Mr Jolly Lives Next Door

Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door
Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door
Directed by	Stephen Frears
Produced by	Elaine Taylor
Written by	Adrian Edmondson Rik Mayall Rowland Rivron
Starring	Rik Mayall Adrian Edmondson Peter Richardson Nicholas Parsons Peter Cook
Release date	5 March 1988

Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door is a 1987 comedy film made for British television as part of The Comic Strip Presents... series and was originally broadcast on Channel 4 on 5 March 1988. It was released on VHS in the late 1980s, and became available on DVD when the entire Comic Strip Presents... series was released as a box set in the UK in June 2005. It has also been repeated occasionally on the Paramount Comedy Channel.

It features Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson as the (unnamed) proprietors of an escort agency, Dreamytime Escorts. Mayall's character is devious, low-minded, calculating and stupid; Edmondson's merely very stupid.

Unusually, rather than providing businessmen with female companionship, the activities of their escort agency essentially involve the pair swooping on unsuspecting foreigners who call them, and forcing them to take part in a drinking binge at their expense. The two are alcohol-obsessed; when their home-brewed beer (which takes all of two days to brew and has a head made from washing-up liquid) isn't available, they steal from the delivery lorries pulling up at the off-licence downstairs: Edmondson's character dives out of the window into a large builders' bucket and is hauled back up with the stolen exploding tonic water by Mayall.

Their next-door neighbour is the eponymous Mr. Jolly, a psychopathic contract killer played by Peter Cook. Jolly's modus operandi is to hack his victims to death with a meat cleaver while playing classic Tom Jones tunes from the 1960s to drown their cries.

Heimi Henderson, who owns the off-licence downstairs, has refused demands for protection money by Mr. Lovebucket, an effete gangster played by Peter Richardson whose abiding love is his Citroën DS car.

Mayall and Edmonson intercept a request intended for Mr. Jolly to "take out" the radio presenter and game show host Nicholas Parsons, who appears as himself. Parsons is due to open Henderson's off-licence, and Lovebucket wants to put a stop to it. Misinterpreting the request, they spend an evening with Parsons, who stays in their company because he believes them to be competition winners, the real ones having been pushed off the road by the Dreamytime Escorts' van in an earlier scene. The two are confronted the following morning by Lovebucket, who wants to know what they've done with the money provided with the contract (they have, of course, used to buy one thousand five hundred seventy four gin and tonics (large ones)). Lovebucket insists that they complete the contract.