Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 128

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Popular Culture Review
make me laugh” (Flicks interview November, 1999, as cited in
the Adrian Edmondson Web Site).

With the actual guest house constructed on a series of stage sets at Ealing,
Edmondson had the freedom to stage elaborate prop jokes that simply couldn’t be
done on the stage, and also, because he was serving as director for the first time, he
could have a much greater degree of control over the entire creative process. With
a small budget of £3.5 million (roughly $6 million US dollars), shooting had to
progress at a rapid pace, but Edmondson pre-planned the entire shoot to such a
degree that even the most elaborate gags - the motorcycle stunts, the “candle in
the eye” routine, to say nothing of the climactic mass-vomiting sequence - were
photographed with speed and authority, without any sacrifice in Edmondson and
Mayall’s personal vision.
Although G u est House Paradiso is Edmondson’s first feature film, he has, as
I mentioned, directed several music videos for such artists as The Pogues and
10,000 Maniacs, and this training experience has obviously been useful. The opening
shots of G u est H ouse Paradiso, particularly the framing of the exterior of the
hotel, with the children’s swings and the sheer cliff on the left, and the faulty
nuclear power plant on the opposite side of the CinemaScope frame, display a
visual sensibility comparable to Jacques Tati or Buster Keaton, comics who also
directed most of their best work. Throughout the film, Edmondson uses the full
CinemaScope frame in all of his compositions, often balancing opposing forces at
the edges of the frame, so that cropped, or “pan and scan” versions of the film give
the viewer only approximation of the adroit visual sensibility at work in the piece.
The film has been an enormous commercial success in Britain, not surprising
given the intense following that Mayall and Edmondson have achieved there, and
a sequel of sorts is already in the works, this time set in outer space. In interviews,
Edmondson has observed that their brand of comedy seems to work best in “closed
spaces” (cited in The M aking o f G uest H ouse P aradiso video), just as Samuel
Becket’s play Waiting f o r Godot, or Harold Pinter’s p la y The Caretaker, Joseph
Losey’s film of The Serva nt (1963), and Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s film
P e tfo rm a n ce (1970), also owe their intensity to a certain psychic claustrophobia.
Thus, it will be interesting to see how well Richie and Eddie fare in a more “open”
situation.
G u est H ouse Paradiso succeeds so brilliantly because it takes two characters
who have been ingrained on the British public consciousness to an even more
brutal and frenzied satirical plane than either the television series or the stage shows.
In a sense, the film has been more than twenty years in the making. If G u est H ouse
P ara diso offends the mainstream critics, one should recall that the Carry On films
in the late 1950s and early 1960s were also critically reviled, precisely because