I was 17. It was July and it was boiling. Sweat made a snail-like progress down my neck – but I didn’t care. My swishy, three-quarter-length coat was half my personality. They would have had to surgically remove it from me. I was dressed for action. The particular action I wanted was what I had seen on a shady DVD version of Withnail & I a few months earlier. I wanted booze and drugs, and to cause outrage in provincial tearooms. In fact, I just looked like a dick, and wouldn’t have known weed from oregano. Still, the film left an imprint like a branding iron.
I was one of many, obviously. None more so than Toby Benjamin, whose latest book, Withnail & I: from Cult to Classic, charts the journey of a film that was initially a flop, gained a following among students – with their propensity to pass around VHS copies – and then assumed a granite-like position in the culture, comparable to the King James Bible or Cilla Black. It speaks to us as clearly today as it did when it was released in 1987. In straitened times, excess and débauche sometimes seem the only answer to harsh reality. What else is there to do, after all? Maybe that’s why it still resonates.
