Feature: Bruce Robinson: the man who put the I in Withnail and I

'I'm talking about something I haven't done for many, many, many years,' he says. 'I haven't really drunk for about five years. I hit 50 and thought do you want to be a piss artist or be a writer? So I went for the latter.'

The Jag, a 1964 model bought by Robinson's then girlfriend, actress Lesley-Anne Down, for £50 was the inspiration for the ruined Mk2 Withnail and Marwood drive to the Lake District to the strains of Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower.

'It was much better than the one in the film,' says Bruce. 'That was a complete wreck. But it sort of looked the part, didn't it?'

It did. In fact the prop car was so convincingly decrepit that during filming it was pursued by real police, an episode which allegedly concluded with star Richard E Grant dumping the Jag and fleeing on foot across some flowerbeds.

Withnail and Marwood's rural adventure was inspired by a real-life drive to the Lake District. But in the movie, their mouldering Jaguar gets them home. In reality, despite its superior condition, Bruce's Jag failed to make it back in one piece. It somehow ended up in a ditch. And when a farmer tried to pull it out with his tractor, it broke in half.

'That was a little tragedy, yeah,' says Robinson. 'The whole f*****g car came off and went up the track. The guy I was with was amused and I seriously wasn't.'

The return journey - during which a hopelessly shitfaced Withnail takes the wheel, swerves wildly across the carriageway 'making time' and is subsequently nicked - is one of the film's funniest sequences. Robinson paid for the scenes from his own pocket, stumping up £30,000 of his £80,000 directing fee to shoot them after Handmade Films refused. He didn't get it back and hasn't received a penny from the film since.

'I've never seen so much as a birthday cake out of it,' he says. 'Unbelievable really.'

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