Poor Paul: He is never going to live down that movie is he?

He's a nice chap isn't he?

‘Don’t threaten me with a dead fish’

There are movies and television shows that, like old soldiers, do not die. Their humour remains buried under the latest dross until, like something buried then unearthed, they are unearthed and shine again and a whole new generation claims them as their own. I am of course talking of the comedy cult classic: Monty Python, The Goodies, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Young Ones, The Goons, Doctor Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb, Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers and some others. These guys are the energizer bunnies of comedy. They keep going and going and going: So on the spot, so insightful to the human condition, so true that you cringe, so memorable that you quote them at parties and feel good because everyone laughs with you, so relevant to any being who has ever felt the necessity to breathe, so utterly stupid that they make you spurt milk out of your nose.

‘There is a certain something special about a firm young carrot’

Withnail and I is one such movie. It has all the elements for a comedy cult classic – drugs, booze, out of work actors and attempted buggery. It is a pitch black comedy about substance abuse, the sixties and coming of age.

‘I must have some booze. I demand to have some booze’

Withnail (Richard E) is a self absorbed irritable out of work actor eager to ingest any form of drug or alcohol he can get his hands on. He is manic, likeable, very unlikable, hilarious, and also tragic in a manner of almost Shakespearean proportions. His straight man, ‘I’ (Paul McGann), is the hero of the film. For him it is a coming of age movie as he realises that Withnail’s sad and ultimately doomed world is not for him.

Plot wise this is the Seinfeld of movies: The two out of work actors go on holiday in the country, Withnail gets drunk a lot, ‘I’ spends a lot of his time trying to keep out of the clutches of randy bulls and randy raving homo uncles and that’s about all there is to it. However this doesn’t matter as the joy of the film comes from its surrealistic characters in surrealistic situations, the grotty ashtray ridden realistic style and the razor sharp dialogue full of eminently quotable quotes.

‘We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now’

Why this movie is an absolute milk spurting kick ass classic is just too hard to describe for mere mortals so C.A. thought we would move straight on to the drinking game? You get a truckload of alcohol (Sherry, cider, whiskey, wine, beer, and for the more intrepid, lighter fluid), as many student mates as you can find, a copy of Withnail & I and an ambulance. Then you watch the film matching the characters drink for drink, and if you are still alive at the end of the film you get straight into the ambulance, straight down the hospital and get a liver transplant