The 1986 movie has added topicality for me as it was this month three years ago that I attempted to replicate the Withnail & I experience by travelling to the Lake District with a friend and fellow fan named Neil (‘Withneil’, ahem) to spend a wintry weekend in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. It was an idea which, while seeming inspired and exciting at first, led from booze-fuelled fun to horrible disaster.

To synopsise for the short-memoried or rare unacquainted, the film tells the story of Withnail and Marwood (the eponymous ‘I’ identified by name only in the screenplay, played by Paul McGann): two struggling and strung-out actors who resolve to escape the substance abuse and squalor of their 1969 Camden flat by retreating to the remote Cumbrian cottage owned by Withnail’s Uncle Monty, a melodramatic fat gaylord who only relinquishes the keys after Withnail deviously explains that Marwood is an active and available homosexual. Of course, the holiday doesn’t go to plan: the weather is worst than in London, the cottage desolate and dilapidated with no heating or electricity, there’s no food and the locals are hostile. The unannounced arrival of Monty is both blessing and curse – he brings food and money, but is also intent on buggering a certain someone “even if it must be burglary”.

It was precisely this unconventional bare plot, fleshed out with dark humour and masterful ever-quotable dialogue, with which the film mocked its modest box office returns by attaining cult classic status, particularly among the nation’s students whose own boozy yet penurious lifestyles closely resembled the main characters’.

Despite the determination of my friend and I to stay as true to the movie as possible, regrettably we had to do without the Uncle Monty figure, as well as crossing off the more unsavoury acts like downing lighter-fluid, strangling a chicken or smearing our entire bodies with Deep Heat. Character-wise, however, we were both quite accurate: Neil being a tall, slightly unhinged amateur actor and alcoholic, and I being his shorter, wiser sidekick in thrall to his mischief despite efforts to be the ‘voice of reason’.

So, step one in transposing the Withnail & I experience to the 21st century: rather than suffer a six-hour drive in a spluttering rustbucket and risk incarceration for drink-driving, Withneil and I take the speedier yet serene alternative of a Virgin train. No traffic, stress or arguments – that was all to come later.

Amazingly, the mid-Feb dates had rewarded us with the best possible weather for the time of year: cold but cloudless skies with brilliant wintry sunshine. Even the gods were making sure what was supposed to be a dismal rain-soaked weekend wouldn’t go to plan, but then wasn’t the whole point of the scripted weekend that it doesn’t go to plan?

We arrive at our holiday abode in a sleepy village called Coniston, just outside Windermere. Whereas our hapless fictional counterparts turn up at a dark, dank hovel, the cottage we’ve rented turns out to be a picture of character and comfort, complete with log fire, exposed beams and antique furniture (disappointingly, no travel agent could find us a dwelling akin to the shithole in the movie). We dump our stuff and hit the pub.

No rain means not having to tie carrier-bags around our shoes and just a short pavement stroll to the first of the village’s three taverns, of which we weren’t expecting so many. We follow the manual: two large gins and two pints of cider – ice in the cider – but choose to leave out the bit about getting into a fight with a fierce Irishman. Nevertheless, we resolve that should we find ourselves in any kind of bar confrontation, Neil would follow Withnail’s ruse of whimpering that his wife is having a baby.

Fortunately for us (and the locals) the pubs are quiet, keeping with the movie’s out-of-season break, only a couple of villagers and ramblers noiselessly sipping their pints. Irrelevant if you’re alcoholics – indeed Withnail and Marwood are content to sit drinking in a ghostpub until closing – but for us, after sinking a couple in each pub we’re now sitting half-cocked in the third and feeling a bit twitchy. We enquire if there’s anywhere with a pool table or dartboard, slipping in that “we’ve gone on holiday by mistake”, and to our delight we’re directed to a local Royal British Legion club with both.

With entertainment secured, we return to boozing with renewed vigour, perhaps a bit too vigorously as after three large scotches we are fairly pickled. It’s worth mentioning as an aside here that if you were to partake in the infamous Withail & I drinking game, in which participants must match Withnail drink-for-drink, you’d be facing a liver-wringing 13 scotches, 10 glasses of wine, 6 sherries, 3 gins, a pint of cider, half an ale and a mouthful of lighter-fluid.

Back at the club I’m facing my first piece of excitement after being challenged to a game of pool by a man with one leg, who whizzes around the table on a wheelchair, but the tightly-contested game ends on a sour note when I fluff the final black, he accuses me of deliberately missing then wheels off in a huff. Sheesh, can’t-win scenario or what? We decide to pop over to the local tea-room before it closes to drunkenly order “the finest cakes and wine known to humanity” but are met with a blank look from the waitress, who checks the specials board to see if she’s overlooked something.

Disappointed, we head back to the second pub which is suddenly busy with locals despite the efforts of the world’s worst pub entertainer, named ‘Wayne O’Neil’, whose appalling karaoke act leaves us teetering open-mouthed at the bar. We choose to call it a night when the one-legged man turns up. It hits home during our dejected trudge back to the cottage that attempting to emulate a Withnail & I weekend of just drinking and wandering around aimlessly is actually a bit rubbish.

So, despite waking the next morning with the kind of hangovers that lighter-fluid drinkers must suffer (Withnail: “feels like a pig shat in my head”), we resolve to do something constructive with our weekend, something our counterparts would not even have contemplated. So we hire a pair of bikes and cycle down to Coniston Water – the Lake District’s 3rd largest lake – where exactly 40 years previously one Donald Campbell attempted to beat his existing world water-speed record before spectacularly crashing and dying. We elect to instead break the record for slowest water speed, hiring out a Canadian canoe for the job.

After passing out prematurely the previous night it’s still pretty early when we glide into the empty lake, no life stirring but ducks and swans, and no sound except our arrhythmic oar splashes, making it quite a surreal hangover experience. It doesn’t last long though because you have to share a Canadian canoe, paddling on opposite sides, and our lack of synchronicity has us erratically weaving around and somehow running aground at the lake’s far edge.

We abandon boat and spend the rest of the day walking off our stupors around the nearby Furness Fells, an area of natural mountainous splendour very similar to the Haweswater spot in which Withnail delivers his desperate cry of “I’m going to be a star!” to the echoing valley after another fruitless phonecall to his agent. With over 200 peaks around the lakes, comprising England’s highest mountains and Scafell Pike, its highest, the sheer uninterrupted scale and space of the Lake District is unlike anywhere else in the country, and as Bill Bryson declared in his book on Britain: “…away from Bowness, Hawkshead and Keswick, with their tea-rooms, teapots and Beatrix Potter shit – it retains pockets of sheer perfection.” It’s a shame that Withnail and Marwood fail to embrace this, zipping themselves into the pocket of the local pub and only absorbing the scenery on their traipse back to the cottage.

Back at our lodge we establish its only shortcoming as its non-provision of towels, and of course we haven’t brought any and the village doesn’t have an M&S so we’re forced to share two tea-towels at bath time. Buoyed by the day’s head-clearing activites though, we attempt a hair of the dog at our local but abandon the idea after the déjà vu discomfort of sitting with exactly the same bored punters as the evening before. London social conditioning can really mess with your head.

The next and final day is when things go hideously wrong, despite an auspicious start in which we hire an off-road 4×4 jeep to explore the nearby Grizedale Forest and precipitous areas beyond, negotiating narrow scree-strewn trails which would tip the jeep sideways into arse-clenching angles. It’s the buzz from this off-road expedition that clouds our judgment in deciding exactly how we’d spend our final afternoon, resulting in a grave error which nearly terminates the pair of us.

However as it’s a story within itself and I’ve presently reached the upper limit of my wordcount I’ll have to make it a separate post, one that ends with Neil and I parting ways back in London with the same poignancy in which Withnail and Marwood finally part, knowing that despite their pissed-up jollies they can never return to the final circumstances they found themselves in.

To be continued…

My own personal gesture is to write this blog entry as I was fortunate enough to meet and interview the man a few years before he died, and this year finally made the pilgrimage to his Australia Zoo in Queensland, where wife Terri and daughter Bindi are still at large around the croc enclosures.

For anyone who’s been living under a rock for the past decade like silver-tailed scorpions, Steve was the Discovery Channel’s greatest discovery and drawcard, his Crocodile Hunter programme becoming the pinnacle of zoological entertainment watched by half a billion viewers in almost 150 countries.

His legendary TV antics will never be forgotten: grappling venom-spitting “super-aggressive” snakes and poking sticks into the nests of “crazy-toxic” spiders, all the while cooing terms of endearment like “crikey, what a little beauty!” or “easy, you cute little fella?”. And of course chasing fully-grown crocodiles along riverbanks and diving onto them in murky creeks before somehow wrestling the shocked beasts into his little wooden boat. Steve was the only thing crocs were scared of – the bogeyman they warned their baby croclets about.

Luckily for them, the wildlife warrior finally came a cropper after being fatally pierced by a stingray barb, ironically while filming his latest documentary ‘Ocean’s Deadliest’ at the Great Barrier Reef. There followed stingray pogroms on Queensland’s beaches in which the creatures were found dead and mutilated by moronic vengeful fans.

I reported on all of this while writing for an Australian magazine at the time, for which I conducted the interview after  arranging to meet Steve, fittingly, at London Zoo. I will never forget greeting him in the flesh and seeing with my own eyes that it wasn’t an act, that he was exactly the way he was in his TV programmes – a wide-eyed over-animated nutcase in khakis, who couldn’t sit still and answered each question as if it was the most pertinent question he’d ever heard.

What was so ironic about the whole interview to this day was the answers that he delivered so passionately on fear, reincarnation and how he’ll never come to serious harm at the hands of dangerous animals – how these words haunted me in the days following his demise, and nowadays make me smile guiltily to myself, especially when Steve Irwin Day rolls around again. Here is an abridged version of that interview:

KG: What, if anything, are you scared of?
SI: Fear’s a natural thing that keeps us alive. Animals don’t frighten me. I’m more afraid of people and the dark cloud of terrorism.

KG: What about flying?
SI: Flying certainly makes you aware of your vulnerability, particularly as we film in some fairly remote areas.

KG: And getting eaten by a crocodile?
SI: I was born into wildlife, mate. I can handle them easily. People find it unbelievable but I’m not crazy – just so well-rehearsed that I’ve complete confidence in what I’m doing. Look at firemen and electricians – electricity can kill you quicker than a croc, no ifs or buts. One flash and you’re ash! A sparky will take plenty of zaps on his way to becoming fully qualified. Pain teaches you quickly. Once bitten, twice shy – I’ve lived my life by that rule.

KG: What was the scariest non-croc moment of your life?
SI: That’d be my wedding day! I’m standing there in a tuxedo with this tight thing around my neck. I’ll tell you what, I’d rather have a boa constrictor coiled around me. Suits – there’s too much stiff in them? I’ll never wear one again. Gimme some good khakis any day.

KG: What has the deadliest venom in the world?
SI: The box jellyfish lurks around our northern waters with the most toxic venom known to man. You don’t wanna mess with that little beauty!

KG: If given a reincarnational choice, what would you come back as?
SI: An Australian saltwater croc. No one would dare muck with me…

So, there you have it – Steve Irwin may be alive and well and floating around an Australian swamp. Crikey!

Thanks for the interview mate, and steer clear of those pesky stingrays…