Alex Hemingway talks to Bottom star Rik Mayall

“Lets just cover the rules. I’m here because I adore you Alex, and you’re my favourite journalist ever… And secondly, I need to punt all the Oxford gigs.”

Rik Mayall is in good spirits. Touring the latest live incarnation of cult TV show Bottom, he is in Birmingham on date 31 of a 76-show tour. “I did the biggest fucking live gig I’ve ever played last night — there,” he shouts, waving his hands excitedly towards the National Indoor Arena. “4,500 people! And it was fab, really great.”

That we are having this conversation at all is something of a miracle. Three years ago he was nearly killed in a quad bike accident on his Devon farm. For four days his outlook was bleak, but in a twist even the most imaginative of scriptwriters wouldn’t have considered, he staged a miraculous recovery on Easter Monday; “My resurrection,” he adds. After an extended period of convalescence, and a brief stage appearance in Cambridge last year, he is back on the road for his first full tour since the accident. To the casual observer, he appears in rude health. “The only thing I have now is the occasional lapse of memory, but Adrian (Bottom co-star and comedy partner Edmonson) is such a merciless Nazi that whenever it happens on stage he just takes the piss.”

Raised in Worcester, he speaks fondly of his childhood. As the head of a drama department, it was his father that imbued his love of the stage; “I was on with Dad’s students in Brecht plays when I was about four. So yeah, I’ve always been in it and always loved it.” From there he made the move to Manchester for a degree in drama, though by his own admission he made a hash of his A-Levels and only made the course through clearing because “everyone fucked up their A-Levels in ’75.” With a cheeky glint in his eye he continues: “the admissions officer, David Mayer, was a very nice man… so I started shagging his daughter. Of course, I had to keep that quiet so I could get in.”

It was in late 1970′s Manchester that the various important strands of Rik’s early career came together. His flatmates and friends included Adrian Edmonson and Ben Elton, and girlfriend Lise Mayer with whom he would go on to co-write The Young Ones. “I didn’t so much cheat my way in, as just have a lot of luck, running into so many good people who were always on my side.” He continues, “A lot of student theatre at the time was bollocks; kind of Marxism for three year olds, so Lloyd Peters, a friend or mine, went into some pubs and eventually got us a residency at the Band on the Wall (a legendary Manchester music venue). It was unheard of… comedians with a fucking residency in a jazz club!” For these early shows, the writing process was suitably last minute; “We’d make it up on Monday, try and roughly write it on Tuesday and on Thursday, Friday and Saturday we’d improvise it on stage; stuff with great titles like King Ron And His Nubile daughter, Who Is Dick Treacle, and My Lungs Don’t Work. And we were making money, which was not the thing to do. The thing to do was sit down and think about Marx, but instead we just had a fucking good laugh, shagging everybody and making money. It was much more rock and roll.”

It was with My Lungs Don’t Work that they made the trip to London, putting on six shows that reputedly pulled a total audience of five. Importantly, one of them was a journalist. “He described me as a “talented little maniac”, which I liked.” Looting My Lungs Don’t Work for the best routines, they crossed town to a new comedy venue, the Comedy Store, and it was here that the next important player in the story came in, in the shape of producer and writer Peter Richardson. “Pete is a genius, and he was like “Hey, why don’t we start a club, our own club.” So we did.” Christened the Comic Strip, the club was the foundation stone of the Comic Strip Production Company which spawned, among other things, the long-running TV show ‘The Comic Strip Presents…’

The success of the club was buoyed by Rik’s first television appearance as Kevin Turvey. “I phoned up Alexei Sayle and said, “Are you going up for that telly thing next week?” And he said, “Rik! It’s fucking tomorrow!” I hadn’t written a fucking bean, I hadn’t written anything, so I was shitting myself, and I thought, well what am I going to do? I know, I’ll do it Brummy, and I’ll call him Kevin, and I know, I won’t write any material, I’ll just talk like he’s the most boring man in the world.” Incredibly, Rik was picked, and his subsequent television appearances brought the live audiences to the club in their droves. Throughout our conversation, Rik sees it important to correct me whenever I mention that there may ever have been a career ‘plan’. ‘There was never a plan. We were never into that, we were just kind of doing what we wanted to do… yeah, doing it for the craic, doing it for the fun.”

And so came the time to think of bigger things. “I was living with Lise at the time, and that’s when we thought, hey, we could all be on telly. It would be fantastic, we could all be living in the same house, and we could have two double acts: me and Ade; Peter and Nigel (Planer), and Alexei could be the fucking landlord! We could do whatever we wanted! So we wrote it, and sent it off, and they said yes…” And so, after a minor disagreement and the departure of Peter Richardson, The Young Ones was born. Charting the lives of four students with totally different outlooks on life, it achieved an almost instant cult following.

Significantly, The Young Ones galvanised the close bond between Rik and Ade that has been the hallmark of their careers over the past 20 years. The way that he talks fondly of Ade gives you some idea of the closeness of their relationship; “He’s a canny cunt, Edmonson… I want you to hear this students. Edmonson is a talentless fuckwipe, and just like a leech he attaches himself to geniuses like myself and Jennifer (Saunders, Ade’s wife). He has a very easy life — when he’s not on stage he’s just drinking.”

The Young Ones also provided the starting point for the character evolution that has brought them to the present day. “Rick and Viv are related to Richie and Eddie, they were there in Filthy, Rich and Catflap (a late-1980′s series that followed The Young Ones), and they both kind of existed before telly anyway… so they’ve always been there.” For the uninitiated, Richie and Eddie — AKA the Hammersmith Hardmen — could be best described as a pair of odious, violent, foul-mouthed freaks, whose sole pleasures in life are to hurt each other and to try (unsuccessfully) to get laid. Throw into this a heady mix of pathos, some outstanding character acting from Rik and Ade, and more than a generous helping of exquisitely executed violent slapstick. If you are still in need an analogy, think Morecambe and Wise on crack, and you’re probably halfway there. A large cult following was guaranteed.

For the Richie and Eddie fans, it was the move to the live arena that really sealed the success of Bottom, with three sold out tours to their name over the past 10 years. “They are great characters to pluck out and pop into new situations. And they grow as well. The first live show we did was all in the flat, the second one we started in the flat and then moved to the prison cell, and the third one was all on the island… Hooligans Island. Then we moved away to film, and we did the hotel in Guest House Paradiso. Unlike Benji (Ben Elton) or Alexei (Sayle), Ade was always uncomfortable with stand up comedy… We need sets, we need a plot, a story.” That doesn’t mean that improvisation is redundant in their humour; “One of the crew came up to me last night and said, “oh, I loved that bit,” and he told me this line that I’d shouted that I couldn’t even remember. I’m not there, it’s Richie that’s on stage, its improvised comedy… it’s very sharp…”

Bottom the TV series ran for four years, and, like most things that Rik and Ade have done, it split audiences and critics down the middle. He talks at length of the demise of the BBC, “it has shot itself in both feet”, and cites the dismantling of the special effects unit and the privatisation of the make-up department as two reasons why a return to the television studio is no longer something to look forward to; “It’s kind of daunting thinking how disappointed we’re going to be. I can imagine asking, “Can I have a house that I can walk into, and then it becomes tiny and I can eat it? Can I have that?” And the suits will be like; “No… but maybe we could do it on the computer.” Fuck off! The magic has gone! But then again, maybe we’re old men, from another time…”

The new show has the usual mix of slapstick, violence and crude humour. But with the addition of some very clever plot twists involving the set and the actual road crew, he describes it as “a new horizon in entertainment.” But how do they approach writing a show like that? “It’s very fecund. We’ll have one gag, and go from there. “I don’t want to hit you with a frying pan, because I just did that… why don’t I hit you with a chair then… oh no, I’ll tell you what – maybe it isn’t actually a chair – we could eat half the sofa so it looks like a chair… in which case we’ll have to stop the fight so that we can eat half the sofa. And then halfway through the fight he’s got to go to the toilet. Yeah, but the toilet has burnt down, because it’s been attacked by aliens. Yes, that’s more like it.” You see how it just sort of breeds…”

Whether their brand of humour is to your taste or not, it certainly pulls in the crowds. “It’s going great, the best yet… except for the heckling. Heckling is a very crap, unproductive thing to do, because some of the really crap members of the audience have started shouting really old fashioned heckles like “have a wank”, which I think is about 3 shows old. This one drunk wouldn’t shut up about it, so I invited him up on stage. I thought I’d put him on stage and then we’d both fuck off and leave him until the audience bottled him. So he comes up, this sad drunk, and he couldn’t get on stage…he couldn’t climb up, and the whole show had stopped and we were just watching this fat drunk man trying to get on stage. The audience were very complimentary on that after the show, asking who the actor that played him was, but he was just a real bloke. What I’m trying to say is… don’t heckle; it’s not even funny, it’s embarrassing to hear.”

So, does he have any advice for future audiences? “Oh yes. You can throw pants. Richie, in his supreme sex, has only had 5 pairs of pants thrown at him after 31 shows. And one of them was a blokes pair, amusingly soiled…” Oxford, you have been warned.

Rik Mayall has always found violence funny, and now that he’s survived a horrible accident he finds it even funnier – as his new film shows. Nigel Farndale meets a modern prince of slapstick, and wonders if, at bottom, he might be a serious actor.

Goodness, how Rik Mayall can talk. In the St James’s Club, Piccadilly, on a cloudless autumn afternoon, he talks so much his voice hoarsens. He pulls faces when he’s in full flow, grimacing, gurning, subverting his fine handsome features. He has bulging blue eyes, one of which wanders. And though his smile is infectious and wide, he bares his teeth so much it could pass for a snarl. He fidgets constantly, playing with the zipper on his fleece, combing his shoulder-length hair with his fingers. The nervous energy is palpable. Mayall is a sturdily built 5ft 11in and, as he alternates between lying flat on his back on a chaise-longue and pacing the room, he seems to fill every molecule of the place. He has presence. He’s full on. He is excited and showing off. There is, indeed, something of the sixth-former trying too hard about his manner: swearing too much, out one cigarette after another, putting his boots on the coffee-table. When he has a memory lapse he falls silent for as long as ten seconds before clicking his fingers in agitation and shouting ‘F-! I can’t remember!’ He has no volume control. When the ringing of the phone interrupts him he picks it up and bellows, ‘Yes!’ Then slams it down when he discovers it’s a wrong number.

I wish I’d met Rik Mayall before his accident with a quad bike in April last year. I’d like to know whether his mood-swings – from dark and demoniacal, to sonsy, light and airily disconnected – are a long-standing condition. Perhaps he was always like this. But serious accidents do change people, perhaps especially when they occur at an age associated with mid-life crisis. Mayall is 41 and, in interviews he had given before the accident he came across as being more subdued. Smaller in life than his comic personas. Shy even.

His wife Barbara found him underneath his four-wheeled 600lb motorbike in the field outside his house in Devon. Dark blood was pouring from his head, ears and nose. He was airlifted to hospital where he remained in a coma for five days. His wife, parents and Adrian Edmondson, his comedy partner of 25 years’ standing, were at his bedside when he came round. All were crying. Mayall couldn’t understand what was going on. For the next six weeks his brain was scanned for further signs of haemorrhaging. He escaped from the hospital and had to be brought back. He suffered the odd fit, insomnia bout and hearing difficulty, then made a full recovery.

But you can’t help noticing the chunky silver ring on his finger. It’s cast in the shape of a skull and crossbones. Mayall looks sheepish when asked about it. ‘It’s to do with me bashing my head. A private thing between my son and me. Cheating death.’

Rik met Barbara when she was working in make-up at BBC Scotland; she never worked on him but when he saw her walking down the corridor one day he just thought, ‘There she is.’ They were married 13 years ago and have three children, Rosie, Sid and Bonnie. But Mayall would rather not talk about them in case their mates read this article at school. ‘They have their own lives to lead. But, yes, they are very quick. Subtle. When I’m halfway through a joke they will pull a disdainful face and say, “Oh pul-ease Daddy.” One of their great hobbies is not finding Daddy funny. When I get to a big finish there will be a pause and Sid will say, “Sorry, what was that, Dad?” Without me even doing anything Rosie will say, “Oh Daddy, please don’t.” But I’m blushing now.’

He is, too. He thinks his accident affected his relationship with his family. ‘It improved things until they realised I was going to live. When I came round there was a lot of weeping – “But we’ve bought this f-ing box! Now we have to take it back.” No. If anything, it has made us all tougher, more resilient. We were pretty lucky never to have had to face anything like this before. And this wasn’t bad.’

Wasn’t it? I’d like to know what he considers bad. ‘Yeah, but it had a happy ending. It made us all, it bonded us.’

Serious accidents have been known to change people’s perceptions of themselves. Some become fearless, others develop a heightened awareness of their own mortality, of the ephemerality of things, of the preciousness of time. Mayall was always superstitious – never performing unless wearing his lucky underpants – so he would seem to have the right temperament to be affected in this way. He doesn’t see it. Looks blank. ‘I’m very aware of’ He sighs. ‘Of wanting everyone to think I’m great! So I’ll just say that I’m very grateful to be alive.’ He laughs at his mock-magnanimity.

‘I’m not maniacally running around trying to do stuff. Though I do annoy the kids a bit because, since the accident, I’m always dancing and singing.’

He’s happier, then? ‘I was happy before but now I’m happier because I’m not dead or crippled. The problems I had before I recovered, in my brain, have gone and this ring is something to do with spitting in fate’s eye. It was meant to get me and it didn’t. So f- knows what’s going to happen to me later, behind the gates. But it makes me a bit swaggery. And I don’t want to waste any time. And it’s fantastic.’

Clearly, the accident has galvanised him. He has thrown himself into work, making advertisements and supplying narration for children’s television, and, with Adrian Edmondson, he has made a feature film, Guest House Paradiso, which is about to go on general release. (The two play Richie Twat and Eddie Elizabeth Ndingombaba respectively, proprietors of the worst hotel in the world. The film is full of their usual cartoon violence and scatological humour, and the gist of the plot is that when the chef eats all the food they have to resort to feeding their guests fish contaminated by the nuclear power station next door.)

The accident hasn’t made Mayall squeamish about violence. His film is full of it. ‘I love the fight in the kitchen,’ he says croakily. ‘When I hit Ade with that jug, he took the punch so well. The editor cut it perfectly. There’s something about his pace and timing. But I shouldn’t try to intellectualise about why I think the comedy works. One of the reasons Ade is attracted to me is that I am a twat and I do try to intellectualise about these things, and then he is able to turn round to me and say, “Oh, shut up, you twat.” He can puncture me so easily.’

Go on, just a little intellectualising. ‘Well, all right. I do think the nearer you are to frightening your audience – the rush of energy you get from witnessing violence, especially if it is more filmic than theatrical – the more unsettling it is. The release comes out in laughter.’

There is a knock at the door. A voice calls, ‘Room service.’

‘No!’ Mayall screams back. There is a look of exasperation in his eyes. His nostrils are flaring. He is probably doing it to get a laugh but — maybe he isn’t. ‘F-, where was I? Yes, the bigger the fear the bigger the laugh, that’s why we’ve always tried to avoid jokey violence. Vic and Bob’s frying-pans are wobbly and that’s a mortal mistake. I know they’ve got an ironic joke going on but you watch Cleese when he slaps someone. It seems real and so it’s really funny.’

In Guest House Paradiso the fight scenes are convincing, and funny, if you like slapstick. Mayall says he had a genuine rush of adrenaline when he was filming them. ‘I had to simmer down afterwards. There had been a release of some sort. But there’s also great control. Ade and I have never actually hit each other. He’s terribly accurate. Deft. It’s better to under-rehearse for film fighting so that it doesn’t look too prepared.’ The phone rings again. ‘F-!’ He looks at me, eyes narrowed, lips pursed. Is he acting now? I don’t know any more. ‘I’m sorry.’ He answers it. ‘Yes? Have who? Not on this number, matey.’ He slams the phone down. ‘F- this!

I keep getting near to an important pointÉ Yes, if you see my head move as his fist comes up, it’s bogus. It’s crap. It’s not going to work.’

Mayall doesn’t think that there is an innate violence in him that he is able to tap into for his comedy roles. ‘No, not usually. No. There’s something.’ Long pause. ‘The best characters I’ve played are the ones that are nearest to me, because I can play them more realistically. And very often I’m using it as a way of expunging something I’m frightened of.’ He gives examples. His first success on television came at the age of 22 with the character of Kevin Turvey – the inane tedious investigative reporter he played on the sketch show A Kick Up the Eighties. It was inspired by his fear that he himself was a boring person from the Midlands. ‘Kevin was from Redditch, which is only seven years, sorry, miles, excuse my head, from where I was brought up, Droitwich.’ And the character of Rick in The Young Ones, the anarchic comedy series Mayall co-wrote in the early Eighties with his then girlfriend Lise Meyer and Ben Elton (with whom he had been at Manchester University), was even closer to home, he says, because it was based on his own embarrassment at being selfish. Rick was a collection of all the things Rik didn’t like about himself, even down to his difficulty in pronouncing the letter ‘r’. Playing Rick was like an exorcism for Rik. ‘There was a lot of the teenager in me worried about not being groovy and popular enough or about being ugly, or spotty, or being caught masturbating.’

For all his insecurities, Rik Mayall’s own teens were, he says, fairly happy and carefree. His parents, John and Gillian, were drama teachers at a college in Bromsgrove and it was thanks to them, he says, that he got a free place at public school.

‘I remember my first day in the refectory at King’s, Worcester: 600 boys and a huge statue of Jesus at the back. Thirty foot high with huge holes in it because when Cromwell won the battle of Worcester he brought a cannon in to shoot it. There were all these older boys, monitors, with stubble and long hair and I thought “F-. I want to be you so much.” He laughs. ‘Why am I telling you this?’

Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall wrote and performed their first cabaret act together in 1976, at Manchester, where they were both studying for a degree in drama. Mayall remembers the moment they met. ‘It was our first lecture and the professor swept in with his flowing hair and gown and I stood up because that’s what I’d been taught at school. No one else did. And this one bloke – with long hair and John Lennon glasses and a fag in his hand and his f-ing feet on the table – just laughed at me and said, “Tosser!” That was Ade. Maybe I always wanted to be as cool as him. Maybe that’s why I took great satisfaction in him going bald. He was always so strong and quick and self-assured. I wanted him to be my friend. I got a 2:2 in the end, which Ade won’t f-ing shut up about because he got a 2:1.’

The double act were called 20th Century Coyote but later, when they began performing at the Comedy Store in London, they changed the name to The Dangerous Brothers. In a typical sketch they would play the part of God’s testicles, or Mayall would recite a poem about Vanessa Redgrave and Edmondson would walk on and beat him up. Over the years they have usually played characters with names – and personalities – similar to their own. Richie, Rick or Rik is always neurotic and pretentious, Eddie is always bullish and blasé.

Mayall and Edmondson consolidated the success of The Young Ones on the BBC by simultaneously performing in The Comic Strip – which they set up with Peter Richardson, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders (Edmondson’s wife) – on Channel 4. Their one real television flop as a partnership came in 1987 with Filthy Rich & Catflap. This rattled Mayall’s confidence for a while. He didn’t leave the house for three weeks for fear of being pointed at by people saying, ‘That’s the bloke who isn’t funny any more.’ Their fortunes revived with Bottom, the long-running comedy series which, although deemed deeply unfunny by some critics, achieves high viewing figures.

Touchingly, Mayall compares his friendship with Edmondson to a marriage — the longest relationship he has had with anyone, apart from his parents, with all the attendant sulks and tiffs. He is the wife, Edmondson the husband. ‘We are like yin and yang,’ he says. ‘We click.’ This was never more apparent than when they played the two tramps in the West End production of Waiting for Godot in 1992. When I mention that I had never really appreciated the comic elements in the play before seeing their performance, Mayall grins. ‘Yeah, it was more intellectually stimulating than the normal things we do. Because it was so enigmatic. My daddy put me in the play — as The Boy — when I was an eight-year-old. It’s so beautiful and the words are so clever. “Makes a noise like leaves, like dust.” And there are some great gags in it, too. We were criticised at the time for making it funny. We didn’t even put any extra jokes in and we actually took out the hat routine — sorry Sam — because it wasn’t going to work. I would love to make a film of it. Love to. Me as Vladimir, Ade as Estragon.’

But Rik Mayall has performed some of his most memorable roles without Adrian Edmondson by his side. The amoral Tory MP Alan B’Stard in the Emmy and Bafta award-winning New Statesman being one. Another was Mickey Love, the paranoid alcoholic gameshow host – created for the Rik Mayall Presents series in 1993 – who came to believe his programme was being axed when actually his colleagues were planning to feature him in This is Your Life. ‘That series was very dark,’ Mayall recalls. ‘There is an area where I like to perform where the audience isn’t quite sure about Rik. Is he being funny or cruel? Is he a goody or baddy? It is more exciting to watch.’

The biggest frustration in Mayall’s career came in 1994 when he was cast opposite Stephen Fry in Cell Mates, Simon Gray’s play about the British spies Blake and Burke who once shared a cell. Fry, famously, disappeared shortly after the opening night and Gray was furious but Mayall was, he says, just cross, and then only after he had found out that Fry was safe and well. ‘And I’d loved playing with Stephen, yeah. There was something about me in there and maybe something about Stephen. I worked opposite him and there was a lot of hidden sadness in his eyes in there.’ He believes that he was born to play the part; indeed, it represented something of a familial rite of passage for Mayall. ‘My daddy, now 74, recognised in my performance the masculine side of my grandfather. There was a lonely bravado to my character. I’m a quarter Irish and so was Burke. And I had my hair cut short and Brylcreemed and my daddy came to the first night and afterwards everyone was drinking champagne and saying, “Marvellous, marvellous,” except for my daddy who was sitting quietly. I asked him what he thought and he said I was just like his daddy who had died when my daddy was 11 or 12. It was kind of.’ He trails off, shivers and mimes wiping away a tear.

I ask Rik Mayall if his father has ever felt embarrassed by the vulgarity of some of his sketches. ‘Nooo. A little maybe. One or two jokes which are a little close to the edge. Medical stuff. Sodomy jokes. My parents were another generation. Very liberal, being drama teachers, but not permissive. They weren’t as extrovert as me. There was lots of banter and laughs and singing and stupidness at home. But I was the naughty boy. I made them laugh.’

Mayall has an older brother, Anthony, who never shared his taste for performing. ‘He’s a civil engineer now. Very successful. Making bridges. That’s what he likes to do. Not what I’d call straight. He’s a dad. He’s funny. He’s cool.’ Is Anthony jealous of his younger brother’s fame? ‘Not in the slightest. Quite the opposite in fact. You always know what your brother is thinking. I don’t think he weeps himself to sleep at night. He likes making bridges and tunnels. That’s what he loves.’ Mayall also has two younger sisters. One, Libby, looks after rock bands. The other, Kate, is a doctor of philosophy at Birmingham University. ‘She does research and lecturing. Very brainy. Very nice. Very quiet. She’s the youngest. Not frightening. But she doesn’t jabber as much as me. I’m blushing again.’

To his credit, Mayall knows what he is good at. He knows why his comedy works and he has enough self-awareness to realise what motives lie behind his need to make people laugh: feeling good ‘and healthy’ about himself. Unlike Ade Edmondson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Ben Elton, David Baddiel, Robert Newman, Charlie Higson and Nigel Planer, Rik Mayall is that rare thing: an Eighties comedian who hasn’t written a novel. And he has no intention of trying to. He is not a frustrated intellectual, yet you do sense a frustrated actor in him – a serious and subtle one, as seen in his performance in Gogol’s The Government Inspector in 1991 – and, because he has spent so many years being mocked by Edmondson for his pretentiousness, one he dare not let out.

Indeed you can tell that the soul of a Stanislavskian Method actor lurks within Mayall by a comment he makes about being his own hobby. ‘One of my preoccupations is playing with myself,’ he says with a deadpan expression. ‘Like playing a piano. You know, I think I’ll try to be this today. I’ll go into a newsagent’s I’ve never been into before and pretend to be a foreigner who is lost.’

Is this what he has been doing throughout the interview – playing with himself, but also with me? Is the whiff of post-accident madness about him genuine or contrived for his own amusement? Is he, as he puts it, performing in that area where the audience isn’t really sure about Rik? I admit I am left confused. He is, after all, a professional performer, the naughty boy brought up in a home full of banter, singing and stupidness.

While I’m mulling this over he stubs out a cigarette, lights another and offers one to me. ‘Go on! Have a faaag! Have a faaag.’ He waves the packet under my nose. ‘Enjoy yourself. Life is too short. Go ooon. Just one.’ It’s a funny moment.

It makes me laugh. It also, I think, answers my question.

Manic Rik Mayall has emergec as the comic face of the Eighties with characters like Kevin Turvey and MP Alan B’stard. But despite his success, he says he’d much rather be on stage at a heavy metal festival being showered with – ahem, piss. Chris Twomey ducks for cover.

Ten years ago, as a member of Twentieth Century Coyote, Rik Mayall was described as “a very talented young maniac”. It was a prophetic remark by the critic James Fenton (then of the Sunday Times), who was one of only two people in the audience watching Mayall’s piss-take of a wellknown play called Warp (his version was called Wart).

He has since, of course, become one of the most durable comedy actors of the Eighties. Switching from a hedonistic delinqent to a shifty and unscrupulous MP to a children’s storyteller, he’s almost impossible to pin down. So, will the real Rik Mayall please stand up?

KEVIN TURVEY
“I named him after a family who used to live next to me in Droitwich. He was just supposed to be boring and talk in a Brummie accent. That was it, really! I developed the boredom thing to its eventual death.”

THE YOUNG ONES
“I wouldn’t want to live down the character of Rick or that expectation of being over-energetic and mad. It’s very exciting when people come to see me live, and they really don’t know what to expect.

“That’s one of the reasons I don’t like giving interviews very much, because this nice polite man comes along and says, ‘Hello, I’m crazy and mad’. It gives the game away!”

THE COMIC STRIP
“We all grew up professionally and we all think everyone else is great! It sounds terribly incestuous, but if I need a brilliant film actress to play an insane heroin addict, I’ll think of Jennifer Saunders before anyone else. Or if I want someone called Eddie Trousers to come and beat me round the head and drink a pint of vodka, I’ll think of Adrian Edmondson.

“I’ve always thought the only way to get anywhere is to form your own gang and push your way through.”

JACKANORY
“I did it really because it was so unlike what you’d expect. Although I enjoy storytelling, I enjoy doing things people don’t like me doing. Just being bloody-minded really!”

BAD NEWS
“We did a gig at the Marquee a few weeks ago, and Nigel got hit by a beer can. It split his nose and he had to have three stitches. It was great! I paid the guy a lot of cash to do it!

“One of the reasons we keep Bad News going is that it’s one of the few opportunities we have for the four of us to get together.

“I don’t think we’ll bother doing another LP. It was a bit of a bore sitting around a studio for three months listening to people tuning their instruments. Being on the road was fantastic, though. We like playing live gigs best, I think. We played Castle Donington and Reading, where the headbangers threw bottles of urine at us. Great stuff!”

VIDEOS
“I like doing videos because it’s the nearest you can get to either mime or silent comedy. The trouble is, the ones I do tend to be for bands that die a death.

“I did a great one for an HM band called Lionheart. I played an evil scientist who tortured models … (demonic laughter.)

“I’m torturing these models when the band arrive in a helicopter and their guitars turn into machine guns. They kill me and then run off with the models and snog them!”

THE NEW STATESMAN
“I wanted to do less shouting and explore something else. Don’t forget by then I’d done two series of The Young Ones, one series of Filthy, Rich and Catflap and a series of the Dangerous Brothers. That’s a hell of a lot of shouting!

“I’m still after this bastard I’ve been trying to get to grips with for years. He’s been present, to a certain extent, in Rick, Richie Rich and Kevin. There’s a whole synthesis of adult unpleasant comedy in The New Statesman.”

THE COMIC STRIP (AGAIN)
“The Comic Strip is really in the hands of Peter Richardson now, who I feel sorry for because I think he’s a genius and Channel Four don’t fully appreciate his talents. I think it’s a real shame.

“We’ve come up with several scripts since the last series, all of which have been thrown out of the window.”

ALAN B’STARD
“I haven’t really liked any of the characters I’ve played, but I think he’s the character I like the least – although I possibly feel the sorriest for. He doesn’t know it, but he’s desperately lonely. But he’s such a bastard! What do you want me to say? I don’t want to marry him.”

THE FUTURE
“Some time in February or March I’m going out on the road with a new show. Ben Elton’s expressed an interest in coming along, but then there’d be a battle over who’s top of the bill and we don’t want to turn into Tarby and Lynchy!

“I’m doing a series for ITV in April called Grimms Tales (semi-animated fairy tales), then there’s talk of a film in the summer and a play in the autumn. I’ve always wanted to play on every stage there is.”

THE ACCOLADES: EMMY AND BAFTA AWARDS… NUMBER ONE SINGLE
“I’d much rather have piss thrown at me at Castle Donington to be honest… but then I’m an old pervie!”

Or as Ian Penman said… “he ‘s a bit of a boring bastard” — but which bit? And is Rik Mayall a great enough comic to become a 20th Century legend along with his own hero, Tommy Cooper?

Someone comes up to you in the street…they expect a funny face rather than a gag?

“Yeah, they do. They say pull a funny face. But they’re always disappointed. Which was a drag when it first started, especially when I was doing Kevin. Someone would come up and tap me on the shoulder, say Kevin!, and I’d turn round and say Hello!…and they’d go Oh, and walk off.”

Rik Mayall doesn’t talk like someone who spent the previous night getting drunk with Alexei Sayle; nothing, that is, spills over.

As the sun pours in and I pour out more lager, and then more again, the off-duty comic conscientiously sips between two black coffees.

Not that I was expecting the velocities of performance, but Mayall is without show, without clamour — more of a reserved Alistair Sim than a cartoon Maoist. He talks in a hurry, but without the froth of agitation, never breaking into fast-talk.

As an act, he hails from the region of the Comic (mimicry, fallibility, reaction) rather than the plots of the Joke. As an actor, he’s not the showbiz mouth whose static field of anecdote and wisecrack ensures the interlocutor’s words remain edgewise.

Unlike his bountiful drinking partner, Mayall has never really followed through from precipitous public license to the slaphappy streams of publicity. The undisguised rationale of Rik Mayall doesn’t seem fired — perturbed or outraged — by the detail of life so often deranged by his others, his enacted editions of the Comic. Resting somewhere, held in, reserved, is “that powerful sadistic component made visible which is more or less inhibited in real life. “

Are you a violent person, Rik?

“No. No, not at all, not in the slightest. Probably why it all comes out…”

The real life Rik Mayall has now ticked off two series of The Young Ones (both as Rick the dickhead and Rik the writer), two series of A Kick Up The Eighties (as bendy toy and sometime investigative reporter Kevin Turvey), the unjustly neglected – utterly classic – Kevin Turvey “special” Behind The Green Door, and various Comic Strips. Our meeting is timed to coincide with the running Young Ones, but the programme is far enough away from ‘cult’ status not to need such prompting anymore. There seemed to be much doubt over the idea of a second series (especially after the decidedly mixed reaction to the Comic Strip ventures), but only students of the Comic appear to have had any difficulty in digesting the realization.

Apart from a run-in with the BBC’s Head of Schools Programming, no one’s complaining…a Radio Times cover (unwanted and unaided, says Mayall), Adrian Edmondson in advertising, Neil the Hippy everywhere (mostly as boring as he’s supposed to be, occasionally as funny), a Young Ones book on the way, and young men up and down the country repeating the motions and metros of last night’s highlights.

“Most of the reaction we get is mainly from schoolkids, and it’s always positive stuff,” enthuses Mayall, sounding vaguely like a sociology lecturer.

The second series certainly came over as deliberately fashioned for the fifth form (no slight on the fifth form intended). Mayall is convinced they’ve done the right thing.

“We tried to make it exciting and unpredictable but obviously you haven’t got the joy of seeing those characters for the first time, like you had with the first series. It was actually funny just to see Vyvyan, but now you’ve got to concentrate on him doing something funny rather than just being there. We tried to make the quality of the writing better. Everyone was much more confident as writers and performers…and we knew there was a huge expectation this time.

“Last time it was alright as no one knew what to expect…and the longer it goes back the more brilliant people think it is. So if anything we tried to change it by making sure there were many more gags, making sure the gags were better written and better shot. And if anything we tried to make it nastier, make them less cute. “

It’s certainly much more physical; more concentration of slapstick (and) violence…

“That’s largely me and Ade. I think the slapstick element is something we’ve always done, and people have kind of sneered at.”

So who’s Tom and who’s Jerry?

“It changes around. It’s more like… there aren’t really any cartoon characters who fight almost as equals. In The Young Ones there’s always something horrible happening to you like getting hit in the bullocks with a cricket bat or something like that, and that only hurting for a few seconds — which is very cartoon like. Like Tom getting a frying pan in the face…”

In common we have a love of cartoon time and a bad TV-viewing habit. The fence of our fidgety interview folds down into rapid-fire rabbiting, swapping dream moments, keeping old heroes alive. We have a shared God, or at least a Godot, to sustain us, and his name is Wile E. Coyote — that omnivorous Sisyphus trying to close off an infinitesimal distance between his self (his Appetite) and the vaporous Roadrunner.

A silly question — I know — but what is it about the Coyote that you like?

“I don’t actually like the Roadrunner character at all, that’s partly it. I’m sure everyone will identify with the Coyote character rather than the Roadrunner. The Coyote is just a complete and utter bastard that’s why he’s so funny; he’s got no redeeming qualities.”

We also mine a shared love of Laurel and Hardy, and aside from the Roadrunners, he also falls for “…Tom and Jerrys, and the original Pink Panthers were brilliant; there was a little guy with a big nose who’s always got something really horrible happening to him and it’s not his fault. “

As far as The Young Ones goes, the only really likeable character is the one nearest to cartoon, furthest from identification, just pure dent: Vyvyan.

“I think that’s probably because — and this is no insult to Ade — he is the most amoral. Not immoral, morality doesn’t come into it; it’s almost like he has no brain, he’s just two-dimensional, he does, he doesn’t think, and he often doesbecause the other characters are so unpleasant. He gets to inflict pain on the others, it’s almost like a punishment and the audience side with him. Vyv delivers the punchline (…)I’ll be shouting and screaming about something and Vyvyan will come up and — ! — me and that’s the conclusion. That’s the punchline, literally.

“That’s probably why he’s the most likeable — because there’s no consideration, no thinking behind it, no morals, he does what the audience wants him to do.”

Why such a predominance of aggressiveness — in The Young Ones and in the newer Comedy in general; or, what about The Young Ones makes it particularly a slice off The Eighties?

“Well, we deliberately set out to make the characters as horrible as possible (…) we did it because we were trying to put down those particular kinds of young students, that kind of arrogance (…) To get pretentious, all that kind of arrogance of youth, the way that breed sets itself up as better than anybody else in society, so you get the fragmentation of society, so you get a lot of people being isolated…and a lot of the time, music being the expression for that kind of arrogance. Which is why Rik picks on Cliff and thinks he’s great, thinks he’s a revolutionary leader.

“So we set out to make them unpleasant because, like we were saying with the Roadrunner, the reason I find the Coyote so very funny is that he’s a complete bastard, so in a sense he deserves the failures that come to him. Like Hancock as well — he was an unpleasant character. Like, I prefer Oliver Hardy to Stan Laurel because Stan’s a bit more sympathetic, whereas Ollie’s a complete pompous bastard. Although that’s just my taste, I find that funny. Although…my hero has always been Tommy Cooper and he was neither, he was neither horrible nor sentimental.”

They’re not really Young Ones so much as pre-adolescent; babies, really…

“In many ways yeah… Some of the thinking behind it when we first did it was to take the piss out of the youth stage where you feel you’re terribly important — not that you’re not, but — you feel you’re more important than everybody else: every decision I make is absolutely right — I never want to get any older — I am right and everybody else is wrong… It was just to take the piss out of all that.”

Something I realized recently, watching The Young Ones again, was — it seemed to me — that they’re a complete nuclear family unit: Mike’s the Dad, Neil their Mum, Vyvyan the nasty boy and Rick, well, a little girl…

“Yeah I suppose so, it’s a unit that maybe subconsciously…that’s one of the reasons the audience can relate to it, it’s a unit that you’ve seen in Sit Com so many times. I never thought of it like that but yes, I suppose you’re right… “

Funnily Enough, the comic doesn’t go off on flighty fancies, doesn’t relish a rave — he simply isn’t fired off with any of the blue funk the likes of himself and Sayle supply for their audience: a valve for the profoundly English fear of blathering, the avoidance of outburst, of voice as purest gesticulation and utter irrelevance.

What is missing in the dialectical decorum of the interview is that staged opportunity of the Comic, that which allows word and accent to chase each other round in circles, chafing their tale; that which kicks the comic into the Comic. I plug away at my grand inquisitor’s sheaf of questions – on censorship, aggression, political vantage, privates/publics — and Mayall returns the enquiry a tidy netter about the work, and never the labour. In the end, my questions just sort of go “Oh,” and walk off. I sneeze into my beer and know that, given the cruel license of comedy and a few more drinks — later that night, as it happens — I’d call him a bit of a boring bastard.

But, then again, given the cruel license of comedy and a few more drinks, Rik Mayall would turn into something Comic, and fly away, off his handles.

For instance?Kevin Turvey, for goodness sake — so far the one truly immortal landmark of the newer comedy. If much of the latter seems concerned to act as TV’s conscience, its sentinel, mildly pickling the game-rules in a propriety of parodies, then Kevin is its subconscious — the rubbish running through its (talking) head.

Kevin — mute nostril agony of the merest articulation, this pain borne with all the patient mirth of an Open University rep — is the other side of neutrality, of the unagonised flow of interviewer, pundit, newscaster, naturalist. He is TV pleasantry’s tic, and the threat of a cannabalistic frenzy (pace Videodrome, Poltergeist). He talks in tongues, albeit with a Midlands accent. Not only is he the real voice of youth-on-TV, but more, he isTV (Tur-Vey), spoken from the proud domain of gibberish. TV’s off, then…

(It is worthwhile recalling to mind that TV’s duration off the air each night is commensurate with the sleep of babes… I mean, what’s going on in three? The man in the sick-covered anorak knows.)

Something I noted down recently — was what Cartoon let me see a con-fusion of Reality and Pleasure? In principle, at any rate.

Cartoon is dominated by the Pleasure principle, utterly selfish and self-contained, allowing a free flow of energy along its storyline, washing us back to a time when we satisfied our needs simply by hallucinating theuend. The sucking and smashing vibrance of the Cartoon (I am thinking here of the five or 10 minute size) literally pops the world out of its skin — at the same time pronouncing its real (a vacuum cleaner might be revealed in all its voracious brutality) and its REAL (endlessly postponed satisfaction).

The cartoon zaps straight to the synapses, employing such subliminal partners as: terror/ delight, destruction/proliferation, and death-threats/ buddies, really. Complicated games of capture, quenching, overcoming and failure are condensed into a flicker.

Perhaps only Hollywood’s ex-cartoon director Frank Tashlin has come close to a sure animation of the human frame, in his work with Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis. The second series of The Young Ones branched out (or relied upon…) a fair degree of cartoon-derived mayhem- in arcs of unmitigated physical violence, and the disintegration of squarelyset Sit Com into hirsute conceptual set-pieces.

The problem with this transfer is that — more often than not — it’s purely energetic. Funnily enough, a cartoon’s violence is never an end-in-itself. It is i) Impossible and then ii) violent. Violence is the shortest and most apt route for a gymnastic (gymnasty?) enumeration of the impossibilities inherent in any one scene, face-off or next step. What The Young Ones offered has no (sur)real basis in cruelty or impossibility: mindless violence.

Turvey’s warring internal partnership of David Coleman and Wittgenstein aside, much of the newer comedy’s aggressiveness strikes me (or doesn’t) as faked in its fury as a soft-boiled Pam Ayres tenderness. Bluster to cover up a lack of cleverness, and a litany like “bored, bored, bored” to hide a rather quaint sort of fear. (It seems no little coincidence that much “alternative” comedy has replaced the slang and arrows of so-called misogynistic put-down with a no less ‘masculine’ violence of delivery; as if the warped denial of sexual difference had to be displaced rather than ditched. Or, as Freud noted: “When we laugh at a refined obscene joke we are laughing at the same thing that makes someone else laugh at a coarse piece of smut. In both cases the pleasure springs from the same source.” Thing and source being the operative words here, presumably.)

Equally lavatorial as ‘traditional’ humour, this new comedy often relies — nudge nudge, wink wink — on a kind of club Left escape clause: OK, this is the same old shit (a gag about our ‘sexist’ apprehension of busty barmaids still features a busty barmaid) but the context is Right On, abide with me. So what? My stomach gurgles more at an expertly choreographed Terry and June golf match (complete with suburbia’s version of class warfare thrown in). Or, as Rupert Pupkin noted: “You don’t say, Folks here’s the punchline– you just do the punchline. “

I recall during the last series of The Comic Strip Presents, switching from their clever-clever simulation of some convention or other to a Steptoe and Son movie, which happened to be about death. There was in Galton and Simpson’s simple exercise precisely the tone of black and delirious absurdity that the Strippers desired, but could only ploddingly schematize.

The point here is not one of inverse (or class) snobbery — I recently roared with laughter at a C4 profile of a Czechoslovakian surrealist animator but of timing, in the general sense of the word. Of knowing where, when and how to strike. Of knowing your frame. Of knowing how Tradition keeps you in its fold.

In bleaker moments I fear for the Great British tradition of superbly craned comedy — uncannily intricate writing, the braiding and twisting of puns, the supernatural timing. Great British Humour (or GBH) does have sledgehammer tendencies, and we shouldn’t deny them. But nor should we forget the remarkable linguistic forays of the Crazy Gang, Will Hay, Frank Randall.

With the predominance on our TV screens of skit and satire based shows, and the absence of a Likely Lads or Steptoe (not to mention the death of the full-length comedy film), the tradition of well-crafted comedy seems best kept alive in what is ostensibly drama: Minder, The Irish R. M., Brass, Shine On – HarveyMoon…

What does the comic think — and feel — about this snobby, sarky, studious forecast of mine?

“I don’t think there is any tradition at the moment really, because…when Will Hay and people were working they had an unbroken tradition of something like 150 years that got them to that — as you say, it didn’t look like it, but — highly intricate, sophisticated form of signals between them and the audience. Because everyone understood the tradition. With the coming of TV all of that was wrecked. The only tradition we have — which is hampering us, if you like — is that of TV restrictions.

“So there’s whole generations of people who have no idea what seeing a live comedian is like — the only way the tradition is being kept up is in the clubs in the North, maybe.

“Now, I don’t think that that’s a shame at all. In fact, I think it’s a really exciting time at the moment because the audience has no expectations, so the performer can really expand, he’s free to do pretty well whatever he wants… especially with the passing of a lot of the old boys who remember the old form, like Cooper.”

Is there now anything of a disillusionment with the ‘easy access’ offered by TV? Is it too easy to by-pass the years of slog, learning and disappointment?

“I don’t know. I think it’s hit and miss. Occasionally you’ll get someone who takes to TV like a fish to water…and you’ll get ten who don’t and it might seriously damage them going on telly and then everyone saying, Saw you on telly last night — you’re shit, and they’ll think I’m not a comedian, I’ll give it up.

“I agree with you that it is very easy to think of ten minutes of jokes and be in the right place at the right time when the right TV producer’s there (…) I mean, that’s what happened to us! We’re lucky, ‘cos we were one of the first and they gave us more breaks than they’re likely to give people these days. Andwe were with the BBC…”

It seems to me there’s a lot of easy laughs in many recent shows through taking the piss out of TV itself. Is that really satire, or just recycling your own medium?

“I agree with you…although I shouldn’t, because we’ve fallen into that trap, both in this series and the last. In its defence I would say that… it works, even though it might be a cheap laugh. It’s always been there: The Goons did it with radio, the Pythons did it with TV, Hancock was full of references to being on the radio. I think it’s always been there: Comedy comments on the form it’s in.

“Like, what was so funny about clowns at the circus was that they were coming on and they weren’t dressed very smart…and that was the joke, they were people who weren’t behaving themselves, they weren’t people who were behaving properly.”

We all of us find redemption in private humour… is the most difficult thing (for the comic) that transition from private code of friends round a pub table, for instance – to a public hearing?

“It’s as important to work on your own private sense of humour as on your means of communicating that. If you’ve got something that you and your mates find particularly funny, say something like a word like ‘trousers’ might make everyone in your flat fall about everytime it’s mentioned…if you work our why that’s funny and then communicate that to the audience…

“But I was lucky… just because I had a reputation for being a funny performer at school that gave me a lot of confidence; then I went to Manchester and into a drama department, so everyone I was sitting round the pub with were performers and a lot of those were funny, people like Ben (Elton) and Ade… So I’m really just with the same bunch of people.

“And now, most of my mates, most of the people I go out drinking with now — sounds terrible, but they’re mostly comics, me and Ade, go out with Alexei a lot, Lise, who’s a comedy writer, so l haven’t really been on my own… “

Was there ever any old comic you met who advised you, or said, Lad, you’ll nevermake it…

“I’ve never really met any. I met Ronnie Barker around Christmas time last year and he was great, a lovely guy. But again, he’s a comic actor, he’s someone you meet offstage and he’s just a nice guy to talk to — when he gets onstage he’s really funny… “

When the comic gets onstage he can get away with madness — he can speak the nonsense of a dozen different mouths in one and the same voice. Perhaps it’s not possible, yet, for us to be interested in what gets the comic onstage, in what begets the Comic.

What in the world, I wonder, is Turvey a pseudonym for? Rik, what part of you does the thinking for Kevin?

“Just in the planning and rehearsal really. It’s because I come from that area of the country, so l know him really well. Once you get all the words you can just slip into him and he does all the thinking for you, does all the talking. Much the same with Rick as well…”

Oh go on! Do Kevin Tur-vey!

“Funnily enough, I just did this Labour Party gig two weeks ago as Kevin, it was great. Neil Kinnock was on afterwards, it was all about, I dunno…

“… he bangs his knob on the kitchen table and all the end goes orange, a bit like a belisha beacon. And Neil Kinnock phones him up and says ‘Kevin Turvey?, and he says, he says ‘Where the fuck are you? I says, I says ‘I’m at home! He says ‘Listen Turvey, get to Wembley, you’re supposed to be doing a gig.’ I says, ‘Listen Neil — I’ve got VD’ — he says, ‘Don’tgive me that! — I says, ‘I’ll try not to mate!…”‘