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Rik Mayall: Magnificent B’Stard is a tribute to the man and a spoof to what you must think was a lost youth in the mainstream audience. I don’t know what today’s youth will do with it. I’m guessing they don’t watch television, so the question is moot.
And, of course, it doesn’t matter. This is 90 minutes of television for us – the generation that grew up with Mayall on the screen as Rick the Poet (“This is my most angry poem – Play!”), then the self-proclaimed investigative journalist from and especially in Redditch, Kevin Turvey, then in the Youth as a student of sociology Rick and beyond his famous Rich & Catflap. Then there was his memorable turn as Lord Flashheart in Blackadder II (and as the horndog descendant of Squadron Commander Flashheart in Blackadder Goes Forth); an unexpected way to show his comic talent as the arrogant, cruel, corrupt, self-absorbed Tory MP Alan B’Stard in Marks and Gran’s wisecracking The New Statesman; a Hollywood hit like Drop Dead Fred; it was the great success of Bottom as a sitcom and a live show throughout the 90s until a terrible quad bike accident in 1998 fixed its sails.
Sky’s articles cover both the fun and the familiar (“Can you kill yourself with artificial sweeteners?”) but they also fill in the blanks. For example, the 1995 adaptation of Simon Gray’s Cell Mates, starring Stephen Fry and Mayall as the main characters until Fry, suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, passed out shortly after opening night and the play was closed. This, like the physical and emotional suffering Mayall personally experienced after his cycling accident, is seen with sadness and compassion on both sides.
There are pictures of his early work on stage with his best friend, writing and acting with his friend Ade Edmondson in the 20th Century Coyote comedy group (Edmondson lights up when he remembers a woman in the audience telling her daughter that they were “traveling actors”) and then as The Dangerous Brothers (leads in Richie and Eddie, the critic of the Bottom). We see them working hard and happily together in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1991 (“Underneath it was the brutality of Wile E Coyote embedded in it,” says Edmondson, highlighting it) as Rick and Vyvyan did in The Young Ones or elsewhere.
This leads to their demise a decade or so later, and was first commented on by Edmondson here, sadly. He doesn’t go into detail but it seems that the combination of Mayall’s excessive drinking, the change in behavior after the accident and the additional responsibilities that Edmondson got during the previous tours (he already had a difficult time in any relationship) made him tell Mayall that he no longer wanted to work with him. “And we didn’t really understand that,” says Edmondson, who now looks frustrated. Mayall collapsed and died of a heart attack on 9 June 2014.
The tone, however, is unabashed fun, even though Mayall’s friend and colleague Ben Elton tries to push the line on many disturbing occasions. “Everybody knew they were having the best time they’d ever had at a comedy show,” he says of the original Rick the Poet club, where Rick the Student was “a natural genius … one of the funniest people”. It’s a good job Stephen Fry isn’t in the running anymore – we’d all be swept away by the nausea which, although Mayall loved his attention, wouldn’t have suited him at all.
If young people watch it, they will get a better idea of the singer and his place in a certain comedy atmosphere. They will have a good idea of the man, too – perhaps not so much from oral testimony but from the combined love of those who help and the generosity of spirit that fills their memories, the undying love from his children, and Edmondson’s lasting wish that the two could have had more time to make things right.
