Elvis Presley’s death was a great career move, his manager Colonel Tom Parker famously remarked. By the same process, Rik Mayall’s five-day “death” after a quad bike accident has had the curious effect of transforming the comic from a manically dangerous menace into a cherishable figure.
Once members of the public would hail him with an expletive to match his scatalogical persona in The Young Ones or his loathsome incarnation of parliamentary sleaze, the Tory MP Alan B’stard in The New Statesman. Now there is genuine affection, he marvels. “People say, ‘You all right, Rik? You better now, mate?’ ”
Which may explain Mayall’s casting as a nice — even cuddly — family man in his biggest mainstream television role since his near-fatal accident in 1998. In ITV’s comedy drama All About George, scripted by the Cold Feet writer Mike Bullen, he plays a kind, ordinary mortal struggling to keep up with the rigours of family life.
Being nice is a professional first for Mayall. In vain he kept reading the script to discover who he had to abuse or sleep with, wondering if he could play such a respectable character. The jury is still out: some critics of the first episode on Thursday felt he had been miscast, while others who have seen more of the series, co-starring Jack Shepherd and Julia Ford, insist it promises to be a hit.
As if to reassure his fans that he has not abandoned the sniggering, cringeworthy grotesques that brought him to fame, he has let rip in his new autobiography with 300 pages of foul-mouthed egotistical rant and comic invention. The Rik Mayall: Bigger than Hitler, Better than Christ claims that he “invented alternative comedy . . . rescued the British film industry . . . [was] the saviour of rock’n’roll . . . brought down the Thatcher administration . .. [and] changed the face of global culture”.
There is precious little about his real life in this excursion of fantasy, which he calls an “autobionovel”, except for a section on how he came to die for five days. Even then he cannot resist a description of meeting God (a beautiful woman who asks for his autograph, naturally), but the facts are beyond dispute.
While on an Easter break with his family at their farm in East Allington, Devon, he was riding a 600lb quad bike without a crash helmet over sloping fields when it hit a bump, flipped over and sent him sprawling, head-first, onto a stretch of concrete. His wife Barbara discovered him beside the machine, blood pouring from his ears, nose and mouth. He had sustained a fractured skull and two haemorrhages, one deep inside the brain, and as he lay in a coma it was feared that if he did pull through, he could emerge with brain damage.
By Mayall’s account, the incident began with an old dream of being beckoned by a man wearing a hood. “All sensation of sitting astride a quad bike melted away. The roar of the engine faded and there I was in the field, the field of my dream.” This time he was not frightened by the spectre, who pulled back his hood to reveal Mayall’s face. “I fell vertically into a complete blackness, a total nothing. It was though everything was magnified a million times. I was utterly alone and upside down and yet, despite the magnitude of my surroundings, it also felt sort of like what I imagine womblike must be.”
Eventually he awoke. “All I remember was opening my eyes and looking at the ceiling and thinking, ‘Where the f*** am I?’” He didn’t feel panic: actors often wake up in other people’s bedrooms, he reasoned. His first instinct was to check out his wedding tackle. “There was a tube sticking out of it . . . ‘Oh Jesus,’ I thought, ‘What have I been doing?’”
Determined to escape the clinic in Harley Street, he ran into the street in his pyjamas, hailed a taxi and arrived home in west London to find his friend babysitting his children. “I shouted, ‘Geoff! I’ve broken out, let’s get pissed!’”
He was transferred to a hospital, where to his horror a doctor told him that to drain the blood that had pooled in his skull for seven weeks, the top of his head would have to be removed. Then, providentially, a scan revealed that the blood had disappeared. “It had just gone! Overnight or something. It was a miracle!” Hence his boast that he is better than Christ: “I was dead for five days and Christ was only dead for three. There’s no quibbling with that . . . and I rose again on Bank Holiday Monday.”
There was a long road to recovery. He suffered a relapse a few months later when he took himself off his prescribed medication and had an epileptic fit. He began to wonder if he would ever perform again. “Wrong words would come out and I couldn’t write jokes.” But after a year he eased himself back with a simple voiceover that proved so effortless that he was soon playing the title role in the film Merlin: the Return.
The incident put into his perspective his disappointment over the defection of his co-star Stephen Fry from Simon Gray’s ill-fated stage play Cell Mates in 1995. Mayall’s reviews had been excellent, but Fry’s less so. Six days after the London opening, Fry absconded, exhausted and depressed, to surface in Belgium. Although it put paid to Mayall’s hopes of reinforcing his standing as a serious actor, he appears to have forgiven Fry, whom he describes as a good friend.
Mayall’s detractors would say he was always heading for a fall. He was born in Harlow, Essex, but grew up in Droitwich, Worcestershire, as the third child of two drama teachers. He was starstruck from the age of five after playing a peasant in The Good Person of Sichuan. Hearing the applause, he thought: “This is it!” It is all he has ever craved.
Despite winning a free place at King’s school in Worcester, he did poorly in A-levels but got into Manchester University in 1975 to study drama. It was the start of his friendship with Ade Edmondson, another manic genius with whom he formed 20th Century Coyote, a student theatre group.
In one of their early sketches, God’s Testicles, the two comics hung from the ceiling in two pink duvet covers. The group was the launchpad for their collaboration in Bottom, The Comic Strip, Filthy, Rich and Catflap and The Young Ones.
Another friendship forged in Manchester was with a younger student, Ben Elton, who later followed Mayall into stand-up comedy in London, where the latter was performing in smoky venues.
Although the “new wave” stand-up comedy was later seen as politically radical, it was really laughing at the futility of ranting against Thatcherism, Mayall recalled. “We were surreal, not political. People said, ‘You’re just hitting each other and what’s so funny about that?’ And we said, ‘I don’t know, but the audience laughs’.”
The Young Ones became cult viewing in the early 1980s, with comedy as the new rock’n’roll. Teenagers adopted the voices, mannerisms and catchphrases of Mayall (the middle-class, aspirational one), Edmondson (the violent Nazi), Nigel Planer (the hippie) and Christopher Ryan (the smoothie). “They were a bunch of prats and that is why they were so endearing,” Mayall judged.
The series was dreamt up by Lise Mayer, with whom Mayall was then living. Then he met Barbara, a makeup artist working at the BBC in Glasgow. “I was sitting on some crates waiting for my turn to go on as Kevin Turvey (in the series A Kick Up the Eighties) and this beautiful creature came around the corner. I thought, ‘That’s the one’.”
They married in Barbados in 1985 and have three children, Rosie, 18, Sid, 16, and Bonnie, 9. Mayall credits her for his recovery — “the kindest, strongest, wisest person that I have drawn on”.
Since his accident Mayall has appeared in several films, including Guest House Paradiso, in which he and Edmondson were co-owners of the worst hotel in the world. He has also been in demand on television, notably in the Victorian detective series Murder Rooms.
Recently he and Edmondson went back on the road with a tour of their outrageous stage play Bottom, which leans heavily on bum jokes. (It features a time-travelling toilet called the Turdis.) He’s as happy as a pig in muck: “If it’s raining, you think, ‘Hey, it’s not raining on a corpse’.”
