Vyvyan and Vivian
Adrian Edmondson and Vivian Stanshall, and a strange little loop of coincidences...
If you’ve not heard Adrian Edmondson’s Desert Island Discs, it’s a good one. Promoting his new memoir, he demonstrates the power of the format by retelling the stories without the cool demeanour of an audiobook, a listening experience which turns out to be raw and honest and moving.
You can listen to it here.
Edmondson talks about being bullied at school for having ‘a girl’s name’ – apparently even though Adrian isn’t a girl’s name, it seemed exotic enough at the time to attract unwanted attention. Host Lauren Laverne flags up that perhaps his best known character, Vyvyan from The Young Ones, shares the same Boy-Named-Sue problem (one which I’d always thought was a great joke that partly explained the character’s hardened and violent shell.)
Edmondson repeatedly stresses elsewhere in the interview that he is a colossal fan of 1960s musical iconoclasts the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band, and how pleased he was to perform with them in their reformed later years. Of course, the person he was replacing in the line up was a bold and eccentric character with the same problem as Adrian and Vyvyan: the band’s officer-class ginger front-nutter Vivian Stanshall.
Last night, a friend on social media asked the obvious question: whether the Young Ones character name Vyvyan was a tribute to Edmondson’s musical hero, maybe even a sympathetic nod to a fellow sufferer of the curse-of-the-girl’s-name. It’s a neat theory, and it’s suprising it wasn’t asked on the Discs show. Maybe the two segments were too far apart to make the connection.
But Vyvyan isn’t spelled the same way. And that’s because it’s a surname, not a first name.
Vyvyan Basterd, Edmondson’s student punk character, is named after Vyvyan Road in Bristol. Young Ones co-writer Lise Meyer lived there, or nearby, and liked the shape of the word. The exteriors for the show were shot in the city, and various landmarks pop up in disguise in the film segments.
So there’s no connection with Edmondson’s musical hero, even though he shares a name.
Except…
Vyvyan Road is named after Sir Richard Vyvyan, part of an aristocratic Cornish landowning family, who was twice returned as MP for Bristol in the 1830s. Sir Richard married well, into another landowning family, successful Quakers from Lancaster, when he hitched himself to a woman called Mary Hutton Rawlinson. He even took her name.
Sir Richard Rawlinson Vyvyan.
Which is insane.
Vivian Stanshall’s signature contribution to comedy, aside from the Bonzo’s songs, is probably the series of rambling monologues he recorded for John Peel’s show, tales of a crumbling English aristocrat called ‘Sir Henry at Rawlinson End.’ These eventually became LPs and a very strange film.
The Rawlinson family included Sir Richard Rawlinson Vyvyan, after whom the road was named. And then the punk played by Adrian Edmondson, who loved Vivian Stanshall. The Rawlinsons had exactly the same sort of ‘havishambling’ properties, celebrated and lampooned by Stanshall in his Rawlinson End stories. Sometimes their stuff even comes up for auction. What a lovely bookcase. Aristocrats in collapsing piles like them inspired the monologues.
It’s highly unlikely that any of this was deliberate. But the connection is there, fragile and possibly imaginary, but no less beautiful for possibly not existing. You just have to catch it in the light and admire it, before it melts away.
So, even though Vyvyan isn’t named after Vivian, and even though Adrian loved Vivian, and felt a kinship with him, I am delighted to report that Vyvyan and Vivian are connected by a truly bizarre coincidence, one that means absolutely nothing, but is about as pleasing as a thing can be.
I love stuff like that.