Rik Mayall’s greatest gift, exceeding both his ability for writing shrewd satire and side-splitting smut (often in a single line) and his boundless energy and enthusiasm for performance (he and Adrian Edmondson literally suffered for their art during recordings of Bottom and the subsequent, even more raucous stage shows), was the ability to make the vilest characters as irrepressibly charming as the man playing them.
Rik was universally adored – the only exceptions being Spike Milligan and my granddad, both of whom found his signature brand of balls-to-the-wall hyper-filth and cartoonish obsession with bodily functions too sordid to stomach – not in spite of the repulsive characters that he portrayed but because of them. Somehow, the grotesque, the narcissistic, the perverted and the pitiable became sympathetic; loveable, even. And always insanely, screamingly, funny.
Right-on write-off and perpetual virgin Rick, the sloganeering wank colossus of The Young Ones, ought to have been utterly unlikeable. Rik made him a national hero. The scheming Tory MP Alan B’stard was as much a conscience-free devotee of Thatcher (‘Full Metal Cami Knickers’, as B’stard affectionately described her) as Rick was her avowed enemy, and entirely loathsome with it. Yet somehow, it was impossible not to root for him (even if there were occasional moments of vicarious enjoyment when buffoonish baronet Piers Fletcher-Dervish got one over on his repellent colleague).
Making Richie Richard – not so much Rick having almost grown up but Colin Grigson of Bad News foregoing heavy metal in favour of aimless voyeurism and extreme violence – into one of the best loved British comedy characters of the 1990s was an achievement all by itself.
Everyone will have a favourite memory of Rik. It could be the chaotic (yet controlled) craziness of his reading of George’s Marvellous Medicine for Jackanory; it may be something from The Comic Strip Presents … (for me, it’s the pencil-moustached proprietor of Dreamytime Escorts trying desperately to carry out a hit on Nicholas Parsons: ‘You’re pissed, aren’t you, Nicholas?’); it might be the successful transfer of nose-picking, farting and playground violence to the big screen that was Drop Dead Fred, or even Grim Tales.
But it’s more likely to be one of his show-stealing tours-de-phworce as Flashheart in Blackadder, the endlessly quotable deviant hero who only appeared twice yet is seared as indelibly into the fabric of British television as Manuel’s pet rat or Trigger’s brush.
Ben Elton and Richard Curtis may have written his lines, but no one except Rik Mayall could ever have brought Flashheart, for whose cocksmanship Rick would have gladly sacrificed at least one of his testicles, to (larger than) life: ‘Any girl who wants to chain herself to my railings and suffer-a-jet movement gets my vote!’
Unpardonable, uncontainable, and unforgettable.