Anarchic comedian took on British establishment
LONDON —Rik Mayall was a former enfant terrible of British alternative comedy with an anarchic line in over-thetop scatology. He later broadened his appeal with his portrayal of the egregious politician Alan B’Stard. Mayall died June 9, aged 56.
His breakthrough came in 1982 when he co-wrote and co-starred in BBC Television’s The Young Ones, a situation comedy featuring a group of revolting students on the breadline, squeezing acne, baring bottoms and sharing a filthy apartment.
Arms flailing and eyes bulging, Mayall’s character, the angst-ridden loud-mouthed student Rick, chimed with the program’s unpredictable “alternative” quality. The show tore up the established rules of comedy. The resulting 35 minutes of rampaging, violent slapstick struck some as having more in common with Warner Bros cartoons than with traditional sitcoms.
Mayall wrote The Young Ones with his then-girlfriend Lise Meyer and another emerging alternative comedy star, Ben Elton. Although it found a cult audience right away — mostly students, teenagers and 20-somethings — others were slow to catch on, and it was only when the series was repeated that it began to build a sizable audience.
In contrast to his outrageous characterizations, Mayall was quietly spoken and shy, with a reputation as the chameleon comedian: “Fluent, funny, polite, informed” noted one of the comparatively few interviewers he spoke to, but “also evasive, slippery, canny, cautious and a tad self-congratulatory.”
“There’s a quality about me,” Mayall himself once confessed, “that you don’t quite trust.”
Although he became a defining part of the television landscape of the 1980s — including a memorable turn as the rumbustiously randy Squadron Cmdr. Flashheart in Blackadder Goes Forth (“Always treat your kite like you treat your woman … get inside her five times a day and take her to heaven and back!”) and earlier Blackadder iterations — Mayall always preferred working in the live theatre. His fellow comic actor Simon Fanshawe ascribed to Mayall “a kind of pure energy as a solo performer on stage that, if you are prepared for the ride, is irresistible.”
In April 1998, when he was 40, a near-fatal accident on a quad bike left Mayall in a coma for five days. Severe head injuries caused impaired memory, shaky coordination and speech problems. “The accident was over Easter and as you know, Jesus our Lord was nailed to the cross on Good Friday,” recounted Mayall in an interview last year. “The day before that is Crap Thursday, and that’s the day Rik Mayall died. And then he was dead on Good Friday, Saturday, Sunday until Bank Holiday Monday.”
But he appeared to have made a complete recovery, and returned to work in blustering form as Richie Twat (pronounced Thwaite) in Guesthouse Paradiso (1999), a film he co-wrote with his friend and longtime comedy partner Adrian Edmondson.
Although his part as Peeves the poltergeist in the first Harry Potter film failed to make the final cut, Mayall remained philosophical. “I’ve looked over the edge, ”he said, adding his brush with death had taught him that ending up on the cutting room floor hardly seemed so bad.
His autobiography Bigger Than Hitler, Better Than Christ was published in 2005.