confused and steeped in a sense of total, irredeemable failure. I am not greatly nostalgic about those messy times, but I don’t feel that I can simply edit them from my life. If you have been kind enough to read this far, I suspect that you will be able to tell much the same story about parts of your own youth – mon semblable, mon frère, ma soeur. You and I can see versions of ourselves portrayed in Bruce Robinson’s film, more clearly than in any other comparable work about the rudderless years (from, say, Godard’s Masculin Féminin (1966) to John Sayles’s

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Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)), and we hardly need persuading that the film is worthy of our respect. We are also aware that there are plenty of people who do not feel as we do, which is why it also seems important to preface this admiring stroll through Withnail by allowing room for the voice of scepticism.

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1 A Terrible Cult? The prosecution Far from being a classic, Withnail & I is an embarrassment. Worse: it is a disgrace. The only viewers who find it funny are impressionable adolescents of all ages, from college freshers to sorry nostalgists for the 1960s – pretty much the same gregarious (from grex, gregis: ‘herd’) men, for they are almost always male, who dote on scenes and routines from Monty Python (1969–74) or The Young Ones (1982–4), and can quote chunks of them by heart, to the boredom of everyone save their equally tiresome friends. It is hardly surprising that the most influential article on the film appeared not in Sight and Sound or Film Comment, but in the first issue of Loaded magazine, that vade mecum of louts; for its humour is of the basest order, and turns chiefly on drunkenness, foul language and reactionary stereotypes. Seldom conspicuously well informed about world cinema, let alone any other art form, Withnail fans celebrate their fetish object not merely by numbingly repetitive viewings of the video, but with more offensive rites. They play the puerile Withnail drinking game, which consists of matching their hero’s consumption of drink, drugs and lighter fluid, hit for hit, as the tape or DVD plays on to alcoholic oblivion for all. They stage ragged pilgrimages to its Lake District locations, leaving those sites vandalised, plundered and strewn with crushed beer cans. They drive around town centres screaming ‘Scrubbers!’ at alarmed female pedestrians, or bellow ‘What fucker said that?’ across otherwise tranquil pubs, as though there were some shred of wit in such yobbery. At the heart of this callow cult is a work of unusual thematic slightness and imperceptible cinematic flair – all but plotless, little more than a plumped-up anecdote of wasted time, pretentiously

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masquerading as confessional art. Heavily autobiographical, yet bereft of the Wordsworthian shaping spirit which turns personal memory into public narrative, it is the debut work of a director who had never previously exposed a foot of film, and freely admitted his lack of all relevant technical knowledge. Intensely wordy, and almost devoid of those rhythms and pleasures peculiar to visual storytelling, it is more like a self-indulgent fringe play than a true film. Overacted to a fault, it is peopled by caricatures worthy of a Carry On farce, and shares that direly unamusing series’ lamentable politics of gender, nation and race. To admit to a liking for Withnail & I is to declare oneself unfit for adult company. It is a sad trifle, an aberration, an immature folly, to be outgrown and then forgotten. *** Harsh words. Uncomfortably telling, too, at least in parts. So here is a correspondingly brief statement of the opposite point of view. *** The defence Withnail & I is perhaps the funniest, and possibly the most profound, comedy ever produced by the British cinema: as deliciously raucous, silly and fundamentally innocent as a vehicle for George Formby or Will Hay, yet as elegiac as Chekhov. (‘I loathe those Russian plays. Always full of women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow.’) It is, at the very least, worthy of mention alongside the admirable likes of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1952), if …. (1968), Topsy-Turvy (1999), Whisky Galore! (1949), The Rebel (1960) … and, if you will, its HandMade stable-mate, Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979); and it is, one may argue, superior to all of them in the sheer, gorgeous virtuosity of Bruce Robinson’s writing. Its dialogue, which bristles with pungent idiosyncrasies of diction and beautifully crafted invective, invites the

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adjective ‘Wildean’, particularly when one remembers that Wilde’s genius was both for the turning of a natty epigram and for the meticulous building of scene and character in such a way that the humblest word, rightly spoken, can bring the house down. Other aspects of the film bear comparison with writers still more canonical than Wilde. Its minor characters – Uncle Monty, Danny – are gloriously memorable grotesques, creepily solipsistic yet weirdly attractive, as vividly imagined as anything in Dickens (one of Bruce Robinson’s two main literary heroes). Withnail himself is an immortal comic creation worthy of comparison – in his bibulousness, his gluttony, his snobbery, his pomposity, his cowardice, his vanity, his near-Stalinist knack for rewriting history so as to put himself in the most heroic light – to Falstaff. (Shakespeare is Robinson’s other, greater hero.) Skilfully conjured in the screenplay, the characters are superbly realised by the actors on the screen, and especially by the two leads: no wonder Richard E. Grant was soon snapped up by Altman, Coppola and Scorsese. The film’s technical execution, at every level, is at the very least precisely thought through, at its best flawless. Robinson had honed the script to the point where he knew exactly how each line should be read, and refused to allow his cast the smallest latitude in adjusting stress patterns or vocabulary. (Not ‘Out of the car, please, Sir’, but ‘Out of the car. Please. Sir.’ 4 In the matter of enforcing dramatic punctuation, Robinson’s peers are Pinter and Beckett.) He had visualised each scene so clearly in advance that his technicians were never in any doubt as to the effect that was required, and he held tenaciously to his vision even as the producers were screaming at him that the shots were unwatchably dark and the comedy non-existent, ‘as funny as cancer’. The completed film teems with unostentatious but deeply pleasing visual grace notes. Like all the greatest comedy, the film is far more than a machine for extracting laughter. Like almost all comedies since Plautus, and certainly the vast majority of British comedies, it draws some of its biting exuberance from the friction of class against class.

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‘Look here. My cousin’s a QC.’ And it is about adolescence – that peculiarly protracted adolescence known only in rich nations. One reason why college students are justified in loving it is because it is such a heartfelt account of their own day-to-day experiences, as well as the dismal lives many of them fear are waiting for them later in their twenties, when school is finally done. At one extreme, the film both revels in and shudders at the dubious joys of anarchic binge drinking, revolting levels of domestic filth, prodigious feats of sloth. At the other, it feelingly portrays the intensity and insecurity of late adolescent friendships – are these the people I am going to be stuck with for the rest of my life? – the dread of loneliness, directionlessness and humiliating, total failure in ‘the terrible years in your twenties’. Substantial as these themes are, the film casts its net still wider. Most obviously it is a film about the end of the 1960s, and a corrective to the usual daft images through which that decade is evoked. But Withnail is also – crucially – timeless: less a film about the end of the Youth decade than about the end of Youth itself. At its core is a very old story; maybe the oldest there is. As Bruno Bettelheim and plenty of less august thinkers before him have pointed out, the essential subject of all fairy tales is growing up; when secular drama came along, it frequently took over the burden, as for instance in the two Shakespeare plays which most haunt Withnail, Hamlet and Henry IV, Part II. Later still, with the Romantics, prose fiction inherited this grand theme of spiritual growth to maturity, and refined it into what became known as the Bildungsroman – the ‘novel of development’, which shows just how the man or woman who wrote the book grew up to become the man or woman who wrote the book. Examples include: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (like Withnail, a tale of young actors; Wim Wenders made a very loose adaptation of it in Wrong Move (1975)), Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (to this day, Robinson keeps a quotation from Joyce pasted up above his typewriter) and Dickens’s David Copperfield – a copy of which

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can be seen in Marwood’s suitcase as he prepares to leave Withnail behind forever. And though Withnail and I may be a couple of pissartists, they are also a couple of artists, possibly quite gifted ones. Before adapting his autobiographical material into the screenplay and film we now know, Bruce Robinson wrote Withnail as just such a development novel, and has since published The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman – note the Joycean surname, from Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake – which fills in the picture of ‘I’ as a very confused teenager. These are the two pieces, he says, of which he is most proud. His pride is fully justified, for Withnail is among other things a fine example of the Bildungsfilm, a genre rare in the British commercial cinema (exceptions include Hope and Glory (1987)), though less so in its subsidised counterpart: see the autobiographical shorts and features of Bill Douglas and Terence Davies. Withnail’s more celebrated overseas cousins include the ‘Antoine Doinel’ series of François Truffaut (for whom Robinson acted in L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975)), Fellini’s I vitelloni (1953) and Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1974). A good deal more might be said. For the time being, the defence will rest by stressing, once more, how very comfortably this film maudit, this darling of lagered-up oiks and boors, will also fit into sober canons of excellence. It is an outstandingly touching yet witheringly unsentimental drama of male friendship (friendship in all its full horror, one might say), a bleak up-ending of the English pastoral dream, a piece of ferocious verbal inventiveness in which unabashedly recondite literary allusions sparkle in the knockabout farce like emeralds in the mud. To pronounce oneself immune to the charms of Withnail & I is to declare oneself a philistine, a Puritan and a snob. *** I write in vigorous support of the second position: to praise Withnail & I almost without reservation, though emphatically not to bury it in the marmoreal respectability of classic status. It is a good thing

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that the film is being taught as a set text in universities; it is also a good thing that it is usually watched by young idlers who have had far too much to drink and smoke. Treated with undue solemnity, the film loses some of its gleefully irresponsible attraction and much of its point. I will want to make some fairly large and high-toned claims for it, but I will try never to lose sight of the fact that it is a shaggy, smelly, disreputable beast, and that it always, unfailingly, makes me laugh like a loon. So: à nos moutons. Pass the lighter fluid.

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2 The Arena of the Unwell At first, the sound is more important than the image. A saxophone solo, improvising weightlessly around the tune of Procol Harum’s 1967 hit ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. (We will meet haughty speakers of Latin later in the film; these pedants would no doubt hasten to point out that ‘Procol’ should be procul: ‘far’, or ‘far from’.) Drained of its nonsense lyrics about light fandangoes and vestal virgins, the pop melody is ennobled. ‘So sweet … so sour … this is beautiful’, as Robinson’s original script rightly notes. The soloist is King Curtis, from the album Live at Fillmore West. You can hear the concert audience, and ripples of applause – an unfamiliar sound to the chronically underemployed actors we are about to encounter. King Curtis was murdered later that same evening, after being attacked in the Fillmore’s car park. Though he did not know it, he was performing his own requiem. Bruce Robinson had heard the solo long before Withnail became a saleable project, and tagged it at once for use as the opening theme. More than that, it is the statement of the film’s dominant emotional key, the doorway into its soul: ‘It’s what the film should be.’ Our comedy begins, as it will end, in elegiac mode. Comedies, in conventional wisdom, should be brightly lit, tragedies glimpsed through a lens darkly. If so, then this is going to be one of the most sombre works in cinema history, because the image is not so much under-lit as grubby, as if the celluloid had been steeped in tea and nicotine. Through it, we can make out an uncommon mixture of grandeur and decay – rooms like a high-class antique shop5 which has been taken over by an army of hippie squatters. Immersed in this shabby splendour is a young man of striking, rather feminine good looks. Dressed in a sweater, and wearing National Health glasses of the kind made fashionable by John Lennon, he sits, he smokes, he trembles. (Is he listening to King

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Curtis on an LP, or is the music, as they say in film courses, nondiegetic? Probably the latter: Withnail and I, who lack most modern appliances, are unlikely to run to a record player.) He is the ‘I’ of the film’s title, and ‘I’ remains nameless throughout the film, just as Withnail will subsist without a Christian name, but the script calls him Marwood. Legend has it that he possesses a given name: Peter. It is clear, even to the innocent eye, that Marwood is none too happy; to the rest of us, we worldly souls who have knocked about a bit in Withnailian society, it soon becomes obvious that Marwood is coming down, though from what intoxicant is not (yet) specified. But consider the symptoms: sleeplessness, agitation, mild to intense paranoia … The clever money would be on amphetamines, and a few scenes later Marwood confirms this diagnosis in a bathtub soliloquy: Speed is like a dozen transatlantic flights without ever getting off the plane. Time change. You lose. You gain. Makes no difference so long as you keep taking the pills … But some time or another you gotta get out. Because it’s crashing. And all at once those frozen hours melt through the nervous system and seep out the pores.

Withnail & I is often referred to as a hangover film, and not without justice, since its heroes are far more given to drinking than to drugging. It is also, and more precisely, a Coming Down film: the seed of the metaphor is planted here and only blossoms a hundred or so scenes later, with the Tiresian lines, ‘London is a country comin’ down from its trip. We are sixty days from the enda this decade, and there’s gonna be a lota refugees.’ Withnail will prove to be a film about endings: the end of a friendship, the end of youth, the end of the 1960s. How better to begin than with the end of a drug binge? *** The ‘I’ of Withnail & I can be identified to the sum of about 70 per cent with its author and director, Bruce Robinson. (He has said that the autobiographical content of Withnail is ‘about 7 out of 10’ and

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of Penman about eight out of ten.6) Most of its principal events took place when Robinson was in his twenties, but it is useful to establish a brief outline of his life before that time. He was born in 1946, and spent most of his childhood in the seaside resort of Broadstairs, Kent – ‘brought up’, as a character in the novel puts it, ‘like vomit’.7 His father was a violent, angry man of extreme right-wing views who terrified Bruce to such an extent that he feared for his life; much later, Bruce found out that some of this man’s rage was due to the fact that he was not the lad’s biological father: Mrs Robinson had indulged in a brief wartime affair with a GI, and Bruce was the result. A dreamy child, Robinson flunked the eleven plus, and was duly packed off with the other designated no-hopers to Charles Dickens Secondary Modern. The school did little for him, but the local author after whom it was named did much: Bruce read and was entranced by Dickens’s novels, and especially by David Copperfield. He also discovered the pleasures of acting, and brought his two routes of imaginative escape together by playing Herbert Pocket in a school production of Great Expectations. His previously wretched life finally began to make some sense. *** Marwood puts the kettle on for a cup of tea, but seems immediately to forget what he’s done, and dons his long black leather coat for a trip to the café. On the way out, he bangs on a door: MARWOOD

I’m going for a cup of tea. D’you want one? D’you want a cup of tea, Withnail? [He pronounces it ‘Withn’ll’.]

WITHNAIL

(O.S.) No …

Or: ‘Noaaah …’ It is a languid, effete, pissed-off, mean, patrician voice: we can already infer quite a lot about this unseen flatmate. And about the never spoken, always present class difference between the two men. Marwood continues down the stairs: shock cut to a greasy spoon café – fried eggs seething in a turbulent vat of vile grease, an old

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woman biting into an egg sandwich which ruptures, gushing runny yolk, everyone reading the down-market Sunday papers with their mad, prurient stories of sex changes and naughty vicars. Close-up on Marwood’s face: his former anxiety has now, understandably, matured into full-blown horror. All London, all creation is a threat. He must go back to the flat, and discuss Withnail’s problems ‘in depth …’ Back at the flat, we can at last match Withnail’s voice with his features. First impression: he must have Transylvanian blood, for he looks like the English cousin of Count Dracula – played by Christopher Lee – in the Hammer films. An ectomorph’s ectomorph: tall, worryingly thin, clean-shaven, an antique tweed overcoat (Edwardian? Regency?) as long as the Count’s trademark black cloak, longish hair slicked wetly back from his high brow and the damp, sallow grey-green complexion of a corpse, or a creature of the night before it has sucked blood. He walks bolt upright, and though he will later rant and scream, at this moment his voice is eerily blank, as inexpressive as his frozen features. He swigs from a tumbler and speaks: ‘I have some extremely distressing news …’ Note the curiously formal vocabulary. As we will rapidly come to learn, Withnail’s mannered eloquence seldom deserts him, though his most typical mode of expression is not so much stately as that odd, forcible yoking together of street language and the diction of the incunabula-lined study which has been dubbed ‘yob baroque’. (Typical example: ‘Then the fucker will rue the day.’) The ‘distressing’ news is that they are out of wine. But Marwood’s paranoia is increasing, and for the first time he owns up to its cause: ‘Jesus Christ. I think I’ve overdone it. I think I’ve overdosed. My thumbs have gone weird …’ Withnail, too wrapped up in his own fate to give a tuppenny damn about his best friend’s condition, tells him to pull himself together; then, picking up the Sunday paper Marwood has retrieved from the café, reads out loud from a story about ‘Jeff Wode’, a 300lb athlete pumped up on anabolic steroids. Rather than waste his emotional resources to any compassionate end, he launches into an

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The washing up

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appalled set of fantasies about ‘Jeff’ – ‘imagine the size of his balls …’, he whispers in delighted dread – and what ‘Jeff’ would do to you if you got ‘into a fight with the fucker …’ This improvised masterpiece of horror is broken short only when Withnail notices that Marwood appears to be eating soup – it is actually coffee, supped from a soup bowl – and within seconds they are engaged in an argument about the state of their dirty dishes, and the foul sink, which has not been touched for weeks. We are in an Alice in Wonderland world of depraved logic here, where Withnail’s angry announcement – ‘Right you fucker. I’m gonna do the washing up’ – sounds like a declaration of war, and where Marwood’s timorous reaction is worthy of a novel by H. P. Lovecraft: ‘You can’t. It’s impossible. I swear to you. I’ve looked into it … Listen to me. Listen … There’s a tea bag growing …’ But Withnail, suddenly switching roles from Dracula to Van Helsing, is undaunted, even when Marwood hints at the possibility of a rat among the debris. (And here it comes: ‘Then the fucker will rue the day …’) What finally brings him to a halt is the unprecedented vision of filth which greets him once he engages with the taps. The horrorfarce deepens. Withnail picks up the red-hot kettle which Marwood put on the hob in the opening scene and howls with pain; Marwood assumes he has been bitten by the mythical rat; something rises to the surface (‘Fork it!’, Withnail screams). Finally, something truly ghastly rises through the layers: ‘Matter.’ They admit defeat. Withnail, bolt upright, slowly blinking at the sheer awfulness of being conscious, stalks towards the camera and past it, intoning: ‘I think we’ve been in here too long. I feel unusual. I think we should go outside.’ *** In 1964, Robinson won a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He became friendly with, among others, Michael Feast (who would later lay cheeky claim to being the real-life Withnail), David Dundas (who composed the film’s musical score) and Vivian MacKerrell (who was the true original of Withnail). Another Central contemporary was Michael Elphick, who plays Jake the

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Poacher. Dundas, richer than the others, bought a large terraced house in Albert Street, Camden, during their second year, and this basic quartet moved in. Before long, the place was so littered with spongers and wasters that Dundas sensibly bought himself another flat in Hampstead and moved out. A generous soul, however, Dundas allowed the others to stay on. The flat became known as The Skin’s Hotel, from a Liverpudlian word meaning ‘friend’. The neighbourhood was heavily populated with Irish construction workers, pleasant enough chaps when sober but lethally violent when drunk, which was often. Robinson and co. uncharitably called them ‘The Wankers’. Some nights they’d come banging at the door, asking for glue so that they could stick back the teeth which had just been bashed out. Other nights they would chase Robinson home, baying for his blood. Their local pub was the Spread Eagle. The Skins would drink there from 11.00 a.m. to 3.00 p.m. before going home to start guzzling red wine. For rare indulgences in more solid fare, there was also a nearby café: the Parkway. Robinson likes to tell the story8 of how one morning, as he was eating a poached egg on toast, he looked up to see a huge, red-bearded Wanker staring at him through the window. At a loss for an appropriate response, Robinson pantomimed rubbing his belly with satisfaction at this modest feast. Redbeard concluded that he was taking the piss, and came crashing in; Robinson, still clutching his knife and fork, sprinted out through the kitchen, over a garden wall, then another, then a third – his own – and in through the back. It was easy to get in the back way, because Bruce and Viv had accidentally knocked part of the wall into the garden. They had been hitting pustules in the plasterwork of the bathroom, and the bathroom wall had simply given way. From that point on, it was sealed off by a sheet of blue polythene. Robinson lived in constant terror of an invasion by the hordes of Wankers who lived in an enormous Victorian workhouse near Gloucester Terrace. He would nail up his bedroom door every night as a precaution.

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Vivian MacKerrell (© Bruce Robinson)

There wasn’t much money. Viv and Bruce would take the bus down from Camden to Victoria to sign on for National Assistance: £8 a week, as Robinson recalls. ‘It was the most humiliating experience. Rows of winos and Irish and actors … we were down there all the time, and it was very formative for me as a writer, this sea of stuff coming in which I used to shove into my diary.’9 *** Regent’s Park has seldom looked less pleasant than on this chilly, grey autumn morning. It is some time before eight: over four hours until opening time and the possibility of easing their pain and re-embracing alcoholic oblivion. Wrapped in their calf-length overcoats (Withnail’s is an enviably fine garment: the inspired creation of the film’s costume designer, Andrea Galer), Withnail and Marwood contemplate the London Zoo wolves in their pen: the damp quadrupeds don’t look much happier with their lot than the bipeds. Finally tiring of their nature watch, the pair mooch aimlessly off down the path. Withnail is on moan overdrive: ‘This is ridiculous. Look at me. I’m thirty in a month. And I’ve got a sole flapping off my shoe.’ Marwood, his drug-induced fear subsiding, is becoming more like the person we shall come to know: the slightly more level-headed one, the practical one, the one who has at least a modicum of what the British Army used to call moral fibre. He tries to cheer Withnail up, but Withnail simply sneers at him, nakedly jealous of the fact that

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A trip to the park

Marwood has recently had an audition. (We do not know it now, but the seed of their eventual fate has been planted.) ‘I tell you, I can’t take much more of this, I’m going to crack … I feel sick as a pike. I’m gonna have to sit down.’ They do so. Again, Marwood tries to rally Withnail from this state of self-pitying funk, and suggests that what they need is to get out of London for a while, head for the country, ‘rejuvenate’. Withnail is sceptical, and proposes instead that they go back to the flat and rub embrocation on themselves as a way of fending off death from cold. Suddenly, he hawks up some vile jelly from his lungs. He contemplates the blob with a degree of disgust so profound as to border on awe: ‘Jesus. Look at that. Apart from a raw potato, that’s the only solid to pass my lips in the last sixty hours. I must be ill.’ *** People have often remarked – knowingly, sniffily, in puzzlement – on the almost total absence of women from Withnail & I. (From the earliest reviews onwards, it has often been suggested that the heroes – ostensibly, if inertly, heterosexual – are engaged in a latently gay relationship which neither they nor the narrative can admit: the

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Uncle Monty sub-plot thus acting as a kind of lightning conductor or red herring, depending on your choice of metaphors for distracted attention.) Robinson’s response: I’ll tell you exactly why there are no women in it … If you’re in a state of extreme poverty when you’re young, you can’t afford girlfriends. I wanted to use that, in a subliminal way, as a facet of the deprivation. There is no femininity in their lives at all. And indeed at that period of my life, there weren’t any women. I couldn’t afford them.

Besides which, it was very much an up-all-night, blokes-talking-and-drinking lifestyle, and girls don’t like that. I remember this friend of mine scored with a chick one night. He washed his sheets literally twice a year. And he got this fucking tube of Mum Rolette that he went over the sheets to get this girl into bed. Because they could not have been thrashed into supplication on the banks of the Ganges, those bastards, I tell you.10

*** Soon after graduating from Central, Robinson landed the part of Benvolio in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968). He has told the story of what happened to him in Rome on a number of occasions, never more memorably than in 1998, in a BBC2 interview programme with Ruby Wax, when he was told that the cameras were not running: I arrive in this apartment, downtown Rome, and it’s filled with little Gucci guys with these Gucci shoes and Gucci bags, and Franco says to me, ‘Oh, you must be tired. Long flight? Why don’t you have a shower?’ Next thing, he comes in with this blue silk kaftan and dries my hair … and now I’m back in the room and all of these faggots … disappear. Now I’m back on the bloody couch with Franco and there’s a line I used in Withnail & I, it’s the only rip-off line: ‘Are you a sponge or a stone?’ Then he’s suddenly fishing in my tonsils with his tongue …

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Bruce Robinson (centre) with Franco Zeffirelli (right) during filming of Romeo and Juliet (1968)

At this point, the anecdote ‘dissolves’ to the next morning, with a dazed Robinson wandering around near the Spanish Steps, only to be cruised by another gay Roman. Robinson was, he told the cast of Withnail without a shred of false modesty, ‘as gorgeous-looking as a fucking Renaissance prince’ when he left drama school, and there were many gentlemen who ‘wanted my arse’.11 (On the question of buggery: consulted on the thorny issue of Withnail’s possible homophobic tendencies, my closest gay friend proposes that the film’s only true note of anti-homosexual bias comes in Marwood’s terrified conviction that what Uncle Monty wants is his ‘arse’. Manifestly, what an Old Queen like Monty would actually want to do is give the lad a blow job; the terror of anal rape is pure, ignorant heterosexual panic on the part of Marwood. I defer to my friend’s expertise here.) The five or six months he spent with Zeffirelli, Robinson claimed, permanently damaged his abilities as an actor – he became terrified of directors, and would respond either by being cringingly anxious to please or stroppy and self-defensive – and eventually sapped his desire to act (he now refers to the director as ‘Frankly Vermicelli’). The screenplay contains a fairly overt reference to Romeo and Juliet. Withnail is reading from the Sunday paper: ‘Look at this little bastard. “Boy lands plum role for top Italian director.”

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’Course he does. Probably on a tenner a day. And I know what for. Two pound ten a tit and a fiver for his arse …’ *** On returning to Albert Street, Robinson found the place so crammed with wastrels that he had to sleep on a mattress in the bathroom. Gradually, over the next two years, all the other inhabitants drifted away. Michael Feast married his agent and went to live with her. Dundas had recently sold the bottom half of the house to an architect called Christopher Bowerbank, who converted the space into a flat. By his own confession, Robinson (and Viv) used to ‘rob him blind’ of food and alcohol. They were dreadful neighbours in other ways, too. When the men from the gas company came to cut off their supply, Bruce and Viv told them to cut off the downstairs supply as well. When bailiffs came in search of their property, the duo again sent them downstairs, whence they removed everything except the bed. Eventually, just Bruce and Viv remained. That extended period of enforced aimlessness was the genesis of Withnail & I: Viv and I were together for two years, and it gets very intense, that, if you haven’t got any money … The one thing we had in common was we were smart, and we would sit up all night talking about whatever. It was a marvellous time in my life, even though I was absolutely destitute.12

*** Back in the flat, Marwood’s voiceover13 corroborates Withnail’s auto-diagnosis of serious illness, in his most poetic offering so far: ‘Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day, and for once I am inclined to believe that Withnail is right. We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell. What we need is harmony …’ (When he speaks out loud, Marwood’s language is unremarkable – he has some of the flattest lines in the film. Like so many writers, he achieves eloquence only on the page: and most of his voiceovers are extracts from the notebook in which he habitually scribbles.) In place of

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Marwood writes

harmony, what we get is the ludicrous spectacle of Withnail, naked save for baggy underpants and overcoat, smearing his scrawny frame with Deep Heat. ‘Wasn’t much in the tube,’ he lies, throwing Marwood the crushed remnant and starting to grapple with some rubber gloves. Possibly enlivened by the chemicals eating into his skin, Withnail indulges in a high-voltage rendition of his favourite theme: the most lamentable tragedy of Withnail, neglected genius: ‘We can’t go on like this. I’m a trained actor reduced to the status of a bum.’ He raises his rubber-gloved hand in the air before him as though he were on stage with the RSC, as though he were Hamlet hoisting Yorick’s skull. His rant continues, then turns nastier, more paranoid. Rage and greed convulse him: ‘I must have some booze.’ Though he doesn’t dwell on the last word, his emphatic pronunciation suggests that it contains more than two ‘O’s: ‘I demand to have some Booooze!’ He plunges for the lighter fluid. Marwood warns him off: not even the Wankers would touch it, and they drink meths. Withnail instantly contrives a piece of insane snobbery: ‘Nonsense. This is a far superior drink to meths. The Wankers don’t drink it because they can’t afford it.’

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Withnail has a tipple

He twists the can open, squirts, swallows, gasps … oh, my God. He actually seems to like it: ‘Have we got any more?’ And he starts to accuse Marwood of hiding a precious cache of antifreeze. Marwood says the first thing that comes into his head: ‘You bloody fool. You should never mix your drinks.’ This accidental witticism strikes Withnail as hugely amusing; he shrieks with laughter, pitches forward … and spills the contents of his guts over Marwood’s shoes. The camera is merciful, and allows this to happen out of sight. *** Two brief notes on the heroism of Richard E. Grant: 1. The Deep Heat embrocation was real. It burned him like fury, especially around the genital region. 2. The ‘lighter fluid’ was, unexpectedly, vinegar. He held it down long enough to complete his lines, then puked for real. ***

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Most of the film’s fans are well aware of the fact that, pace the Observer interview with Michael Feast, Withnail is closely based on Vivian MacKerrell. ‘There isn’t a line of Viv’s in Withnail & I, but his horrible wine-stained tongue may as well have spoken every word.’14 They met in the first year at Central, 1964: Vivian wore a blue suit and sunglasses and looked like the young Marlon Brando. ‘Within ten minutes I was his closest friend, and so was everyone else. Everyone loved Viv.’ MacKerrell’s almost supernatural ability to sit drinking in a pub all day without ever, ever buying a round earned him the ingenious nickname ‘Crime’, since everyone knows that Crime Doesn’t Pay. (He was also called ‘Spine’ – perhaps a sarcastic reference to his conspicuous cowardice.) People didn’t mind the sponging, though, because his company was well worth the price of a few drinks. Vivian came from what Robinson calls the ‘drowning upper classes’. He was obsessed with wills, and always praying that some valetudinarian aunt would finally die and leave him a few thousand pounds; the ladies obliged him with surprising frequency. In Robinson’s retrospective view, he was a dreadful actor – a verdict sometimes moderated to ‘he wasn’t a bad actor’ – but he cut a swathe at Central because of his air of sublime self-confidence. ‘Everyone thought he was going to be a star.’ MacKerrell’s lack of success in later years baffled and appalled him, so that he retreated into a private world where it was eternally the summer of 1968. Vivian was a great influence on Robinson. The product of a public school, he was fluent in French, Latin and Greek – or, at least, gave the impression of such fluency to the overawed Secondary Modern boy Bruce. Viv soon became a mentor not only in debauchery but in connoisseurship of wine and the literature of several languages. Previously under the sway of Dickens and Dylan Thomas, Robinson turned greedily to Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the French poets of the Second Empire – Verlaine, Rimbaud and especially Baudelaire. After hearing Viv describe Baudelaire as the greatest of the modern poets, Robinson ordered

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a copy of the Penguin Baudelaire, and was stunned. Robinson’s first shot at a screenplay, in around 1968, was a life of Baudelaire entitled Spleen. Hence Uncle Monty: ‘Laisse-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps l’odeur de tes cheveux. Ah, Baudelaire. Brings back such memories of Oxford. Oh, Oxford.’ And if Marwood and Withnail are not exactly Verlaine and Rimbaud, they are certainly engaged in Rimbaud’s project for the systematic derangement of their senses. Vivian also put Bruce on to Huysmans’s À Rebours – ‘the funniest book I’ve ever read’. Not everyone finds Huysmans’s lapidary fable about an effete urban hermit quite so hilarious (it is, incidentally, the thrillingly corrupt book alluded to in The Picture of Dorian Gray), but, for those who know it, there are muffled echoes of Des Esseintes’s principled withdrawal into his own lavish apartments in the opening scenes. At the end of the film, Marwood carefully places the Penguin À Rebours next to David Copperfield. When there was money, or even when there wasn’t, Viv and Bruce would drink. Looking back over his diary entries in later years, Robinson was amazed at the sheer quantity they consumed, and the damage they recklessly inflicted on themselves. Practically every page began with a description of a hangover: ‘November 16 1969. In bed for two days. I can hear Viv groaning in the other room. I can’t believe this one. It’s almost biblical.’ On another occasion – 30 April 1969 – the pair pulled on suits and went down to Sotheby’s for a wine-tasting: ‘Sotheby’s was one of the best shows in town to drink brilliant wine and arsehole yourself absolutely free.’ Unfortunately, one of the doormen – ‘some bloke with ears and a green hat’ – recognised them, blocked their way and told them, ‘You two cunts can hop it.’ Sorely disappointed, they strolled across to Regent’s Park and looked at the wolves: ‘I can’t count the number of times we went into the park and looked at the wolves.’15 ***

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On the walk to the local pub, General Withnail outlines his strategy: All right, this is the plan. We’ll get in there and get wrecked. Then we’ll eat a pork pie. Then we’ll go home and drop a couple of Surmontil 50s each. That means we’ll miss out Monday, but come up smiling Tuesday morning.

The streets, and the exterior of the pub, are daubed with proIRA graffiti. The pub is called the Mother Black Cap, and it is not the kind of place that British Airways use in photo-spreads to entice American visitors to the UK. Withnail puts in their order – two large gins, two pints of cider, ice in the cider (Ice? In this weather? They must be mad …) – and as they knock them back, they engage in a classic duet of failed communication: MARWOOD

What about what’s his name?

WITHNAIL

What about him?

MARWOOD

Why don’t you give him a call?

WITHNAIL

What for?

This is in danger of turning into the old ‘Who’s on First?’ routine, until Withnail breaks the vicious cycle by asking Marwood ‘Who the fuck’ he is talking about, and all becomes moderately clear. Marwood knows that one of Withnail’s relatives, an Uncle Monty, has a country cottage; perhaps he would lend it to them? Withnail agrees to give it a whirl, sponges a ten bob note from Marwood, and says he’ll telephone. Marwood sets off for the Gents; Withnail orders another round with an officer-class flourish of the new note. But, as Marwood nears the Gents, a burly Irishman in a too-tight suit growls ‘Ponce’ at him. At the urinals, Marwood is too terrified even to pee. Over the urinals, someone has scrawled ‘I fuck arses’. Reverse shot on Marwood’s eyes – a reprise of the close-up in the café, but much tighter on the face, which expresses much more urgent fear. His voiceover and his actual voice knit together: ‘“I fuck arses”?

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Who fucks arses? Maybe he fucks arses …’ Literary critics call this device ‘prolepsis’ – a kind of anticipation. One of the key plot moments of the film will turn on Marwood’s dread of being fucked in the arse by Uncle Monty. But, sufficient unto the scene is the evil thereof. Marwood, a sickly smile of attempted insouciance on his face, makes his way past the drunk – ‘Perfumed ponce!’ – and tries to recruit Withnail for a swift exit. Withnail is now sufficiently recharged with gin and cider to be unimpressed by Marwood’s whispered resumé of the imminent threat to their well-being. Taking a chomp on his sandwich, he listens impatiently to Marwood: ‘I’ve been called a ponce.’ Mighty Withnail swivels in his chair, faces the bar and bellows: ‘What fucker said that?’ The fucker presents himself. Withnail’s face instantly collapses around the sandwich he has in his mouth: a lump of crust juts from under his top lip, as though he had grown an extra tooth. In the following seconds, cowardice and treachery inspire him to a rapid volley of assorted escape strategies: 1. Diplomacy: ‘Would you like a drink?’ 2. A bid for pity: ‘I have a heart condition …’ 3. A threat: ‘If you hit me, it’s murder.’ 4. Maudlin sentimentality (delivered on the verge of tears, and with the hint of an Irish accent16): ‘My wife is having a baby …’ 5. The Judas manoeuvre: ‘I don’t know what my f— [swerves away from the incriminating word “friend”] … acquaintance did to upset you. But it was nothing to do with me …’ All five fail to impress. The couple scream, run past their aggressor, get jammed briefly in the doorway, fall out into the street and leg it. *** The memorable sight of Withnail’s new bread tooth, which most viewers assume to be scripted, was simply a fortunate accident,

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‘What fucker said that?’

the sight of which made Robinson fall about laughing – the only time, Grant claims, that he was known to corpse in the entire shoot. Whenever the crew would laugh at what had just been shot, Robinson would order a retake, on the assumption that anything which raised a laugh on set would fall stone dead on screen. He summed up his philosophy of the film’s basic comic method when he told Grant to accentuate Withnail’s fury and pain at all times:

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the deeper the rage and sense of injustice, the greater will be the comic result. It’s what I tried to explain to those fuckers [the suits from HandMade, who weren’t finding the rushes funny]. This script has no jokes. It’s cumulative and has to be real. Otherwise it’s just a load of old wobbly bollocks.17

*** There was one purely artistic source for Withnail: the character of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, as created by the brilliant triumvirate of Tony Hancock (actor), Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (writers) for the BBC in the 1950s. Like much of the British nation, Robinson adored Hancock’s Half Hour (1956–60), and was entranced by the Galton and Simpson style – irresistibly funny, yet not really built on jokes in the conventional sense: I thought they were brilliant, those two, with him; a trio of utter geniuses. Withnail and Hancock share that same pompousness, that total sense of self-worth, and they constantly lose their dignity, being slighted by the plebs that they run into.18

Such slim plot as the film has came from a bleak adventure Robinson endured not with Viv but with another of the Albert Street Tony Hancock in The Rebel (1960)

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irregulars, Michael Feast. In the spring of 1969, Robinson was sitting in a nearby Greek restaurant in Delancy Street, run by a married couple they called ‘Mr Crackadopolus’ and ‘The Emu’. Feast noticed a personal advert in the Sunday Times offering an ‘idyllic cottage’ in the Lake District for £10 a week. Feast and Robinson were trying to collaborate on a script called Private Pirates, about a group of four friends each one of whom, unknown to the others, liked to dress up as a pirate. Robinson suggested that they rent the place for a couple of weeks, hole up and finish the script. He borrowed the beaten-up old Jaguar which belonged to his recently acquired girlfriend, the actress Lesley-Anne Down, and they set off north, only to find that the alleged cottage near Ullswater was actually more like an ancient barn with a shattered roof. Water poured down through its holes into buckets. There was no gas, no electricity, no wood for the fireplace, and the blankets teemed with snails. Frozen and hungry, they burned all the furniture in the kitchen range to keep warm; they dragged a bed downstairs and slept together in it, desperate for warmth; wrapped polythene bags around their feet in lieu of Wellingtons; clumsily axe-murdered a chicken, which persisted in wandering around without its head. They drove the Jaguar into a ditch, and when a farmer – Mr Parkin (his name survived into the film) – dragged them out with his tractor, he also dragged off the car’s front. They retreated, but before their departure, Robinson wrote to his girlfriend saying that though they were having a wretched time, it would all be wonderful material for a story. In the winter of 1969/70 came an astonishing development: Vivian MacKerrell actually landed a job. He went off on a tour of the provinces in a Shaw play. Robinson was left alone and broke. Without Viv to distract him, the squalor and aimlessness of their habitual existence lost its amusing aspect. The DHSS summoned him to Victoria to ask why he hadn’t been employed for thirteen months. He was told that his case was under review, and was given £2 to survive on in the meantime.

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January was grim. The snow fell heavily, and Robinson paced up and down the flat by day and night. For basic sustenance, he had raisins, pilchards and whatever he could swipe from Camden market when it closed on Saturday: mainly apples and turnips. He owned a single lightbulb, which he moved from room to room in the hours of darkness, sometimes watching it like a television while he huddled in front of the only source of warmth, the open oven. When it was time to sleep, he took the bulb to bed with him. Eventually, a writ arrived, demanding payment of the rates, and summoning him to Hampstead Magistrates’ Court: I started weeping and screaming at the floorboards. Begging the God of Equity, or any fucking god, you know, to help me. And then it really made me laugh, the predicament I was in – I laughed hysterically when I thought about it. And I had this old Olivetti typewriter that I used to try and write poetry on. I sat down and started writing this story about my predicament, involving me and my friend who had now gone.19

He entitled this screed Withnail & I: It was one of the few times in my life I felt I was inspired. I was writing so fast, and crying with laughter as I was writing. I wasn’t earning my living writing; I certainly never thought it was going to be published. I wrote it purely for the joy of writing, and I sat there in penury having one of the best times I’ve ever had.20

The name ‘Withnail’ comes from a friend of Robinson’s official father called Jonathan Withnall (hence the pronunciation by Marwood). ‘Because I can’t spell, I spelled it Withnail, which is a more appropriate name. It sounds like he is, vicious and bitter …’ In Robinson’s memory, Jonathan Withnall was a posh ne’er-do-well and alcoholic, who favoured cravats and cavalry-twill trousers. At the age of about eight, the young Bruce was taken for a ride in Withnall’s Aston Martin; at one point, Withnall pulled over to the kerb, opened

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the door, puked copiously and then drove happily off again. Bruce was impressed. In later years, Withnall, in standard condition, reversed his Aston out of a pub car park and into the side of a police car. He later emigrated to the United States.21 *** Marwood is sitting naked in the bathtub, shaving. This looks like the sort of bathroom from which you emerge more grimy than you entered. The only clean thing is a black-and-white movie poster – the famous image of a bespectacled Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock suspended high over a street. Withnail storms in bearing two portions of chips and a major grudge – his agent has told him he’s been turned down for the cigar commercial. Worse still, it seems, a certain ‘Danny’ has turned up, shoeless and in flight from the cold. Too angry to cope with food, Withnail flushes his fried dinner down the loo and storms out. Marwood brings his razor blade up to his pale, naked throat; he is so thin that the jugular vein stands out, and he looks painfully vulnerable. He muses fatalistically about Danny: ‘The purveyor of rare herbs and prescribed chemicals is back. Will we never be set free?’ This seems a shade hyperbolical until the scene cuts to Danny, who is the sort of creature that haunts the most lurid nightmares of Daily Mail readers, who makes Drug Squad officers salivate and dream of promotion, who would probably be turned away from a Hell’s Angels convention for looking too disreputable. Fairly beefy, he is dressed in biker chic, with wraparound shades, a thermonuclear mop of uncombed hair and painted (black) fingernails. He could legitimately be arrested just for being alive. And the voice! An unearthly mode of hyper-cultivated cockney – distant echoes of Harold Steptoe from Steptoe and Son (1962–74)? – festooned with recessive consonants more typical of the inbred upper classes. It’s almost fey, but there’s something about its brain-damaged deliberateness which also chills the vitals. Enter Marwood, naked save for his bath towels. Danny gazes at him from behind his shades as if considering his suitability as a

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Danny pays a visit

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main course: ‘You’re lookin’ very beautiful, man. Have you been away? St Peter preached the epistles to the apostles looking like that.’ (The alliterative ‘P’s are a tiny masterpiece. Eat your heart out, Gerard Manley Hopkins.) He asks Marwood for food; Marwood offers him a chip-shop saveloy, which he passes under his nostrils as if it were a fine Havana and then files away for future use. His wandering attention is snagged by the handsome suit which Withnail is in the process of donning; Withnail snaps irritably back, and Danny drifts into a vaguely suit-related reverie about one of his business associates who made the mistake of turning up in court dressed in a kaftan and a bell. Danny’s self-engrossed ramblings continue, to his exploits in the ‘bottle industry’ and the toy industry: he and his pal Presuming Ed, inspired by a successful doll ‘what pisses itself ’ – ‘S’horrible really, but they like that, the little girls …’ – are going to manufacture a prototype ‘that shits itself as well’. But Withnail’s mood is growing more foul by the second, and Danny does not like his tone: DANNY

If I medicined you, you’d think a brain tumour was a birthday present.

WITHNAIL

I could take double anything you could.

Oh, no. There is a terrible pause. Danny removes his glasses. His eyes have been made up with black mascara, but there is nothing remotely feminine about the effect. It’s more like Hieronymous Bosch. His voice is hushed with menace: ‘Very, very foolish words, man.’ And, breaking open the head of his ‘voodoo’ doll, he removes a pill: ‘Trade: Phenodihydrochloride Benzorex.22 Street: … “The Embalmer”.’ Withnail continues to bluster: ‘Balls! I’ll swallow it and run a mile,’ until some strange sense of propriety grips what is left of Danny’s brain – ‘Cool your boots, man’ – and he makes his peaceable departure. Parthian shot: ‘Have either of you got shoes?’ ***

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‘Danny’ was an amalgam of two hairdressers. One, actually called ‘Danny’, was a bisexual with bizarre dress sense, who favoured a top hat, clogs and a sort of wolfskin pelt. He sported this minimal outfit even in the depths of winter, and Robinson recalls the sight of Danny showing up on their doorstep in the middle of the night during a snowstorm, ‘these terrible waxen pin-like legs with clogs at the end of them’. At last report, Danny went into the City, made a fortune and bought a house in Surrey. Danny’s highly imitable voice owes a good deal to a startlingly dim woman who worked as a make-up artist at Pinewood Studios. The fourth major character in the piece, Uncle Monty, was an amalgam of Robinson’s experiences with Zeffirelli and a strange, inadvertently hilarious volume of vintage gay rhapsodies, Rondeux of Boyhood. Privately printed in the early 1920s, it includes a photograph of a naked youth and a selection of strikingly gauche verses in praise of boys. Robinson discovered a copy in a junk shop: ‘ridiculous poems, stuff like “In trousers now my boys arrayed” and “Come into the woods and strike my conker, oh bend, I conquer you” and “We all got laid at the Dog and Duck in the morning” …’23 *** The Withnail novel began to circulate in samizdat among Robinson’s cronies, and some time in 1970 it found its way, via another of Robinson’s friends, the screenwriter Andrew Birkin, to David Puttnam. It was on the strength of this that Puttnam commissioned Robinson to write a thirteen-part television series, Garrett’s Guitars, for the sum of £200. The story of a boy who dreams of being a rock star and the genie who lives in his guitar, it was never produced. But the novel did not die. 1980: An actor called Don Hawkins passed the novel to Moderick ‘Mody’ Schreiber, who liked it, and gave Robinson a few thousand pounds to adapt it into a screenplay. Robinson wrote the adaptation while living in California, and did not enjoy the

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experience much. Where the novel had flowed freely with the fresh juice of inspiration, the screenplay was more like hard labour. 1985: Robinson, hoping to scare up some interest in the film, commissioned a spec poster from the cartoonist Ralph Steadman for £200. Robinson had admired Steadman’s illustrations for Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. None of the actors had been cast at this stage, so Steadman’s drawing was based entirely on his reading of the script. It was later used as the poster for the film’s theatrical release, and as the cover of the VHS. In that same year, Robinson’s first produced screenplay, The Killing Fields proved to be a major international success. It earned him an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA award. It was around this time that the American producer Paul Heller read the Withnail script, and loved it. Better still, he managed to raise about half the required budget straight away from an enlightened property developer, Lawrence Kirstein. Heller also encouraged Robinson to think about directing the material himself. Another friend of Robinson’s, David Wimbury, took the package to HandMade Films. At the head of HandMade: yet another American producer, Denis O’Brien, and an English musician and songwriter, name of George Harrison. HandMade Films had been formed to produce Monty Python’s Life of Brian in 1979, after EMI had backed away. The Python film eventually took more than £40 million, and the company was receptive to the idea of making further British comedies. Harrison read the script for Withnail & I in his first-class seat on a flight to New York. He loved it too, and said ‘We’ll make it.’ A budget of £1.1 million was agreed, of which £80,000 was Robinson’s director’s fee and £1 his writer’s fee. Astonishingly, Robinson had his money; now he just needed his cast. He called on the services of a respected casting director, Mary Selway, and auditions began in July 1986, at Peel Cottage, Peel Street, Notting Hill Gate. Daniel Day-Lewis and Eddie Tudor Pole were among the actors being seriously considered for the part of Withnail. Bill Nighy also gave a very strong audition, but he was drinking

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Photographs of a cast meeting by Ralph Steadman (© Ralph Steadman 1986)

heavily at that time and, as Robinson says, ‘one drunk on the set was going to be enough’. (They were later to work together as actors in the 1998 comedy about an ageing rock group, Still Crazy.) If it had not been for Mary Selway’s persistence, Richard E. Grant would never even have made it to the auditions. At this stage of his career he was very much the struggling actor – very much like Withnail, really, and almost precisely the same age. (Born in Swaziland in 1957, he was twenty-nine; Withnail, we recall, is a month away from his thirtieth birthday.) Apart from one television film, Les Blair’s satire on the advertising world Honest, Decent and True (1986), his CV was bare of anything save bits and pieces of fringe and profitshare work. In brief, he was desperate for a breakthrough role. Robinson took one look at Grant’s publicity photograph and pronounced him overweight. ‘I’m looking for Byron, not a chubby Dirk Bogarde.’ (Historical note: Lord Byron himself fought a constant battle against obesity all his adult life, frequently resorting to violent exercise and crash diets to keep the pounds off. His reputation for Romantic gauntness owes more to rumour than to reality.) This was a sour irony for Grant, as he had spent a great deal of time in the gym throughout the previous year, strenuously trying to add more than a stone to his usual weight in the belief that it would help land him some more leading-man roles.

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Grant has told the story of his audition at length in With Nails. The clinching moment was his impassioned delivery of the line, ‘Fork it!’: My script goes flying, my fingers missiling towards Robinson’s face. And the morose little fucker laughs. He seems even more surprised than I am. Scrabbling around the floor for the dismembered script, whose metal clips had snapped, he asks whether I had attacked any other directors. ‘Not yet’, I lie. [Grant had recently auditioned for the part of Frankenstein’s monster, and had found himself rather carried away: he grabbed the director by the throat.]24

From that point on, though days of agonised uncertainty followed, the part was already his. Robinson told him to lose a stone, and he was soon back to his previous weight. It almost goes without saying that the film now seems unthinkable without Grant as Withnail. It is a brilliantly observed, immaculate performance; beyond praise. Apart from the command to lose weight, Robinson required one other transformatory experience from Grant. A lifelong nonsmoker and teetotaller – genuinely allergic, it seems, to alcohol – Grant had no experience of what it feels like to be drunk, let alone ‘arseholed beyond Withinsnape’: Bruce wanted me to have this Los Angeles bullshit: a ‘chemical memory’. For a man who is allergic to drink, it is a lot: a whole bottle of champagne in one night. And the next morning they had set up a bar absolutely stacked with these gallon-sized jars of vodka. So I poured one of these long tumblers three-quarters of the way with vodka and topped it up with Pepsi-Cola, drank it down in one, and vomited …

25

Such was the backstage farce. There was also a backstage tragedy. On 21 July 1986, Grant’s wife Joan, seven months pregnant with their first child – a girl, already given the name Tiffany – went into labour. Despite the best efforts of the staff at Queen Charlotte’s Maternity

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Hospital, the girl died shortly after birth. Both mother and father were plunged into the agonies of mourning. Less than a fortnight later, Grant had to perform before the rolling cameras. The other cast members were chosen more rapidly. The part of Marwood was offered to Kenneth Branagh – shortly before his career really took off – but Branagh refused it, because he was only interested in the part of Withnail, and, as Robinson said, ‘I didn’t want him to [play Withnail]. I didn’t think he had enough nobility. Marvellous actor that he is, there’s something about Ken that is the antithesis of Byronesque: he looks like a partially cooked doughnut. Richard looks like fucking Byron.’ Marwood was also offered to Michael Maloney, who eventually turned it down on the grounds that he considered the script anti-gay, anti-Black and anti-Irish: not the last time such accusations have been levelled.26 Robinson then went back to the performer he had originally had in mind for the part: Paul McGann, who at the time was mainly known for his leading role in Alan Bleasdale’s 1986 BBC series The Monocled Mutineer, a World War I drama. (It was only years later that the coincidence of Marwood going off to play in another Great War drama, Journey’s End, dawned on Robinson. Though it is tempting to hunt for buried significance in the choice of Journey’s End – doomed youth and all that – Robinson has noted that the detail is unmodified autobiography, and that a successful regional tour in the Sherriff play gave him his steadiest income as a stage actor.) McGann was ideal for the role, save for one detail: his Liverpudlian accent, which he only dropped after repeated threats from Robinson. As to the two main supporting roles: Michael Feast was offered the part of Danny, and turned it down, fearing that it was too close to his own recent history for psychological comfort. Ralph Brown, who in real life was not very far from bald, and had closely cropped what hair was left, arrived for his audition at Shepperton in a long wig and bare-footed – pretty much in Danny fig, in fact. Robinson was immediately taken by his performance, which

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exactly caught Danny’s ‘quality of intense seriousness about absolutely nothing.’27 There were no auditions for the part of Montague Withnail. Robinson had seen Richard Griffiths in A Private Function (1984) some eighteen months earlier and told his wife, ‘If I ever get a shot at making Withnail, that’s my Uncle Monty.’ He called Griffiths in, handed him the script and told him that Monty was his if he wanted the role. Griffiths phoned back in short order and said that he would love the part. As Robinson later explained, he wanted Griffiths for the simpatico, Billy Bunter quality he would bring to the part, so that Monty would generally seem more sweet than predatory.28 Aware of the fact that his technical expertise as a director boiled down to having seen others do the job, Robinson knew that he needed a highly reliable crew. In collaboration with David Wimbury, he recruited Peter Hannan as director of photography, Bob Smith as camera operator and Alan Strachan as editor. The production designer was Michael Pickwoad: Pickwoad came out of the HandMade woodwork; he’d worked on some HandMade films before. He’s terribly eccentric and very tense, wearing bowties and a grin. I liked him enormously from the moment I met him, and I think the casting of the crew is as important as the casting of the actors.29

Pickwoad was essential to the task of finding appropriate London locations, drawing up detailed lists of exactly what each scene would require. The Camden flat was a condemned house in Chepstow Villas, off Kensington Church Street – its condemned state meaning that the art department could run riot, though they needed to do very little with the existing kitchen sink, which was already clogged with matter. The Mother Black Cap was a pub in Notting Hill, on Tavistock Crescent, near the Westway. And Uncle Monty’s house was found in Glebe Place, near the Albert Embankment. It was, and is, owned by the fabric designer Bernard Neville, whose philosophy of interior decoration corresponds so closely to Uncle

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Monty’s that the set needed little dressing apart from the silver-potted vegetables: for example, the velveteen Howard couch, from 1870, still dominates Mr Neville’s sitting room. Robinson had met Neville at a dinner party about two years earlier, and had been invited back for drinks. When it came to the shoot, ‘Hannan stuck the lights in, we turned the camera on and that was it.’30 *** The duo own a Jaguar – an impressive vehicle, until you notice the state it’s in. As they pull up in the street where Monty resides, they pass another fine car – a Rolls. And this beautiful vehicle is in pristine condition. It’s Monty’s, of course. Unnaturally smart in their suits, they knock at his door. After a pause, an apparition opens it: magnificently obese, dressed in a fine suit – a radish taking the place usually occupied by a carnation – clutching a watering can in one hand and a fluffy cat in the other. From behind, warm light and exquisite music: late Schubert, his Piano Sonata in B-Flat Major, D.960, third (scherzo) movement31 (the script had specified Mozart). After another pause, this vast humanoid speaks, or flutes, or croons: ‘Oh hell-oooooah …’ As performed by Richard Griffiths, Uncle Monty’s speech cries out as much for musical notation as for verbal analysis. His first aria deliciously combines (homo)erotic metaphors with mad connoisseurship, and is on the theme of his avowed preference for root vegetables over flowers: ‘I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts. Prostitutes for the bees …’ Quotation alone cannot do justice to the music of Uncle Monty’s speech. Not that Marwood is enchanted: MARWOOD

What’s this? The man’s mad.

WITHNAIL

Eccentric.

MARWOOD

Eccentric? He’s insane. Not only that, he’s a raving homosexual …

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Uncle Monty

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Oh dear. Well, it is 1969, and Marwood is in some ways a curiously naive and fearful creature. And one must agree that Monty can be very alarming, especially on the matter of his cat, which drives him into frenzies of rage and fantasies of ailurocide. Meeow! Re-enter the cat, pursued by a howling Monty. Thwarted in his pursuit, Monty flops backwards, momentarily spent, onto one of his giant couches – a remarkable manoeuvre, as it seems to involve no bending of the legs or waist, just a reverse collapse which leaves Monty semi-supine: a beached cetacean. The colours and textures of his clothes match those of its covering, so that the overstuffed man appears like a part of his overstuffed furniture. Withnail tells a few routine lies about his brilliant career, lets it drop that Marwood is also an actor (‘So you’re a thesbian, too?’; yes, he says ‘thesbian’ with a ‘b’) and thus allows Monty an opening to reminisce about his own time treading the boards: ‘It is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life, when one morning he awakes, and quite reasonably says to himself, I will never play the Dane. When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases …’ And before long he is drifting off to the ramparts of Elsinore. Marwood is ready to scram, cottage or no cottage, but his evening of torment is far from over. After more theatrical anecdotes (‘I remember my first agent. Raymond Duck. He was a dreadful little Is-ra-el-ite …’ – each vowel of that word sounded separately, as though in an anti-Semitic oratorio), attention swerves dangerously in Marwood’s direction, never more dangerously than when Monty suddenly darts: ‘Where did you go to school?’ But Withnail is on the ball: ‘He went to the other place, Monty.’ ‘Oh, you went to Eton …’ Another feline eruption, another Monty explosion: ‘It will die. It will die.’ Withnail takes control, and, despite Monty’s protestations, leads him out of the room. For an ominously long time. Eventually, Monty sees them out, something newly, strangely smug in his demeanour. Marwood is suspicious, angry: why on earth did

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Withnail tell him that whopper about Eton? ‘I was just trying to establish you in some sort of context he’d understand …’ ‘What d’you mean by that?’ Withnail brandishes a giant key: ‘I mean, free to those that can afford it, very expensive to those that can’t.’ *** The exterior scenes at Uncle Monty’s were the last to be shot. Both McGann and Robinson had been celebrating the wrap a trifle prematurely with some cans of beer, and McGann drove the Jag into the side of a skip. Grant was annoyed: ‘I’m not being in this scene with a fucking drunk!’ And he bailed out of the car. In Robinson’s memory, the two leads were never particularly chummy, though both actors protest that they were on good terms and still see each other socially from time to time. When Robinson finally declared a wrap for the last time, Grant found himself having to suppress tears. He handed out presents – vodka for Robinson and the camera crew, beer and home-made caricatures for the rest of the unit. If he had been containing his misery over his lost daughter for the duration, now was the time he could let it out. But he didn’t. As Grant writes, he had begun the film in a state of near-numbed grief; he ended it driving home ‘in shocked silence’.32

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3 A Kingdom of Rains The secret of good comedy: timing. Sudden cut to a daylight (well, almost) exterior. After the restrained Schubertian atmosphere chez Uncle Monty, blazing acid rock: the soundtrack splits open with churning guitar chords – the overture of Jimi Hendrix’s radical rereading of Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ – while a wrecking ball swings with surreal gracefulness into the side of a terraced house, mashing its grimy brickwork into dust and rubble. Viewers with an eye for running threads of symbolism could see this as one of many emblems of decay in the film, and so it may be, but the immediate effect is comic – the architectural equivalent of a pie in the face. The terrace demolition continues as Withnail and Marwood get into their decrepit Jag (no surprise that Marwood is the driver). As they reach the junction, Marwood winds down his window, peers out into the oncoming traffic and flicks down a pair of clip-on shades. Cool but redundant, for the weather remains overcast and will grow progressively darker as they venture further north. So we suspect a small moment of narcissism in the usually self-effacing Marwood; one reason why his gesture, carefully noted in the script, also seems funny. The addition of shades also underlines McGann’s close resemblance to the young Bruce Robinson – here, they look virtually identical. As they make their way through the unlovely streets of North London towards the motorway, Withnail squirms and jumps in his passenger seat, electric with mischief and self-delight: so this is what he can be like when not he’s not moping or preening. He swigs from a bottle of Haig and shouts out of the window at pedestrians. At a group of schoolgirls in their prim blazers and pleated skirts: ‘Scrubbers! Scrubbers!’ He is gleeful at his own wit, and maybe, for the one and only time in the film, sexually aroused: ‘Little tarts! They

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Off to the Lake District

love it!’ The sight of an ‘Accident Black Spot’ sign inspires him to an aesthete’s tirade: ‘These aren’t accidents. They’re throwing themselves into the road! Gladly! Throwing themselves into the road to escape all this hideousness.’ And, to a gormless-looking bloke at the kerb: ‘Throw yourself into the road, darling. [It’s a fair bet that no man has ever addressed him as “darling” before.] You haven’t got a chance.’ Robinson thought that only one in a thousand viewers would

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notice that this Black Spot sign is posted by the London Borough of Finchley, and that he had Mrs Thatcher in mind as the Dark Goddess presiding over all this hideousness.33 He was too conservative. As the journey continues, Withnail announces his intention to get hold of a child. Why? ‘To tutor it in the ways of righteousness, and procure some uncontaminated urine.’ And so to an explanation of the anti-drunk-driving contraption Danny gave him. Fill the bottle with innocent urine, slide the pipe under your clothes, Sellotape the end to ‘the old chap’ and switch on when a clean urine sample is required. ‘Then you get horribly drunk, and they can’t fucking touch you.’ Thus established, the joke is allowed to slumber for another hour or so. Content with his day’s work, and feeling the soporific effects of the whisky, Withnail announces his intention of nodding off. *** The departure point for the road trip to the Lake District was Barlby Road, Notting Hill. As McGann recalled: We hadn’t really got permission to film, and on the fourth take, just as we get to where the crew are, the traffic lights go red. We’re sitting there in this Jag for a minute. And we can see across the road there’s this Panda car. It’s Sunday morning, there’s no one around. I can see this fellow nudge his mate, mouthing, ‘What the fuck is that?’ And I thought ‘Bollocks’ and stood on it and we took off through this red light. And they chased us. And Grant is screaming. He’s screaming in my ear, he’s babbling, he’s talking about being deported back to Swaziland. I’m going, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ And we get back round to where the crew are – I’m on the pavement doing about 60 – and before I’ve even brought it to a stop the passenger door is open and Grant’s running for his life. Disappeared down the street. They found him in someone’s garden.34

It has been reported35 that the rights to use ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and, later, ‘Voodoo Chile’ cost Robinson £50,000 per second, a figure as impressive as it is obviously inaccurate, since the film’s total budget of just over £1 million would have been

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obliterated by twenty-odd seconds of the maestro’s music. Today the Hendrix estate refuses permission for his songs to be used in any film which includes the reckless use of drink and drugs; Robinson was fortunate in his timing, for a Withnail without Hendrix now seems as unthinkable as, say, Alexander Nevsky (1938) without Prokofiev, 2001 (1968) without Ligeti and the two Strausses, or Sergio Leone without Ennio Morricone. *** In English cultural history, the Lake District is deeply interfused with memories of the Lake Poets; oddly, it was the American reviewers of the film who first picked up on this association, the home team perhaps thinking it too obvious to require a mention. There are certainly some traces of Romantic leftovers in the film, if only because those two generations of radical intellectuals made up Britain’s first true Bohemia, but the point needs to be made lightly. If Withnail has been likened to Byron, our comic duo are hardly avatars of Coleridge and Wordsworth.36 Quite the contrary: the first days of their Lakeland sojourn might be read as a derisive raspberry at the reverent attitude to nature adumbrated in the Lyrical Ballads. Withnail, particularly, has a truly Augustan disdain for the countryside, and regards it as a zone of chill, hunger, mud, psychotic peasantry and potentially lethal wildlife. Their midnight arrival sets the all but relentless anti-pastoral tone: unforgiving darkness, wind, rain, bone-chilling cold. Withnail has a hangover – ‘a bastard behind the eyes’ – and as his self-pity ripens into loud wailing, he reaches for an appropriately rural simile: ‘I feel like a pig shat in my head.’ And – the horror, the horror! – there are no painkillers, however immaculate the grammar with which Withnail, verbally fastidious though in extremis, pronounces that ‘There must and shall be aspirin …’ Even the place name is ominous: not peaceable Dove Cottage, but carrion Crow Crag. They enter the pitchy interior, examine it by matchlight and then by hurricane lamp. ‘Christ Almighty’, breathes Withnail, and one can but agree. The place is more a cluttered shed

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On holiday by mistake

than the cosy nook of their fantasies. Again, desperate measures are called for: Withnail starts to smash up the wooden furniture and feed it to the fire. We glimpse warmth for the first time since Monty’s flat. This has not been a promising start. And yet the next morning does strike a certain version of true pastoral: as the script notes, Marwood – wearing his leather greatcoat over his bare chest like a dressing gown, and pulling on

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English pastoral

his granny glasses – sees ‘a fifteen-mile-long picture postcard. Bleak but beautiful.’ With Dartmoor and the Peaks, the Lake District is about as close as the English landscape comes to wilderness, and this establishing shot – the first in the film to show anything one could reasonably call a panorama – has an authentic touch of the sublime. Not necessarily a soothing vision, not soft and fecund like the cultivated pastures of the Home Counties, but rawly beautiful. With rare exceptions – the East Anglia of Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968) is often cited37 – the British cinema has not made much of these un- and under-peopled native landscapes. The next few scenes are mainly in the Cold Comfort Farm mode: soft townies at an utter loss in the country; hostile, incommunicative locals. The urbs-in-rure joke is ancient beyond charting, and though it is well done here, much of the comedy which follows has a slightly formulaic quality. Marwood tries and fails to ingratiate himself with an elderly woman; his girlish curls and boyish charm would no doubt serve him well in the city, but they butter no parsnips here. She refers him on to her son – the farmer, Isaac Parkin – who finally appears mounted on his tractor, one leg (gored, it emerges, by a randy bull) untidily swathed in plastic sheeting, and half-deaf.

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By this time, Withnail and Marwood are thoroughly soaked. Rain Niagara-ing down his chalky features, Withnail sums up their predicament in one of the film’s half dozen most beloved lines: ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake.’ (As Robinson has pointed out,38 this is one of the many lines in the film whose slight dissonance is perceptible only to those who have English as a first language. Even those with exceptionally fluent English generally fail to register the oddity.) WITHNAIL

Are you the farmer?

MARWOOD

Stop saying that, Withnail. Of course he’s the fucking farmer!

Dogged by Parkin’s justifiable suspicion and mild deafness, their negotiations take a while. Eventually, having warned them about the bull – another comic landmine planted for later detonation – he agrees to supply them with some logs and a chicken. Back at Crow Crag, Marwood for once gets the better of his bone-idle partner. Withnail has foolishly boasted that he would be more than happy to go and forage for spuds if only he had boots. Marwood duly improvises a crude pair of boot substitutes from old plastic bags. Out into the mud and oomska39 Withnail must go. There is something childlike and very nearly touching about the pride with which he announces that he has found a potato, standing bolt upright and brandishing the puny specimen at the end of his fork to prove it. Hours pass, Parkin comes by, and the chicken … proves to be crammed with warm giblets, and very much alive. The city boys are squeamish, as most city folk would be, but Withnail has hunger and an Inner Heartless Bastard to call on. The beast is doomed. Soon, while Withnail prances around irresponsibly with the double-barrelled shotgun he has just found, Marwood has it gutted and plucked. More or less. ‘Shouldn’t it be more bald than that?’ asks Withnail dubiously, indicating its surviving crop of feathers. ‘No, it shouldn’t.’ Now, how to cook it? At first, Marwood tries to ram it into a kettle for boiling. When this fails, he has a brainwave, and sits it upright in the oven, legs straddling a brick, like a headless horseman.40

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Preparing dinner

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Just in case it might seem as if matters are finally looking up, the next scene has Withnail in a phone booth, locked in a long-distance row with his agent, who wants him to understudy Constantine in The Seagull. When Withnail angrily turns the offer down as unworthy of his talents, the agent appears to hang up on him: ‘Hello? Hello? Hello? How dare you. Fuck you.’ Pure Hancock, that ‘How dare you.’ Grant remembers that the phrase proved invaluable: knowing the script so well and finding the lines and scene descriptions very funny, you have to put all that aside and inhabit the mental furnishings of failed rage. ‘How dare you?!’ seeps into my head like a mantra for this character. It silently goes through my head before every new scene and keys me in.41

As they walk away, Withnail effortlessly trounces a century of all but universal Chekhov-worship with a single line of gross slander: ‘Anyway, I loathe those Russian plays. Always full of women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow.’ Engrossed in Withnail’s griping, and his random daydreams about his career, the townies forget to secure the gate behind them. Enter the bull, sex-crazed. Withnail, nothing if not an accomplished coward, instantly hurls himself over a wall and, regaining his hauteur the very second he is safe, lights up a cigarette and graciously advises Marwood on how to deal with the beast. More from despair than bravery, Marwood follows Parkin’s shouted advice to run at the creature screaming, and – surprise! – it retreats through the gate. Withnail proposes an evening at the Crow. *** This point, between the bull scene and the evening at the Crow, seems as good as any to break from the narrative and underline how often in the film our heroes are the victims of real or imagined threat. They are threatened, inter alia: • by the whole world (Marwood, paranoid in the café)

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• • • • • • • •

by their landlord (scene deleted) by the drunken Irishman by Danny and his ‘medicine’ by the randy bull by Jake and his dead eel by an unidentified hand in the dark (actually Withnail’s) by ‘Jake’ (actually Uncle Monty) by Uncle Monty (repeatedly, as a would-be ‘burglar’ of Marwood’s honour) • by Jake again (who proves innocent of anything more than hare-killing) • by a mysterious knock at the door (telegram) • by the traffic police •  by Presuming Ed’s mere naked presence and, perhaps, • by the Camberwell Carrot and its dreadful potency. In a 108-minute film, that averages at least one threat every ten minutes. No wonder Robinson has said that his ruling theme as a writer, his lifelong obsession, is with the figure of the victim. *** The thirty-day Withnail & I shoot began in the Lake District at the start of August 1986. Grant met McGann at Liverpool Street station at noon on the first, and they travelled together to Penrith, where the cast and crew were booked into a characterless modern hotel. The next day, the two leads investigated the main location. The real-life ‘Crow Crag’ is an eighteenth-century cottage called Sleddale Hall, near Shap in the Vale of Eden – said to be one of the rainiest parts of Britain. Members of the art department were busy putting a fibreglass cover over the roofless barn, so that the structure could serve as a reasonably rainproof Green Room; they were also draping

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the kitchen area with thick black cloth, since the first scene to be shot would be a day-for-night sequence: the drenched arrival. That night Robinson was so terrified by the prospect of his debut as a director that he sat up with David Wimbury until three in the morning, swilling vodka in the vain pursuit of sleep. Terror kept him sober despite his prodigious intake: That was the night he [Wimbury] said something about film-making that has really stuck in my mind. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter how good your script is, how good your actors are or how friendly the weather is. If you haven’t got luck on a picture, you haven’t got anything.’ And that’s so true.42

The call was set for 5 a.m. Shooting began on the morning of 3 August. By lunchtime, they had filmed Marwood’s lighting of the lamp and Withnail’s sulky line, ‘Sitting down to enjoy my holiday.’ They had barely begun to eat when it became obvious that Robinson was having a blazing row with someone. That someone was Denis O’Brien – recalled by Grant as a Sergeant Bilko lookalike – very tall and bald and angry. The production, O’Brien yelled, was behind schedule. Robinson replied, quite reasonably, that they could hardly be said to be behind schedule by lunchtime on Day One, and promptly resigned as director. David Wimbury diagnosed a storm in a teacup, and told everyone to stay calm. O’Brien continued to complain. He hated the bull scene, and said it had to be cut. He hated the chicken scene. When he saw how dark the first rushes were, he hated the darkness, and asked Robinson if he thought he was filming a fucking nature documentary about bats? He hated Uncle Monty’s Baudelaire-quoting, and thought Griffiths’s playing not nearly camp enough. In short, as Robinson reported to his star, O’Brien says it’s a fucking disaster. He thinks it’s all too dark, funny as cancer and that you, Grant, should be like Kenneth Williams, throwing your arms

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in every direction. I told him that you were playing a manic alcoholic in desperate circumstances, and that the comedy was cumulative not Benny Hill laugh-a-minute, so!43

As so often, the ‘artists’ rallied against the ‘suits’, and formed a united-we-stand front. Eventually, Roy Cooper persuaded O’Brien to let Robinson get on with his job as agreed. ‘Because the film was so cheap and they’d gone this far, they left me alone and just thought, “Fuck it, we’ve blown a million quid”.’44 Rumblings from the front office continued, but the subsequent HandMade visits to the locations were morale-boosters, from Harrison himself and, in London, from ‘Richard Starkey, MBE’, more familiarly known as Ringo Starr. Robinson extends great credit to his technical crew, and particularly to his cameraman, Bob Smith, who is given an unusually prominent credit, alongside the director of photography, Peter Hannan. As Grant recalled,45 Robinson made no secret of his complete inexperience behind the camera, and it was his uncompromising honesty in telling everyone how much he was relying on the skill of others which woke the crew up, and gave them the responsibility of finding out how each scene should be shot. *** The script calls the local pub the Crow and Cunt: the latter word softened to ‘Crown’ for the actual film. Marwood’s voiceover description is perhaps his most eloquent: ‘It was like walking into a lung. A sulphur-stained nicotine-yellow and fly-blown lung …’ This is one of Robinson’s most obviously Dickensian scenes, with two succulent Dickensian grotesques in the offing. First the alcoholic bartender – the ‘General’ – who claims to have detected a military bearing somewhere beneath Withnail’s louche demeanour. It takes very little to launch Withnail into a self-aggrandising pack of lies; so, enter ex-Lt (Captain? Major?) Withnail, former Territorial, now roving feature writer for Country Life:

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GENERAL

… Don’t spose you’ve engaged, have you?

WITHNAIL

Ireland … [Almost plausible for an ex-regular army soldier in 1969; doubtful for a self-proclaimed ‘Territorial’, though the General buys it. Is Withnail indulging in a little retrospective wish-fulfilment about his encounter with the murderous Irish Wanker in the Camden pub?]

GENERAL

Ah, a crack at the Mick …

The fantasy earns Withnail and Marwood a round on the house. The evening slips away in a warm fug until closing time, when the fire’s embers begin to grow cold and our heroes are the only customers left. And then, like an apparition brought on by alcohol poisoning, enter Jake the Poacher. Jake leans across the bar, pulls – more exactly, pushes – himself a pint. He also yanks a wriggling, phallic black thing from inside his trousers, gives it a fatal whack on the bar and tucks it back in. (The secret of good comedy …) His cowardice muted by booze and hunger, Withnail tries to wheedle an eel or a pheasant from this uncouth object. As so often, his high-handedness – and his unfortunately frank use of the term ‘poacher’ – antagonises the man: ‘If I hear more wordsa you, I’ll put one a these here black pods on yer.’

An evening at the Crow

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And he threatens Withnail with an eel. Withnail blusters, but the blustering subsides when Jake reveals that he knows where they are staying. Jake has been watching them – especially Withnail, ‘prancin’ like a tit’. With the threat of angry eels hanging ominously over the rest of their stay, they set off back to Crow Crag under the stars. Inspired by the eternal silence of that great empty space, by the whisky and by his chronic sense of being a pearl of great price cast among a nation of swine, Withnail howls and flails his arms, his long coat-tails flapping: WITHNAIL

Bastards. Bastards. Bastards. [An echo takes up his outrage.] You’ll all suffer. (Suffer. Suffer. Suffer.) … I’m gonna be a star. (Star. Star. Star.)

The actual stars are impassive. A few years later, Grant would reprise this hilltop soliloquy in deranged and triumphal mode for the finale of How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989). *** The late Michael Elphick, who played Jake, arrived on set for his big scene thoroughly pissed and – as he later recalled – pretty well coked-up into the bargain. He had staggered there straight from a heavy all-night session, and within a matter of seconds had found out where the production’s own daily supply of lubricants was kept. By the time the cameras began to turn over, he was so drunk he could hardly stand, and kept delivering lines from other productions he had been in. Rather than cutting, Robinson kept the cameras rolling and shouted encouragement: ‘You’re saying the wrong lines. You’re in a different film, mate.’ ‘Fuck off!’ ‘Keep running. Start again.’ But the effects of drink and coke are imperceptible in Elphick’s resulting performance, which is as convincing as one could wish. ‘Bloody good’ was Robinson’s verdict.46 ***

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Improvised angling

Everyday life at Crow Crag continues to scrape along at a joyless subsistence level, until Withnail’s blood lust prompts him to yet another deathless outburst: ‘I want something’s flesh!’ The next scene – maybe the best piece of pure slapstick in the film – shows Withnail prancing around (‘like a tit’) in a stream, trouser legs rolled up, blasting away at the fish with Monty’s shotgun. This has all the success one might expect and the pair walk back to Crow Crag fishless. As they approach the cottage, they see a scrotumtightening sight: Jake is lurking around. Withnail is terrified. Once they are safely inside, he nails up the doors, reloads the shotgun and insists that Marwood not leave his side for an instant, even when he urgently needs a pee. ‘Those are the kind of windows faces look in at …’ Made of sterner stuff, Marwood refuses Withnail’s suggestion that they ought to sleep together. He even manages some pleasant dreams, and is laughing in his sleep when Withnail comes in, plus gun, to find out what is going on. He tries to clamber in beside Marwood, and in the struggle, the gun goes off. (Some people have seen this joke as a metaphor of premature ejaculation. But a cigar, as Dr Freud observed, is sometimes just a cigar.) Furious, Marwood hurls the gun

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out of the window and decamps to the other room. Again, he sleeps the sleep of the just, until a menacing hand clamps over his mouth. It’s Withnail. Again. He thinks he has Heard Something. Marwood is sceptical, but then he Hears Something too. Someone outside. Then breaking glass. Then someone inside … It’s obviously Jake. A scraping sound: Withnail’s voice is a strangulated coo of terror: ‘He’s sharpening a fucking knife …’ Feet ascend the stairs … go into the other room, usually Marwood’s. Treacherous to what may well be his last breath, Withnail urges Marwood to go and offer himself up for sacrifice. Then their own bedroom door creaks open, and torchlight catches them cowering behind the futile barrier of a sheet. Withnail’s voice reaches a new pitch of falsetto despair: ‘We mean no harm …’ Just as they face certain death by evisceration, a familiar uppercrust voice breaks the tension: ‘Dear boys. Dear boys. Forgive me.’ The duo react instantly, each in his own character. Withnail snaps from abject quivering to top-volume rage in a sliver of a second: ‘Monty, you terrible cunt!’ But Marwood is blissfully relieved, and, lacking Withnail’s hypertrophied sense of dignity, sees the funny side. As do we.

An unexpected arrival

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4 The Last Island of Beauty Morning: Uncle Monty, neatly dressed in plus fours, is bustling around preparing a hearty carnivore’s breakfast, unpacking tastylooking provisions and generally dragging the cottage back to the realm of civilisation. The fire burns, daylight fights its way into the murk. From this scene onwards, and until the ‘Burglary’ episode, the film’s colours start to grow warmer – reds and oranges and rich browns, in place of the chilly blues and greens which have thus far predominated. At the same time, the camera’s perspective on the world grows more expansive: the lens changes. Robinson describes this as the one purely cinematographic effect he planned in advance. Where most of Withnail is filmed with a 50mm lens, Uncle Monty’s scenes are shot on a 35mm, with almost a wide-angle effect. The film only resumes its 50mm format when the heroes return to London. Any discussion of the film’s alleged homophobia needs to take into account the reassuring subliminal air of warmth and creature comfort Monty always brings with him. Breakfast itself passes off between scenes. Replete, and relaxed, Monty waxes nostalgic, elegiac, prophetic: in this respect, he is a smooth patrician counterpart to the hairy, shamanistic Danny. In a film populated with strangely articulate characters, Monty is probably the single most fecund (one of his own favoured words) user of the English language. Almost every overripe line he speaks begs for response and comment, and though there is not the space here for an exhaustive account, it might look something like this: ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new …’ (His unacknowledged source is Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’: ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new, / And God fulfils Himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the

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Monty holds forth

world …’ Monty’s talk is usually shot through with direct and indirect quotations.) ‘And soon, I suppose, I shall be swept away by some vulgar little tumour …’ (Griffiths’s over-archly exact pronunciation of the word ‘tumour’ is one of the film’s countless small aural pleasures: the orotund art critic Brian Sewell could hardly do better. Note, too, the delicious euphemism ‘swept away’. Monty is, no doubt, more poetaster than poet, yet his every line has some such pleasing grace note.) ‘Ah, my boys, my boys, we’re at the end of an age …’ (Precisely the sentiment of Danny’s valedictory remarks on the 1960s, which are lying in wait for us at the end of the film.) ‘We live in a land of weather forecasts, and breakfasts that “set in” …’ (Quasi-aristocratic disdain for the utilitarian and quotidian, albeit a trifle opaque. Compare his later shudder at the idea of ‘Vim under the sink’.) ‘Shat on by Tories. Shovelled up by Labour.’ (Pretty much Robinson’s own politics, albeit in a melancholic rather than a splenetic key? And note that Monty does not disdain earthiness, when appropriate.)

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‘And here we are. We three.’ (The echo, surely, is: ‘We few, we happy few …’ from Henry V.) ‘Perhaps the last island of beauty in the world …’ (Well, Marwood and Withnail are both handsome specimens of young English manhood – in its effete rather than athletic mode; but Monty appears not to have noticed that the disfiguring pounds have crept on him since Oxford. Or perhaps he refers to beautiful souls? At Oxford, a literate Uranian like Montague Withnail would surely have learned of Wilde, and Ruskin, and Pater, and burning always with a hard, gem-like flame.) Enough close reading for now. The scene proceeds with the resolution to buy the boys some proper footwear (‘You mean you’ve been up here in all this beastly mud and oomska without Wellingtons?’), with Monty’s flagrantly flirtatious recruitment of Marwood as his kitchen assistant, with Marwood’s nervy attempts to find some excuse for heading back to London pronto … and so to his accidental and potentially dangerous admission that he and Withnail are signing on. Monty: ‘At a Labour Exchange?’ (compare Lady Bracknell: ‘A handbag?’) Visibly trembling, face stretched in smiling alarm, Marwood ingeniously tries to pass the practice off as no more than an amusing, fashionable affectation. Monty, fortunately disinclined to chase up the implications of this slip, overrides all his objections and puts him back to work on the joint of lamb. ‘Garlic, rosemary and salt. I can never touch meat until it’s cooked. As a youth I used to weep in butcher’s shops.’ Foolishly, Marwood calls out that he can’t find the rosemary; Monty, several hundredweight of opportunistic sexual arousal, glides over and corners him against the table. In a Whitehall bedroom farce, this would be the predictably hilarious moment when the vicar would walk in and find the characters in a compromising position. Predictably, Withnail walks in; less predictably, he seems sanguine at finding Monty and Marwood apparently on the very brink of an act which was illegal in the United Kingdom until only two years earlier. Monty, who can bide his time, breaks out the sherry, and makes a toast

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Monty takes an interest in Marwood

‘To a delightful weekend in the country’. Even slower-witted viewers now have a fairly clear idea of the kind of delight he has in mind. Marwood retreats outside, and is joined by Withnail. Withnail suggests a compromise: they’ll stay for lunch, and then head back. Something tells us that he is not being entirely forthcoming … Monty whisks them off in his open-topped Rolls, drops them off at Penrith, muttering darkly about their unshaven chins, and hands them a fiver each. Withnail steers them into the pub instead, where Marwood calls his agent about the proposed part in Manchester and Withnail sets about ordering the quadruple whiskies and the pints. By the time the pub closes, they are, as Withnail puts it, ‘arseholed’. They head for a tea shop to sober up before Monty’s return. Inside the tea shop, they behave badly. *** Pilgrims have wasted innumerable hours wandering around Penrith, trying to find the pub and the tea shop: a doomed enterprise, since the true location for the Penrith scenes is a village called Stony Stratford, near Milton Keynes. The ‘King William’ pub is in reality the Crown, at 9 Market Square. Across the road is 1 Market Square, today a

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chemist’s shop, but in 1986 an empty store-front.47 The tea room was constructed here. One of the most frequently quoted scenes in the film, the teashop episode was dogged by technical flaws. About the only thing that did go precisely as planned was the shocked reaction of the other tea-room customers to the invasion by these noisy louts: elderly locals were recruited as extras, and not told exactly what was going to happen. When Withnail explodes, their response is quite spontaneous and, Robinson calculated, would probably have been impossible to catch in its full freshness after the very first take. There would have been reason enough to reshoot, since the dailies came back much darker than intended. Peter Hannan, the cameraman, had just heard the news that a close friend had died; naturally upset, he had misjudged the stops. Since Robinson refused a reshoot, the footage had to be treated by the lab to bring it up to a respectable level of brightness. The other main gaffe was that Grant, for the first and only time on the shoot, corpsed. No matter how often he tried to speak the line ‘And we’ll get a fucking jukebox in here to liven all these stiffs up a bit’ with appropriately poker-faced Withnailian disdain, he would always burst out laughing. Robinson pleaded with him to stifle the laughter, since a major key to the whole film’s comedy is that the characters should not under any circumstances find themselves amusing. In the end, he rationalised the laughter by telling himself that Withnail was so drunk that he was acting out of character, and eventually grew to like the effect.48 *** Faced by an obstacle to his immediate desire – which rapidly escalates from cake alone to cake and fine wine – Withnail resorts to his two most potent weapons: fantastical lying and pomposity. The lie: ‘We’re working on a film up here. Locations see. We might wanna do a film in here.’ (The self-referential nature of this lie need not be laboured.)

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The pomp: ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity. And we want them here. And we want them now.’ The proprietor – played by Llewellyn Rees, who enjoyed the experience so much that he wrote Robinson a charming thank-you note – asks ‘Miss Blenehassitt’ to call the police. If Miss Blenehassitt looks oddly familiar, it is because Robinson cast and costumed the extra who plays her to look as much as possible like Margaret Thatcher. Marwood joins in the fantasy, and declares that they are multi-millionaires; and though their bluster is funny, it is fractionally nastier than usual. (This is, in part, a matter of narrative form: the tea-room scene is the first time in which the idlers have come face to face with ‘straight’ Middle England, and the shift in implied point of view is distancing.) We expect Withnail to be a bastard, but sweet and sensible Marwood, even arseholed, would usually have the imagination to grasp how their oafishness might look to a disenchanted onlooker: a couple of youthfully vigorous idiots alarming, offending and, in the last analysis, threatening a group of weaker people whose only immediate offence is to be old and staid. The chronic victims have suddenly become victimisers.

Afternoon tea

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Still, this passing sense of unease evaporates when the fantasy that they are millionaires receives apparent corroboration by the arrival of ‘their’ Rolls. (For no explicable reason, this punchline to the scene was trimmed from the first American VHS version.) And Withnail’s ominous but ill-aimed finger-wagging as he makes his clumsy exit is a joke that is hard to resist. *** Understandably miffed, Uncle Monty sulks up the hill; but not for long. His new flirtatious game – or perhaps he actually believes what he is saying – is to pretend that the bad influence in these parts is Marwood. Withnail tries to soothe him with a drink: ‘Sherry? Oh dear, no, no, no. I’d be sucked into his trap. One of us has got to stay on guard. He’s so mauve. We don’t know what he’s planning.’ Marwood serves a brief penance peeling potatoes, until Monty, announcing that he is preparing to forgive the boy, suggests that ‘I think we’d better release you from the légumes, and transfer your talents to the meat.’ He dragoons a reluctant Withnail into the kitchen; lunch follows shortly. Monty is expansive; Marwood does everything he can to bring the conversation back to their imminent return to London, but Withnail, delighted to be wrapping himself around good food and better wine, is having none of it. That small miracle of historical revisionism which is the Withnail memory even manages to convert the Jake episode into a ‘delicious’ little amusement. Disgusted as well as fearful, Marwood heads out; Withnail joins him, and agrees that they will depart for London first thing in the morning. Which leaves, of course, the threat of a night in Crow Crag with Monty and his all-too-clear intentions. The trio take a post-prandial constitutional in the hills. Monty is stirred to cite the poetry of his youth: ‘Laisse-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps l’odeur de tes cheveux. Ah, Baudelaire. Brings back such memories of Oxford. Oh, Oxford …’ (A nagging thought: when was Monty at Oxford? In the script, a photograph of a young Monty in football strip is dated to 1926,

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and this seems to pan out quite well. So much of his demeanour, so many of his trappings smack of the 1920s that it is tempting to assume he was at ’Varsity as one of the Bright Young Things. This puts his date of birth c. 1905, which makes him about sixty-four in 1969: fair enough for his worries about fatal tumours and his imminent lamentation on the vanished beauty of Norman. If this is roughly accurate, then Richard Griffiths is far too young for the role; that no one ever seems to worry about this says a great deal about the mesmeric brilliance of his acting, and perhaps something about our assumptions of the ways in which the obese show their age.) Monty’s Baudelairean rhapsody was originally spoken in the living room; in the edit, Robinson lifted the soundtrack and laid it over a panoramic shot of the three walkers on the fells. He also trimmed the lines, ‘Halcyon days. The gentle ego making art. The brutes’ selfishness’, and cut directly to Marwood’s sardonic voiceover response: ‘Followed by yet another anecdote about his sensitive crimes in a punt with a chap called Norman who had red hair and a book of poetry stained with butter drips from crumpets.’ Monty’s speculation about Norman’s fate (‘Probably wintering with his mother in Guildford. A cat and rain. Vim under the sink. And both bars on …’) gives way to a more all-embracing sense of cafard, mingled with meteorology: ‘We live in a kingdom of rains where royalty comes in gangs.’ (He may be half-remembering Baudelaire’s ‘Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux …’). ‘Come on lads, let’s get Spying on Jake

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home. The sky’s beginning to bruise, night will fall, and we shall be forced to camp’ (no obvious double entendre in that last verb). But their path home is interrupted by a sinister vision: a form lurking around Crow Crag: Jake again! Withnail is queasy, Marwood vengefully triumphant – this is the perfect cue for a lightning return to London. Surprise: Jake proves to be a rough diamond after all. He has left them a note. The marriage of Monty’s cut-glass vowels and Jake’s rudimentary prose style was made in heaven: ‘Here. Hare. Here. Jake.’ (Approximately: ‘hyah … haiah … hyah’.) ‘Here … hare … here.’ Light dawns. Translated into standard English, Jake’s message means that he has brought them a nice, recently slain hare for their ‘pot’, as he said he might. This joke was, Richard Griffiths recalls, the only one in the entire film made up by Robinson on the spot: It [the note] had to say something, but the Poacher is pretty inarticulate and not very literate, so it had to be something very simple. Here Hare Here. All the rest of it was organised down to within an inch of its life.49

*** Later in the evening, the trio are playing seven-card-draw poker, flushed not only by ample quantities of wine and Pernod but by candlelight and firelight. The room is worthy of World of Interiors: the Platonic English ruling class interior that has not greatly changed since the eighteenth century. Monty’s presence has magicked Crow Crag, a soggy and quasi-derelict barn, into a country cousin of his own snugly upholstered Chelsea nest. Very pleasant indeed, except for poor Marwood, whose jittery nerves are hardly improved when Monty and Withnail swap smutty innuendoes about ‘Queens’ in Latin. Hours pass, drinks evaporate, time melts. Nothing if not consistent in his selfishness, Withnail ends up sloshed and remembers nothing about the proposed bedroom arrangements for the night. Terror is another mother of invention, so Marwood appears to undergo a lightning conversion to homosexuality, addresses the semi-comatose Withnail as ‘lovey’ (a noted gay locution) and starts

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A game of poker

to drag him upstairs … Monty, as a shock pan to the right reveals, has silently followed him. The next few minutes are wholly taken up with Marwood’s frantic and varied attempts to avoid what he terms ‘a buggering’. First downstairs, where Monty accosts him with Signore Zeffirelli’s magnificent line: ‘Are you a sponge or a stone?’ To which Marwood replies with the hysterical blurt: ‘I voted Conservative.’ Marwood scampers off to bed, but sleep is elusive. A heavy tread on the stair, the turning of a doorknob … it is a reprisal of the earlier moments of terror by night, but this time the knowledge that it is Monty rather than Jake on the stair is not so reassuring. Especially as Monty has now donned eyeshadow and a hint of rouge, and is clad in an ample dressing gown which looks like a dress that a dowager might wear to a ball. Withnail, it appears in the course of their brief conversation here, has told Monty (a) that Marwood is gay – indeed, a ‘Toilet Trader’ (Griffiths runs the alliterative phrase round his mouth like a ’53 Margaux), and (b) that Marwood is profoundly, bitterly in love with Withnail. (Withnail, it seems, can’t even sell his best friend into white slavery without making him seem pitiful into the bargain.

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Look at it dispassionately, and it is a kind of brilliance.) Marwood protests, but Monty is rampant, apparently unstoppable: ‘I mean to have you, even if it must be burglary.’ All but naked, all but lost to this importunate hippo of a man, Marwood suddenly realises that the only way to trump a lie is with a bigger lie. So he plays that desperate card: Withnail and he are lovers, he shrieks, who have not until now spent a night apart in six years. Monty struggles with this new version of events for a moment or

Monty makes his intentions known

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two, then yields to his innate sense of romance. His face puckers with compassion. And he nobly sends Marwood off to his ‘lover’. The following scene is hardly one of ardent lovers reunited. Marwood hisses rage and righteous indignation at his treacherous oppo; Withnail, groggy at first and then more fluently, presses his ever-ready pompous button, and talks of ‘tactical necessity’ and ‘calculated risk’ – the object at risk being Marwood’s body. Marwood, unconsciously plagiarising Withnail’s favourite phrase, splutters: ‘And how dare you tell him I love you? And how dare you tell him you rejected me?’ Withnail’s half-hearted apology is compromised, more than compromised, by the satanic little smirk he fails entirely to repress: God, what genius I had when I said that! They settle down for a night in the same bed. Come the next day, over a late lunch, Marwood reads out loud from the apologetic letter from Monty which reveals that he had eavesdropped on the entire conversation and at last grasped the reality of the situation. Marwood, a good man at heart, is touched. But Withnail has ‘bastard’ written all the way through him, and sneers at Marwood’s belated show of fellow feeling. He helps himself to another swig from Monty’s ‘sensational’ cellar. A noise at the door. Withnail and Marwood do not like noises at the door. Monty back? Jake, in less generous mood, with a ‘black pod’? Something even worse? As it proves, something much better – a telegram for Marwood, calling him to London about his part. Withnail’s ‘Well done’ rings forced; and when Marwood demands that they depart within half an hour, Withnail insists that he needs at least an hour for lunch. Cut to the Jag, driving through the sheeting rain and all but impenetrable darkness. The windscreen wipers are still defective, and Marwood can hardly see a thing; Withnail, still tearing into the plate of roast food on his lap and swigging from a bottle, shouts instructions of doubtful accuracy. Marwood has almost had it; at the next service station, he’ll fix the windscreen wipers. And he has to have some sleep.

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5 The Company of Wolves Marwood, his head cradled on old leather and illuminated by thin, pallid sunlight, gradually edges his way into consciousness. On the soundtrack, an effortlessly inventive electric guitar solo – scratching, stuttering, whimpering: the introduction to Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’. What is going on? To his mounting horror, it becomes apparent to Marwood, and to us, that he has been snoozing in the back of the Jaguar; that Withnail is at the wheel; and that he is very, very, very drunk. Cut to an exterior frontal view of the Jag hurtling recklessly in and out of early morning traffic: Hendrix’s first power chord explodes, and the Jag sways and careers suicidally along the road into London as if dancing in time to this demonic music. The effect is alarming, strangely graceful, hugely funny. And then they pass a black police van … *** Since HandMade declared the scenes of the trip back to London ‘unnecessary’, Robinson paid for them himself: £30,000 from his director’s fee of £80,000, which makes his total earnings from Withnail to date precisely £50,001. He has never made another penny from the film: author’s royalties from the published screenplay go directly to his favourite charity, the Save the Children Fund. Still, it was money well spent. As Robinson has since pointed out, not only would a direct cut from the cottage back to the Camden flat have looked awful, trimming the journey home would have meant cutting the earlier scene which plants the time-bomb joke of Danny’s ingenious drunk-driving gadget. Withnail’s drive was shot on a stretch of the M25, just before the road’s official opening by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The crew closed off sections of the motorway, and a selection of

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hired period cars surrounded the clapped-out Jaguar – so thoroughly clapped-out that it had been transported to the shoot on a trailer after its engine failed to start. *** The police stop Withnail, who insists, through the mushy consonants of his overprecise speech, that he has only had (quaint phrasing: calculated to strike a chord in the English yeoman hearts of these

‘Geddinthebakothevan!!!’

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bobbies?) ‘a few ales’. His eyes are at once wide and droopy, alarmingly uncertain of their focus. If we did not know better, we would swear that Grant had actually tanked himself up to play these scenes. Bruce Robinson considers this the most convincing performance of a drunken role he’s ever seen, and it’s hard to think of a better. The older policeman orders Withnail to his feet. ‘Out of the car. Please. Sir.’ (Note, again, the Pinteresque full stops.) His pleasures once again being imperilled by horrible oiks, Withnail turns on the poshness full blast. ‘Look here. My cousin’s a QC.’ Once again, the tactic fails. ‘Get in the back of the van,’ shouts the younger, more tightly wound officer: or, more exactly: Geddinthebakothevan!!! The older policeman flinches: Robert Oates, who played the part, had not been told that Anthony Wise would scream his lines, so, as in the tea-room scene, his shock at the outburst was entirely genuine. Cut to the police station: grey light, drab institutional colours, tea-drinking and all but universal smoking. There is a subdued commotion of some sort going on behind a set of moveable curtains, so a junior officer investigates; and the joke about Danny’s anti-drunk-driving gadget, planted so early in the film that most first-time viewers will have forgotten it until now, finally erupts into its punchline. The policeman struggles with Withnail, the curtains pull aside and we see what our reprobate has been up to: a sad little jet of urine pumps out from the plastic nozzle peeking through his flies. For the first time in the film, the staggering Withnail seems a trifle abashed. *** Back in London, the Camden flat is full of ill omens. Their dole cheques are mysteriously missing. Marwood opens up the bathroom door to see that the tub is occupied by (as he puts it in the insensitive idiom of the day) ‘a huge spade’ – Presuming Ed, the doll genius and partner-in-scams to Danny – who stares back at him wordlessly. Indeed, though Presuming Ed will make a number of deep, loud

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noises throughout the next scene, we will not hear him speak a word of English. Sanskrit is another matter. And upstairs in his bed, their foul-weather friend and eternal nemesis, Danny himself. Roused from one form of stupor, Danny prepares to enter another mode by constructing the monstrous instrument of intoxication which has made Withnail & I beloved of dope-heads everywhere: the Camberwell Carrot. ‘This’ll tend to make you very high.’ In the poster for the film’s re-release in 1996, a cheeky

Presuming Ed … and the Camberwell Carrot

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parody of the then-recent promotional campaign for Trainspotting, the film’s five major dramatis personae were pictured in boxes: Withnail, I, Uncle Monty, Danny … and the Camberwell Carrot. This Eiffel Tower of the spliff world began life in an early, unproduced Robinson screenplay called Roadie, in which, for reasons which will hardly need labouring, it was identified as the Cincinnati Carrot.50 As the Carrot burns, the four characters cope with its mesmeric fumes in very different ways: Withnail is prostrated with hysterical laughter. Presuming Ed chants – in a thunderously deep, rich voice – a Hare Krishna mantra, while spinning an antique globe between his legs, like a Buddha gazing down from the empyrean and contemplating the transience of earthly things. Danny, the Holy Fool, waxes prophetic. And Marwood – predictably – gets The Fear, his dope panic here reprising his speed panic at the film’s beginning. *** Robinson points out that from the very first scene onwards, so far the entire movie has been told from I’s point of view: if he doesn’t in some way witness it, nor do we. The first major violations of this self-imposed rule come when Marwood walks out of the Camden living room, first to phone his agent ‘Squat Betty’, and then in his drug-induced funk. He is gone, but the action continues – a subliminal signal to the audience that the old symbiosis is finally breaking up. And no one will witness Withnail’s imminent performance of Hamlet except some wet, indifferent wolves. *** In terms of the film’s narrative thread, the importance of this long scene with Danny and Ed is that it makes the forthcoming separation inevitable: Marwood has won not only a part in Journey’s End, but the lead role. What most fans remember, though, is the Carrot and the wonderful ramblings it induces in Danny, especially his unexpectedly conventional career ambitions (‘Law rather appeals to me, actually’), his beatific drug advice (‘Find your neutral space’), his glorious

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non-sequiturs (‘That’s politics, innit?’) and his digressions into codCassandra mode: ‘We are ninety-one days [in the script: sixty days] from the end of this decade, and there’s gonna be a lota refugees … They’ll be goin’ round this town shoutin’ “Bring out your dead.”’ Danny’s final proclamation is as glum as it is cryptic: ‘They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And, as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.’ What on earth, as Withnail might bark in one of his politer moments, is Danny talking about? Given the allusion to Ed, it sounds like some sort of Black Power reference, but despite his admirably colour-blind choice of business associates, Danny seems an unlikely supporter of Huey P. Newton or Eldridge Cleaver. ‘Paint it, Black’, a hit by the Rolling Stones from their most intense period of inspiration (1965 to c. 1970), is a song about anhedonia and borderline psychosis – not exactly an anthem for the idealistic 1960s rebel. But if the precise reference is recondite, trapped somewhere in the THC-saturated synapses of his brain, Danny’s general sentiment is crystal clear: the 1960s Revolution has failed. And the next scene tacitly confirms his diagnosis. *** Hands press down the contents of a small suitcase, nearly full. Plainly visible on top of the assorted clothes, two Penguin paperbacks – David Copperfield and À Rebours. (A subtle touch of didacticism, this latter.) On top of these printed texts, Marwood puts the small blue exercise book in which he has been recording his experiences. In the original screenplay, the book is marked ‘Withnail & I’. The camera reveals Marwood’s head, and his new World War I haircut: he’s still very handsome, but there’s also something cold about the look, something potentially hard-edged and heartless which doesn’t quite accord with the sweet-natured, anxious young man we have come to know. Parts of Marwood are going to have to die if he is to succeed: his fecklessness, obviously, but also some of the things

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Marwood’s new look

which make him worthy of love, and fully alive. Mallarmé, one of the Symbolist masters beloved of the real-life Withnail and of Huysmans alike, observed of the child’s transition to adulthood: ‘L’enfant abdique son exstase.’ Marwood is taking the survivor’s path in life, doing the sane and adult thing. At the same time, we may fear, he is abdicating his ecstasy; or at least, renouncing the chances for those moments of ecstasy that sometimes redeemed the boredom and squalor of his vie de bohème. The script identifies his neat trim as ‘1914’, but it is also, of course, in the go-getting City style of 1986 and all that; and Robinson has often confirmed the widespread assumption that Marwood’s loss of curly locks, here, is a self-conscious premonition of Thatcherism. Marwood, topping off his new identity with a black trilby, tells Withnail that his father is going to come and pick up the remainder of his possessions. The sudden allusion to a pre-Camden world comes as a mild shock: it is as if, by suddenly winning a future, Marwood has also reopened the connection to an occluded past. Withnail, loneliness and terror rising beneath his show of bonhomie, tries to keep Marwood within his world for a precious few minutes more, offering him some wine swiped from Monty’s cellar: ‘’53 Margaux,

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Leave-taking

best of the century.’51 Marwood declines the offer; his denial of Withnail’s wistful maxim that’s there’s always time for a drink is weirdly affecting, as if he’s telling his friend that, sorry, there is no Santa Claus. Withnail, painfully close to revealing that in the teeth of all the evidence he is actually capable of caring about another human, insists on accompanying Marwood on his walk to the station, through the park and the rain. When they finally part – the scene is

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a tender revision of Hal’s terrible casting off of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part II – the young men speak a truth about their friendship which is speakable only because that friendship is now in its last, dying seconds: ‘I shall miss you, Withnail.’ ‘I shall miss you too. Chin-chin.’ Chin-chin: brave and brittle lightness. But Withnail’s face is desolate, and his eyes are wet. *** The film was conceived in such minute detail that there was very little surplus to trim and very few alternatives to play with. Robinson said that he was sometimes so hard up for coverage that he would lift the odd foot or two from the start of rushes, before the clapper board went in. His editor on Withnail, and again on How to Get Ahead in Advertising, was Alan Strachan; Robinson liked and admired Strachan, but there were moments of tension in their work, especially when Robinson became too immersed in juggling the edits: [Strachan] was standing behind me, and I said, ‘If we did this, wouldn’t that … ?’ and I turned round and he was like [stands up, hands outstretched, leering maniacally] a sort of horrible wizard wanting to strangle me. God it made me laugh, that.52

A few scenes did end up on the floor: the streets of Camden (scenes 5 and 6 of the Bloomsbury screenplay); scene 12, where their bald landlord tries unsuccessfully to flush them out (Marwood, startled, spills a full bottle of essence of petunia over his trousers; hence his unusually fragrant air in the Mother Black Cap); and four short scenes (23–6) in which the lads fix up the Jag and buy an arsenal of booze: Didn’t need them. Once they had decided to go, the best thing is to get them gone, otherwise you’d have cut from Uncle Monty’s not to that ball swinging but maybe to an off-license, and I think that would have slowed it up.

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Probably true: though it’s a shame to miss Withnail’s cost-benefit analysis of how to achieve maximum intoxication for fifty pounds, six shillings and seven pence – their total pot after reclaiming money on all their empties and pooling their National Assistance. He proposes either ninety-six bottles of Greek hock; or ‘nine and a half litres of Eye-tie red and three dozen barley wines …’ The only loss seriously worth regretting is the fencing scene – scene 60 of the first screenplay – which falls between the bull attack and the visit to the Crow. Marwood is trying to write in his notebook; Withnail, irritatingly frisky, is prodding him with an épée and blurting combative lines from Shakespeare, spoiling for a joust. ‘Last time I fought you,’ Marwood snarls, ‘I thrashed you into the ground.’ ‘Thou speakest bollocks,’ Withnail ripostes. So Marwood picks up his own foil and they fight – fight with both spirit and skill. Obviously they weren’t pissed or passed out through all their courses at drama school. At one point, falling back under Marwood’s thrusts, Withnail pulls his fencing mask down over his face, but disdains to remove his cigarette, so that smoke billows out through the mesh as though his head were on fire. This is straight autobiography: Viv had pulled just the same stunt in one of the classes at Central, and looked like a smoking beehive. Robinson, still fond of the joke, has since recycled it for a screenplay called The Block. *** Robinson had asked one of his old Camden ‘Skins’, David Dundas, to compose the score for Withnail, but when he heard and saw Dundas’s first version, he feared that he had made a terrible mistake. ‘My toes were curling because track after track was completely wrong …’: the fish-shooting scene, for example, was set to a piece for bongo drums. As Dundas played him theme after theme, Robinson grew more and more despondent and the atmosphere more tense. The very last track to be played, as he recalls it, was ‘Withnail’s Theme’ – played on a small steam organ, a calliope. Robinson erupted with pleasure and relief: ‘That’s it, David! That’s the music!’53 Delighted by this

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eleventh-hour burst of enthusiasm, Dundas was more than ready to throw away all his other compositions and re-score the rest of the film around this strange theme – melancholic yet with an odd air of jauntiness. His first cut complete, Robinson presented the film to HandMade. What happened next, he recalls as ‘the most nightmarish piece of stupidity that I’ve ever been through’. Uncertain about the film’s chances with its most likely audience, the young, HandMade’s publicity company held a test screening in which about 150 studentaged people were dragged in from a nearby hostel. Thirty minutes into the film, there was not so much as the faintest giggle from them. Robinson squirmed. It gradually emerged that the audience was entirely composed of German students, few of whom could speak passable English: So these Germans are all sitting there and they don’t know what day of the week it is with all this yak coming at them, and all they see are two ludicrous blokes tramping about in polythene bags with a tirade of dialogue that’s meaningless to them. They got fired, those publicity people, and quite rightly so.54

In a bad period for domestic releases, no one was willing to take a chance on this small independent production, and Withnail remained on the shelf for over a year. Eventually, a small distribution company (now defunct), Recorded Releasing, took it up, and the film was finally released in the second week of February 1988. The critical response was encouraging: generally very favourable, sometimes much warmer. The most literate of the tabloid reviewers, Neil Norman of the London Evening Standard, raved: a superbly written, lovingly played comedy of a bygone age; … if the film belongs to anyone, it is Richard E. Grant, who takes the dissolute and mannered character of Withnail and creates a Wildean creature of tragi-comic proportions, the like of which has not been seen in a British film for some time.

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Bruce Robinson in Private Road (1971)

On balance, the broadsheets and weeklies agreed. Though quite brief, the most thoughtful and perceptive piece was by Philip French in the Observer, who found the film ‘funny, curious and oddly affecting’. Acutely, and alone among his colleagues, French nailed the ‘Hancockian’ disdain and bombast of Withnail; he also made the following interesting comparison: ‘They are a sort of straight, sleazy version of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, whom Swinging London has passed by.’ (Displaying similar insight, French also compared it to Barney Platts-Mills’s Private Road – ‘a film of wry charm and casual desperation that gave Bruce Robinson his one substantial movie role back in 1971’. Again, French was the only critic to have picked up on this point.) His summary: ‘It’s really about unlikely friendships, and the way quite miserable experiences persist in the mind, taking on a masochistic glow as the years pass – especially for those who become successful.’ Hilary Mantel in the Spectator was comparably articulate, and similarly approving: ‘every line is sharp and the whole film finely judged and well paced. The performances are quite out of the ordinary …’ Geoff Brown of The Times carped that some of the scenes were played too slowly, but finally praised it as ‘a film with a personal, thoughtful touch: rare qualities in the frantic, imitative world of British screen comedy’. Derek Malcolm of the Guardian – the only

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Ralph Steadman’s original drawing for the Withnail & I poster (© Ralph Steadman 1985)

review to single out Peter Hannan’s cinematography, and to note the contribution of its designers, Michael Pickwoad and Henry Harris – proclaimed that ‘I would account it one of the most original and certainly the most personal of the current British revival.’ There were no entirely negative notices of any moment, though the reviewers for the Independent and the Financial Times were cooler than most and took issue with what they saw as the film’s homophobia. More than enough praise to launch most films? So much for the power of the newspaper reviewer: Withnail came and went in a matter of a couple of weeks. (If memory serves: when I first saw it, the cinema was all but empty.) Those who did see it began to tell their friends, and it rapidly developed a healthy word-of-mouth reputation; but it proved hard if not impossible to find the cinemas which were showing it. Richard Griffiths spoke for all concerned when he remembered that

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The picture came out to nothing … and I cannot tell you how gutted I felt. I thought, God, Bruce will never recover from this. This should be a fucking Oscar in anybody’s money. Can they not feel what he’s done with the fantastical script?55

Some comfort, at least, came in the form of an Evening Standard award for Best Screenplay, 1988. *** Curiously, this intensely English creation did rather better in America, where it enjoyed a protracted release at selected cinemas. Again, the reviews were good. One of Vincent Canby’s two notices for the New York Times was headlined ‘Childhood’s End’ – presumably a nod by Canby, or his sub-editor, to Arthur C. Clarke’s popular science-fiction epic, but also a sharp summary of the film’s broadest theme: for it isn’t social history. It’s about growing up, almost as if by accident. It’s also genuinely funny, especially Mr Robinson’s dialogue, though the accents of the actors occasionally make individual words unintelligible to the American ear. Mr Grant, Mr McGann and Mr Griffiths are nothing less than neat, or, as Andy Warhol would have said, super. ‘Withnail & I’ does credit to this year’s New Directors/New Films series.

Andrew Sarris for the Village Voice was not wholly seduced: ‘I am not sure that I like this unkempt evocation of druggy London near the end of the swinging ’60s … But like many current movies I don’t particularly like, Withnail & I manages to make me believe in it implictly …’ Withnail & I, he concluded, ‘stays in the mind as the heartfelt memory of a provisional togetherness that for a time at least kept out the cold of failure, frustration and a cosmic indifference’. Katherine Diekmann of the Village Voice Film Special found quite a few things to dislike in the film, including its ‘weirdly homophobic nightmare’ of Uncle Monty, but finally brought her thumb up: ‘a very funny movie, loaded with screwball-style repartee. Robinson’s script

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is relentlessly inventive, and the actors have a field day spewing their snide, literate lines …’ Withnail developed a loyal cult following in the States, which continues to this day. Some American viewers thought they saw similarities between the film and Hunter S. Thompson’s definitive work of gonzo journalism, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Robinson agrees that there are certain similarities, especially when you boil the plot down to its basic elements: ‘Two blokes taking off to go somewhere and then coming back.’ But he denies any specific influence from the book, not least because the original Withnail novel was written a couple of years before Thompson’s book was published. He suggests that the main thing they have in common is a narrative structure which antedates Hunter S. Thompson by decades, if not centuries: ‘It’s the S. J. Perelman three-act thing: “Put a man up a tree, throw rocks at him, bring him back down the tree …”’56 The film played for about six months at one New York cinema, and was still going strong when it was replaced by a Paul Newman vehicle, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990). That film closed after a few days. *** At home, the prodigious growth of Withnail & I into a video favourite, Saturday-night special at rep cinemas, mandatory student film and general cult movie went largely unremarked by the mass media until May 1994, and the first issue of a publication aimed at a previously undefined demographic tranche, that of the so-called ‘New Lads’: Loaded magazine. The debut issue contained an article by its bibulous editor, James Brown: ‘Withnail You Terrible Cult’. Brown reported what just about every boozy student in the United Kingdom already knew: that Withnail had ‘infiltrated the language’. ‘In every bar in the land stands a drunken youth shouting “What fucker said that?” Every street has a car full of druggies screaming “Scrubbers!” Or so it seems …’ The article was also the first to include ‘official’ instructions for playing the Withnail Drinking Game. ‘Stick in the video, and as the film unwinds, tuck into a “here’s some

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I prepared earlier” bounty of intoxicants … And no pausing the video, either. Or rewinding.’57 The cult grows larger as new generations discover the film and clasp it to their collective bosoms. As Mary Selway commented in 1999: ‘a few years ago, a boy of 20 started quoting me huge passages from it, and I said, “What on earth are you doing? That’s Withnail & I, how do you know that?”…’ If anything, the film seems to have a greater appeal to those born after the 1960s than to those for whom it touches on first-hand memory. Gratifying for its creators, but not without unfortunate consequences, of which the worst is probably the vandalism inflicted by pilgrims on its various locations. Sleddale Hall, the original of Crow Crag, has long since been gutted for relics. The fireplace has been ripped out, as have the kitchen sink and the wall fittings. The floors are littered with beer cans and cigarette ends. Its owners, North West Water, put it on the market in 1998, but there were no offers. They have now built a large fence around the property, which continues to rot gently under the Cumberland rain to this day. Alerted by the Loaded article and related coverage, the film soon found a new distributor and a much-heralded ‘10th Anniversary’ re-release in 1996 – the tenth anniversary of its making, that is, not of its initial release. It was flanked by all sorts of publicity, including a promotional tie-in with the Oddbins chain of wine shops, featuring graphics by Ralph Steadman and a competition for ‘best Withnail window’. Newspapers and magazines ran large features about and by Robinson, Grant, McGann and others; the reviewers had a second chance to assess the film; columnists and broadcasters58 were given the opportunity to expand on the significance of the film in their own lives or for the world at large. Now cemented in public awareness, Withnail spawned a wide variety of celebrations and cash-ins. In the summer of 1999, Stella Screen organised a free outdoor screening of the film on Brighton beach, introduced by Ralph Brown as Danny. (Ralph Brown, incidentally, reprised the Danny role in all but name for the second

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Ralph Brown as Del Preston in Wayne’s World 2 (1993)

Wayne’s World movie in 1993.) A ragged flotilla of Withnailites watched from the waves. The proceedings were filmed for Channel Four as Withnail on the Pier, and broadcast later in the year as part of a weekend devoted to Bruce Robinson in general and Withnail in particular, with screenings of The Killing Fields (1984) and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, as well as two new documentaries – Withnail and Us (1999) and The Peculiar Memories of Bruce Robinson (1999). Brighton has since been home to a stage adaptation of Withnail: Robinson had no objection, though he asked that a suitable fee be sent to the Save the Children Fund. What else? Websites, of course, the twenty-first-century equivalent of the fanzine: the most prominent is the Withnail & I Multimedia Archive, begun in 1999, and run by Mike Hall, though the site with the best title is The Arena of the Unwell. In 2000, Richard E. Grant organised a charity auction of Withnailabilia at the Odeon Leicester Square. The DJ Chris Evans bought Withnail’s Byronic tweed overcoat for £5,000; the ‘Crow Crag Farm’ sign, which had been gathering chicken-shit in Robinson’s barn, went for £600; Grant’s annotated script for £5,000; and a manuscript of the original Withnail novel was bought by the screenwriter Richard Curtis (author of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill) for £6,600; Curtis graciously returned the manuscript to Robinson a

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week later. In all, some £100,000 was raised for an educational fund in Grant’s native Swaziland. *** Robinson had originally planned a much darker ending for his film.59 We see Marwood sitting in a dressing room during the run of Journey’s End, reading a cheery letter from Withnail, full of optimism about his career. Cut to Withnail, pouring the remains of a bottle of Monty’s ’53 Margaux into the twin barrels of a shotgun. ‘Chin-chin’, he says, puts the barrels into his mouth, slurps down the finest wine of the century and pulls the triggers. Never entirely happy with this grim finale, Robinson came to feel that the scene was not merely ‘morbid’ and over the top, but redundant. Hence the Hamlet soliloquy. Robinson kept in touch with Vivian MacKerrell, the real-life Withnail, over the years. It wasn’t hard to see the way he was going, even a decade before the film was shot. In the introduction to the 1995 edition of the screenplay, Robinson reproduces a diary entry from the mid-1970s: April 16 1975. Hadn’t seen V. for two years. He’s lost his looks but not his habit. Scotch before breakfast. He doesn’t eat breakfast. Vivian is drinking himself to death. He said, ‘If there’s a God, why are arses at the perfect height for kicking?’ …60

(Later, Robinson admitted that this was a bit of auto-plagiarism. The ‘arses’ line was a gag he’d originally written for Jennifer Eight (1992).) Vivian saw the film and, it seems, liked it. ‘He laughed quite a lot.’ He obviously didn’t take it as a warning, though. He developed terminal throat cancer and moved into a hospice. Radical surgery left him unable to speak, unable even to swallow, and he had to spit his redundant saliva into a large bowl. Nourishment reached him by way of a plastic tube inserted through a hole in his stomach. Robinson

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remembers seeing him pouring neat Scotch into it. Robinson’s farewell, written when he was himself in hospital suffering from a bad case of food poisoning, is understandably fervent: the fellow I’d always thought of as being the biggest coward I’d ever met materialised into the bravest bastard I’d ever known. It’s got to be hard to laugh when you’re dying, but I’ll always remember you laughing. That sad, brilliant, bitter face of yours laughing. Goodbye my darling friend. This is for you for ever. And I know if there’s a pub in heaven, you’ll be in it. And Keats will be buying the drinks.61

*** On the day of shooting the final scene, the weather in London was dry and sunny, so rain machines and dark filters were called into play. Peter Frampton, the make-up artist, asked Grant if he would be needing ‘the Menthol’. Unfamiliar with the term, Grant assumed that he was referring to a herbal cigarette, and declined. When Frampton explained to him that ‘the Menthol’ was an old actor’s dodge – a quick sniff of eye-smarting vapour when prompt tears were required – he once again declined. Grant felt more than adequately bereft to produce his own waterworks. He launched into the Shakespeare. The sound engineer, Clive Winter, complained that the rain thumping down on the umbrella was drowning out the iambic pentameters, and insisted that the scene would have to be post-synched. ‘Fuck that,’ said Robinson. ‘Never be the same.’ So they filmed on. *** Uncle Monty was prophetic, it seems, when we thought he was merely being self-pitying: ‘It is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life, when one morning he awakes, and quite reasonably says to himself, I will never play the Dane …’ (Robinson says he can no longer remember whether he gave Monty those lines before or after he wrote, or co-wrote, the final scene.) Withnail will never

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play the Dane. Not to humans, anyway; but at least he has a captive audience of wolves. So to Hamlet, Act Two, Scene Two – very slightly fudged in Withnail’s Margaux-d memory. I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth … And so on, with gathering intensity, old umbrella brandished into the rain like a broadsword. Fans divide on the question of whether this speech shows that Withnail is a genuinely gifted actor, and could have been a contender, or whether it shows for good and all that he is more ham than Hamlet. The screenplay makes it clear that in Withnail’s own mind, no star who ever trod the boards of Stratford has ever done better. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties … Final judgment on Withnail’s gifts probably depends as much on one’s philosophical outlook as on one’s taste in acting style. Is it worse never to have had a talent, or to have had talent to burn, and then simply burned it? For my part, I find the latter more harrowing; and so consider that Withnail would indeed, as Uncle Monty kindly predicted, have played the Dane marvellously. Man delights not me, no, nor women, neither … Departing from his text (and Hamlet actually says ‘woman’, in the singular), he repeats the last phrase: Nor women neither. A strange emphasis. Hamlet threw that qualification in because he saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern smirking, and assumed smutty thoughts. But before the indifferent wolves? Is he making some valedictory, deeply coded avowal of gay love for Marwood? Affirming an absolute nihilism? It is the film’s last enigma. Withnail takes a bow, and turns to walk away. Book-ending the bitter-sweet of King Curtis’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ which served as overture, David Dundas’s ‘Withnail’s Theme’ rises on the soundtrack, a jaunty tune fit more for a tragic clown than a sweet prince … From within the wolves’ enclosure, a crane shot begins; a crane shot, the conventional valedictory flourish of a feature film, but here a very

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Withnail quits the stage

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modest, very restrained little flourish, since it does not rise into the heavens to reveal the far horizon, but stops dead just a few feet off the ground. The eternal English rain pours down, and the end credits start to crawl upwards as Withnail’s form grows smaller and smaller until it is barely perceptible across the park. Like Ethan/John Wayne at the end of The Searchers (1956), like Rick/Humphrey Bogart and the redeemed cop at the end of Casablanca (1942), like Jake Gittes/ Jack Nicholson at the end of Chinatown (1974), like Marlowe/Elliott Gould at the end of The Long Goodbye (1973) … Withnail just walks away. Walks out of Marwood’s life, out of our lives, out of life.

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Notes 1 Alastair Owen (ed.), Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 119. 2 Ibid., p. 131. 3 Martin Amis, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), p. 88. 4 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 114. 5 Exceptionally sharp-eyed viewers have noted what appears to be the standard portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft on the wall; if so, this is one of a number of hauntings by the Romantic generation. I owe this point, and a great deal else, to Dr Peter Swaab. 6 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 214. 7 Bruce Robinson, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 236. 8 This account comes from the Ruby Wax interview: Ruby, BBC2, tx. 27.07.98. My warm thanks, as so often, to David Thompson for tracking down tapes of this and other relevant documentaries, and for other invaluable help. 9 Owen, Smoking in Bed, pp. 100–1. 10 David Cavanagh, ‘You’re my bessht friend’, Empire no. 81, March 1996, p. 79. 11 Richard E. Grant, With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant (London: Picador, 1996), p. 19. 12 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 100. 13 The device of the voiceover, often the sign of last-minute despair in the editing room, was always planned: see Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 169. 14 Bruce Robinson, Withnail & I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, rev. edn (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1996), pp. viii–ix.

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15 Ibid., pp. x–xi. This account of Viv is based largely on the 1996 introduction and on Owen, Smoking in Bed, especially pp. 99–104. 16 I owe this observation to Rob White. 17 Grant, With Nails, pp. 40–1. 18 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 264. 19 Louise Brealey, ‘Withnail & I: Ten Years On’, Premiere vol. 4 no. 1, February 1996, p. 80. 20 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 106. 21 Ibid., p. 105. 22 Dr Glyn Johnson of NYU Medical School kindly confirmed my suspicion that there has never been any such drug. 23 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 124. 24 Grant, With Nails, p. 12. 25 Brealey, ‘Withnail & I’, p. 83. 26 See Owen, Smoking in Bed, pp. 110–11. 27 Ibid., p. 112. 28 Ibid.; Grant, With Nails, p. 19. 29 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 118. 30 Ibid., p. 124; and see Ali Catterall and Simon Wells, Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), pp. 194–5. 31 My thanks to Dr John Kenyon and Dr Clare Robertson for identifying this piece. 32 Grant, With Nails, pp. 41–2. 33 See Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 123. 34 Cavanagh, ‘You’re my bessht friend’, p. 80. 35 Catterall and Wells, Your Face Here, p. 196. 36 Wordsworth makes a surprising appearance in Jennifer Eight, when the Uma Thurman character quotes the line, ‘Thoughts that lie too deep for tears’.

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37 See, for example, the references to Witchfinder General in David Pirie’s A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973) and in Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory (London: Granta, 1997). 38 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 131. 39 Uncle Monty’s word, unknown to the OED, at least in my edition. 40 On the role of chickens in the cinema of Bruce Robinson, see Owen, Smoking in Bed, pp. 53–4. 41 Grant, With Nails, p. 38. 42 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 117. 43 Grant, With Nails, p. 30. 44 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 117. 45 Grant, With Nails, p. 28. 46 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 126. 47 See Catterall and Wells, Your Face Here, p. 199.

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48 See Owen, Smoking in Bed, pp. 118–19. 49 Cited in Catterall and Wells, Your Face Here, p. 198. 50 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 176. 51 The ’53 Margaux is indeed very fine, but not generally acknowledged as the best. 52 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 130. 53 Ibid., pp. 126–7. 54 Ibid., p. 131. 55 Cited in Catterall and Wells, Your Face Here, p. 202. 56 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 132. 57 Cited in Catterall and Wells, Your Face Here, p. 203. 58 Including me: for Radio 3’s Night Waves, in 1996. 59 Owen, Smoking in Bed, p. 128. 60 Robinson, Withnail & I, p. ix. 61 Ibid., p. xi.

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Credits Withnail & I United Kingdom 1986 Directed by Bruce Robinson Produced by Paul Heller In association with Lawrence Kirstein Written by Bruce Robinson Photographed by Peter Hannan Editor Alan Strachan Production Designer Michael Pickwoad Original Music by David Dundas Rick Wentworth ©1986 HandMade Films (1985) Partnership Production Companies HandMade Films presents a Paul Heller production Made by HandMade Films (Productions) Ltd on location in England and at Lee International Film Studios, Shepperton, England Executive Producers George Harrison Denis O’Brien Co-producer David Wimbury

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Production Accountant Bob Blues Assistant Accountant Gordon Davis Accounts Secretary Jacky Holding Production Co-ordinator Valerie Craig Unit Production Manager Matthew Binns Special Production Consultant Richard Starkey Assistant to Producer Paula Merwin Production Runners David Carrigan Richard Whelan Assistant Director Peter Kohn 2nd Assistant Director Kathy Sykes Script Supervisor Sally Jones Casting Director Mary Selway Camera Operator Bob Smith Focus Colin Davidson Loader Ian Foster Grip John Payne Gaffer Reg Parsons Best Boy Brian Martin

Electricians Brian Sullivan Perry Evans Don Maton Lighting by Lee Electric Camera Equipment by Joe Dunton Cameras Stills Photographer Murray Close Additional Stills Photographer Michael Heller Special Effects Paul Corbould Special Effects Assistant Dominic Tuohy Assistant Editors Anne Sopel Tony Tromp Jeremy Strachan Bob Mullen Art Director Henry Harris Property Buyer Leith Boler Property Master Bert Gadsden Props Wesley Peppiatt Les Allett Steve Payne Supervising Carpenter Alan Chesters Painter John Roberts Rigger Don McClellan

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Stagehand Peter Browne Costume Designer Andrea Galer Wardrobe Mistress Shaun Wyldeck-Estrada Make-up Peter Frampton Hairdresser Sue Love Titles by Damson Studios Soundtrack ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Keith Reid, Gary Brooker, performed by King Curtis (©1969 Published by Westminster Music Ltd. Original Sound Recording Made by Warner Bros. Records); ‘Schubert Piano Sonata in B-Flat Major’ performed by Leslie Pearson; ‘All Along the Watchtower’ by Bob Dylan, performed by Jimi Hendrix (©1969 Published by Dwarf Music, Special Thanks to Jeff Rosen, Original Sound Recording Made by Polydor Records Ltd); ‘Hang Out the Stars in Indiana’ by Harry Woods, Billy Moll, performed by Al Bowlly (Published by Peter Morris Music Co. Ltd. Original Sound Recording Made by EMI

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Records Ltd); ‘My Friend’ by Ervin Drake, Jimmy Shirl, performed by Charlie Kunz (Published by Chappell Music Ltd. Original Sound Recording Made by The Decca Record Co. Ltd); ‘Walk Hand in Hand’ by John Cowell, performed by Charlie Kunz (Original Sound Recording Made by The Decca Record Co. Ltd); ‘Voodoo Chile’ by/performed by Jimi Hendrix (©1969 Published by Chappell Music Ltd. Original Sound Recording Made by Polydor Records Ltd); ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ by George Harrison, performed by The Beatles (©1968 Published by Harrisongs Ltd. Original Sound Recording Made by EMI Records Ltd) Soundtrack Album Available from Filmtrax plc Film Soundtrack and Original Music Published by Ganga Publishing B. V./ Filmtrax plc Sound Mixer Clive Winter Boom Operator Trevor Rutherford

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Sound Maintenance Alan Brereton Dubbing Mixer Hugh Strain Sound Editor Alan Paley Footsteps Editor Peter Holt Dialogue Editor Peter Best Re-recorded at De Lane Lea Sound Centre Processed by Technicolor Transportation Steve Hill Mick Beaven Special Thanks to Moby Schreiber Ralph Steadman Ray Cooper Denis Carrigan Bob Crowdy Fuji Film John Geary Martin Gutteridge John and Benny Lee Debbie London and Inger Best John Mackswith Paul Olliver Ronnie Pearce Nicole Rothman Bella Serrell John Stansborough Thames Valley Vegetable Growers Association and all at 26 Cadogan Square

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Catering by First Unit Caterers Unit Publicist Joanna Campling Publicity Consultants Zakiya & Associates

Running time: 107 minutes 12 seconds Length: 9,649 feet: Colour MPAA certification no: 28355

CAST Paul McGann Marwood/‘ … & I’ Richard E. Grant Withnail Richard Griffiths Uncle Monty Ralph Brown Danny Michael Elphick Jake Daragh O’Malley Irishman Michael Wardle Isaac Parkin Una Brandon-Jones Mrs Parkin Noël Johnson General Irene Sutcliffe waitress Llewellyn Rees tea-shop proprietor Robert Oates policeman 1 Anthony Wise policeman 2 Eddie Tagoe Presuming Ed

Credits compiled by Markku Salmi

uncredited Bruce Robinson bartender

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