12/10/2026
Ade Edmondson's autobiography Berserker! came out in 2023, and it was the chapters about his childhood that people kept talking about afterwards.
He was born in Bradford, and in 1969 his father went off to Uganda for work, leaving his mother at home with four children until the rest of them could follow months later. On the day his father left, Ade made what he calls "some kind of sarky comment about being abandoned", and his mother's reaction has stayed with him ever since. "She's got both her hands clamped around my throat and is shaking me so hard that my brain feels like it's detaching itself from the inside of my skull," he writes. He wonders now whether some of what she felt about his father landed on him instead.
Smacking was ordinary in that house, and he is very clear about what the adults were after. "They want to hear the 'smack'. Only that sound will convince them justice has been done." At the family's evangelical Methodist mission, his grandfather once banged his head against his cousin Kevin's hard enough that a piece of Kevin's tooth ended up lodged in Ade's forehead. "I can still feel the dent and Kevin's had a lifetime of dental problems. Praise the Lord," he writes.
The detail I keep coming back to is that piece of tooth.
Once the family reached Uganda he was put back on a plane to England on his own, to board at Pocklington School in East Yorkshire. He still doesn't know why he was the only one of the four sent away. He cried for a fortnight, then learned what all the boys were there to learn, which he sums up as being "emotionally cold and maladjusted-without-showing-it-too-much".
His first proper punishment was a slippering from an assistant housemaster, who asked whether he was crying, and when the answer was no, simply increased the dose. Once the tears came, the same man put an arm round his shoulders: "There you are, you see – not too hard, is it?" By the time he left he had worked out he had taken 66 strokes of the cane across eleven separate punishments, and he says the two weeks of waiting beforehand were worse than the cane itself. One headmaster had boys bend over a chair for six of the best, then shake his hand and thank him for it.
He draws the line to the comedy himself. "The glee in The Fuhrer's face as he gives me three on the hand is the same as the glee in Vyvyan's face... as he hits Rick between the legs with a cricket bat."
The rest of the book follows the damage. He married young while at Manchester and it lasted 18 months, looking, he says, for some proof that he was loved. Depression came after it, along with the suicidal thoughts he had always assumed everybody had. "I've lived with them all my life." It was in his fifties, after losing two friends that way, that he took the option off the table altogether, and he is blunt about what that was worth: "Deciding su***de is not an option is a game changer." Psychiatric help followed, then Jules Evans's book on Stoic philosophy and the idea he took from it, that you cannot change what happened but you can change what you do with it.
Then came his father's dementia. He brought him a copy of National Geographic one visit, the magazine his father had always loved, and was told: "It's no use, Adrian. I can't understand it any more. I can't read any more." Of the whole relationship he writes: "I will never know if he loved me or not, but now he can't tell me either way, and that's a kind of closure."
He tells nearly all of it with the jokes still in, and that takes some doing.
