The Dangerous Brothers was a stage and TV act by anarchic comedy duo Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, performing respectively as "Richard Dangerous" and "Sir (or occasionally Lady) Adrian Dangerous". Although originating before the show, they appeared in a number of brief sketches in the 1980s TV programme Saturday Live. Eventually being banned for being "too sexy and too violent", they staged a protest by returning as 'The Ben Elton Brothers', and blowing up the car park at LWT Studios.
The act was, in essence, a prototype of the career which the pair were to forge over the next twenty years in such shows as Mr Jolly Lives Next Door; Filthy, Rich and Catflap; and Bottom- two low-life loser perverts hitting each other in spectacular slapstick ways. It was arguably more hazardous than much of the material which was to follow in later incarnations - stage props in the brief run included a live (and very large, although apparently lethargic) crocodile, blank-firing submachine guns, and Edmondson apparently consuming Vim, a well-known UK brand of powder toilet cleaner. One of the early sketches went wrong when a stunt to set fire to Edmondson's trousers left him with serious burns - although much of this was left on the broadcast version.
Sketches included
One of the final sketches prepared for Saturday Live was entitled 'Kinky Sex'. This fell foul of Channel 4 censors who banned it. The duo responded in the sketch Dangervision by apparently hijacking the programme and blowing up the wall on which the show's logo was painted in graffiti art. The banned sketch, which by modern standards seems fairly tame, was finally released on a compilation video The Dangerous Brothers present: World of Danger.
Several Dangerous Brothers sketches are also included on the DVD compilation Saturday Live: The Best of Series One (2007).
A DVD of all of the sketches featured in the show was released in 2009.