My life through a lens

Celebrities share the stories behind their favourite snaps – this week it’s actor and writer Adrian Edmondson, 61

1986

I love this photo – particularly Rik Mayall’s face (far right)! We were promoting The Young Ones’ hit single, Living Doll, which we recorded with Cliff Richard for the first-ever Comic Relief. It went to No 1, although disappointingly we were never invited on Top Of The Pops. This was two years after Band Aid so we knew the power of music to raise money for good causes.

1990

This is Jennifer and me with our two eldest daughters, Beattie (left) and Ella (right) on holiday in Barbados. I’m a very hands-on dad; I really enjoy being with my three girls. We saw a lot of them when they were growing up because we mostly worked from home, writing. Ella, 32, is a singer/songwriter and mum to three young children. Beattie, 31, is an actress – she recently played Kate in BBC3 sitcom Josh – and Freya, 27, is a sustainable clothing designer.

1987

For a spell in the 1980s I worked as a pop video director. This is me with the band Squeeze after recording the video for their hit single Hourglass. It had all sorts of visual effects, including bendy guitars and fish as telephones. Making pop videos was like being at art school, but with more money to spend! Sadly, I had to stop as budgets were slashed after the 1987 stock market crash.

2009

I look quite irritable here, while filming Hell’s Kitchen. Perhaps it was because former Dynasty actress Linda Evans snatched the winning trophy from under my nose! I won Celebrity MasterChef in 2013, although I was in such a panic on the first day of filming that my hands shook. I started cooking at boarding school because the food we were given was so awful.

1985

I took this photo of Jennifer [Saunders] and me on our wedding night in Chester – I set the timer and jumped back into bed. A friend gave us the nightshirts with our names embroidered on them. Jools Holland played the organ at our wedding and we had a cracking reception in the garden of Jennifer’s parents’ house, not far from Chester. We’d been friends for a long time before getting together, so we had a lot of mutual pals.

2015

Here I am as Count Rostov in BBC drama

War And Peace, with Greta Scacchi (centre) and Lily James as my on-screen wife and daughter. When I first read the script I turned to Jennifer and said, ‘This is your dad!’ The character was very funny, just like her father Robert, who’d been a pilot in the RAF – that Forces connection meant that Jennifer and I had incredibly similar childhoods.

1964

This shot of me dressed as a cowboy sits on my desk. It was taken on the roof of a block of flats where my family was staying in Bahrain. Dad taught geography to Forces kids and was stationed at the RAF base at Muharraq. His work meant we had to move a lot, so when I was 11 I was sent to boarding school in Yorkshire while the rest of the family remained overseas. The school regime was quite cruel, but it’s foolish having regrets.

1989

We look really cool in this picture taken at a wedding – and I still have the tie! Rik and I had met as drama students at Manchester University and fell in with each other very quickly as we were both middle-class kids and teachers’ sons. Our mums had even bought us the same paisley dressing gowns. We met Ben Elton (left) in our third year at Manchester, and even then he seemed to write a play a week. The three of us went on to work on The Young Ones and then the sitcom Filthy Rich & Catflap. When Rik died of a heart attack four years ago it was a terrible shock. Ben now lives in Australia but we email regularly – he’s my closest friend.