He was unique in the chaotic way he performed comedy and the way his anarchic and alternative mind worked. So it should perhaps go hand-in-hand that comedian Rik Mayall was neither straightforward to work or live with at all times. But behind the bravado, there was also a softer side.
In a rare interview, his daughter Bonnie Mayall explains: “There was a joke in the house, it was like ‘always on, never off’. And it was a joke between us because he wasn’t always on with us. But to everyone else, who’s not a part of that inner circle, you’re always on, because you’ve got to be funny.”
His other daughter Rosie Richardson adds: “Anywhere there were people that knew who he was, he’d immediately just sort of stand taller, puff out his chest, really make a show of it, just be flirty and silly.”
Bonnie concludes: “I think the people would just assume that he’s the most confident person in the world, and it kind of is a dichotomy, because he was, and he did believe he was amazing. But he was quite dual in the way that he would have that but also be very, very kind of worried about stuff. I think people would probably be quite surprised to know about his anxieties.”
The intimate moments of Rik’s rollercoaster life are described in detail in a new Sky documentary celebrating his work. But it also highlights drinking issues, the danger of using a quad bike without having your mind fully on the job and a painful split from comedy pal Ade Edmondson, which was never fully repaired when Rik died in June 2014 from a heart attack.
View 4 ImagesRik’s daughter Rosie speaks about his incredible life as part of the documentary(Image: © Sky UK Limited)
After leaving Manchester University with a Theatre studies degree, Rik and pal Ade began trying to write and perform comedy amidst a backdrop of punk and the birth of alternative stand up. Whilst working factory jobs they managed just four gigs in their first year but undeterred they carried on. “We enjoyed each other, we were best friends,” Ade tells the cameras with a smile.
In 1979 they went to Edinburgh Fringe and were a big enough hit to be able to spend time in the pub every day, whilst performing at night. Ade, 69, says: “I used to go to the ticket office and collect our tickets every day, and it was just that huge wads of cash. Proper cash money. I remember thinking, in the three weeks that we did it, I’d earned about three months’ money from the job I’d been doing before, which is a good whack.”
View 4 ImagesRik Mayall on Stage in the earlier days of his career(Image: © Sky UK Limited)
Success continued with the opening of the Comedy Store in London and Rik gained a kind of cult status, with his solo character Kevin Turvey, a self-styled “investigative journalist”, as well as working as a duo with Ade under the name 20th Century Coyote. With the help of Ben Elton and his then girlfriend Lise Mayer, Rik turned an idea for what he called an anti-sitcom into what would become The Young Ones, running from 1982-84 and described as “an absolute” joy to be part of by Ade.
Around this time Rik and Ben would tour regularly and the pair teamed up for their next TV comedy project Filthy Rich & Catflap before Rik played Alan B’Stard, a Conservative politician in a widely acclaimed political satire The New Statesman that showed how well he could act as well as mess around and make ruder gags. Memorable cameos in shows like Blackadder as Flashheart were also loved by his growing army of fans.
By the start of the Nineties, Rik was also working with his regular comedy partner Ade having launched Bottom, a BBC sitcom featuring comedy violence and loneliness of two flatmates desperate for girlfriends and money. It was hugely popular on TV and as a live show, but in some ways this success also had a negative impact on their friendship.
View 4 ImagesAde Edmondson looks back on his final years with best mate Rik Mayall with a lot of emotion.(Image: © Sky UK Limited)
“Rik was brilliant. He was really good as that character. It’s the best programme we ever made together. It was fundamentally him. It was him as a kind of 15,17-year-old boy wants to have it off and can’t afford anything,” Ade recalls.
Of their first live shows he adds: “It’s the most success we ever had. We would run off stage in our incredibly sweaty gear, run into the van and drink all the way home. We felt like we were tearaways.”
But even as the tour grew more successful, trouble was just around the corner. Rik’s drinking was getting out of control, and after a difficult discussion he agreed to go teetotal for the second tour.
“The show was good, the second one…. by the third run, he was sort of secretly drinking. My little office was overlooking a pub, and then I’d start to see him going in for a quick couple of shorts before he came in to write. Strange as we used to enjoy alcohol so much together.”
His daughter also recalls increasing problems with drink, leading to one horrific life event.
Rosie Richardson says: “In 1998, Dad and I were traveling from London to Devon. He had a briefcase, and he went in his briefcase, and he got out loads of little miniatures; whiskey, gin, vodka.
“He just kept getting these little bottles out the bag. I said ‘What are you doing, darling?’ He said, ‘just don’t tell your mother’. Knocking them back, knocking them back.”
It was then that a life changing moment took place, and Rik suffered a quad bike accident in Devon once they got down to their farmhouse. Rik’s voice in the programme is heard from an archive interview saying: “I thought I’d go out for a ride on my new quad bike. Bonnie comes running out and says, ‘Oh, can I have a ride?’
“There were drops of rain on my arm, and I thought, ‘This isn’t very safe, you go inside the house’, and off they went, and that’s the last thing I remember.”
Rik flipped his bike and the accident very nearly killed him. Son Sid Mayall recalls: “My dad was lying with the quad bike on him, so when I went round the corner, Mum and my aunt were taking the quad bike off of my dad at the time.
“There was a huge pool of blood around his head, it fractured his skull and was completely unconscious. There was bleeding inside the skull and in the brain, so they had to put him into a coma, so that he could heal.”
Lying in his hospital room as family and friends worried how he would come out of the other side and it was touch and go. He came round to see Ben Elton sitting by his bedside. “Oh hello Benji, I’ve f**ked up,” he told his pal.
Friends and family all agree that the accident changed Rik understandably, and whilst some of the confidence would come back there more emotional and insecurities. Rosie says: “He was very very unwell. Nobody would ever know, he was the bravest man to deal with all of that.
“He wasn’t dad for years after, he completely had to stop drinking, which was difficult in itself,” She also reveals he had epilepsy trauma and seizures which he would try to hide from people. Son Sid also says now he could no longer drink he found it harder to socialise.
Rather than hit the road and tour again as he got used to his new issues and medication, Rik and Ade decided to make a movie instead called Guest House Paradiso. With things like mental health being a taboo subject back then, Ade recalls: “He was never exactly the same person. He was bizarrely more emotional.
“I’ve said that most of our material is about real friendship, but we never bloody talked about it. Of course, we didn’t! But he would get emotional about it and cried a lot.”
The pair did go back on the road again with Bottom but the relationship was not quite the same and at the end of the fifth tour in 2003, Ade had decided enough was enough.
“I think endless touring did us in,” he says looking back. “I kind of realised we couldn’t really do it anymore, and we never really got to an understanding about that, which makes me very sad.”
He told Rik on the last night of the fifth Bottom tour he wouldn’t be doing more, which left Rik in tears and for years afterwards any time Ade called him, he would assume it was about them bringing Bottom back.
The impact was huge as Rik felt rejected, and the pain is seemingly still felt on some level by his daughter Rosie. “I remember Dad saying to me ‘I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, I don’t know why this has happened’. I think he just felt like the carpet had been pulled from underneath him, and he was just sort of left going, well, now what?
“I just think that my dad deserved more, so much more. But then again, Adrian was completely entitled to do what he needed to do as well, for his own mental health.”
The pair did try to write together again in 2012, a Bottom follow up for the characters, but in his autobiography Ade wrote that at one stage Rik was “counting the jokes” in the script to check they had equal amounts and at that point he felt their old partnership “trust” was gone. He also thinks it is a good thing the programme called Hooligan’s Island – a reworking of a previous Bottom stage show – was never made as it would not have been up to the quality of their other work.
Ending the documentary, Ade says: “It was something that grieved me in the way he died so suddenly, that we never kind of repaired what our relationship was. So I’ve had to explain the later part of our relationship in some ways, because people want to know. It is obvious that something went a bit awry, but I think we should mostly remember that he was a f**king genius.”
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* Rik Mayall: Magnificent B’stard will premiere on Sky Documentaries on June 25.
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