I remember coming home from work on June the 9th 2014, it was around 5pm and I really fancied some chips to eat. There was a chip shop on my route home, so I hatched a plan. I’d order some food via my phone, stop off at the chip shop on the way home, pick up my chips, save a few minutes and have the bare minimum of human contact too. I reached into my pocket and grabbed my phone to place the order, and there was one of those news alerts on it. I didn’t pay it much mind because I was hungry and just wanted some food. But, I do remember seeing Rik Mayall’s name on that news alert, which I swiped past to order my food.

As I walked into the chip shop, it had a small TV in the corner on the wall and the news was on. Again, I didn’t pay it much mind, just finished work, hungry, want food. I gave my name and said I’d just placed an order a few minutes ago, and the fella behind the counter got my food and put it into a brown bag before handing it to me. Then he said: “Unbelievable eh? I grew up watching him too”. I’d just finished work, I was hungry, and I wasn’t in the mood for idle chit-chat. So, I just politely smiled and nodded my head before leaving.

I got home. It was a lovely, warm and sunny day so I opened the back door. I got myself a nice glass of ice water, grabbed my chips and went into the living room to eat. That was when my phone vibrated, my brother had just sent me the bad news. Rik Mayall has died and I just felt utterly numb. This was my “where were you when JFK was shot?” moment, my bother sending me that text message. In fact, it was my brother (who sent me the news) who got me into watching Rik at a young age.

We used to have a TV show here in the UK called Saturday Live. Basically, it was the UK version of Saturday Night Live in the US. I remember feeling a bit ‘naughty’ staying up late to watch Saturday Live in 1986. I would’ve been around 9 at the time and my mom was pretty lax about things like this. It was a Saturday night, so I was allowed to stay up later because there was no school the next day and as long as I didn’t repeat any of the bad language that I heard, she was fine. But, Saturday Live was where I was introduced to the rise of the ‘alternative comedian’. I recall Alexei Sayle once saying that he was an alternative comedian – in that he’s not very funny… which was funny. A lot of now-famous comedians appeared on Saturday Live, Harry Enfield, Ben Elton, Julian Clary, (pre-Red Dwarf) Chris Barrie and Craig Charles, and even Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie all cut their teeth on this show. But, there were two comedians on Saturday Live that I absolutely loved to watch each week, Ade Edmondson and Rik Mayall.

Ade and Rik used to do their The Dangerous Brothers act. They played Sir Adrian Dangerous and Richard Dangerous and each week, they would pull off dangerous-comedy stunts. But, I’ve jumped ahead a little bit here. The reason I used to love watching Ade and Rik on Saturday Live was because my older brother would let me stay up late to watch The Young Ones on the small black & white TV that he had in his room. Not when it originally aired in 1982, but when it was repeated in ’83.  In fact, if I recall, he used to wake 7-year-old me up in 1983 and we would have to creep into his bedroom while mom was downstairs. This was when I was first introduced to the Ade and Rik double act, playing the two student losers, Vyvyan and Rick (spelt with a silent P) who had a penchant for violence.

The Young Ones definitely made an impression on me, I was 7 at the time, I didn’t understand any of it and the content of the show was massively lost on me. I just thought it was funny when Vyvyan would hit Rick with a cricket bat. The one episode of The Young Ones that stuck in my mind was the Nasty episode, mainly because the plot was about the reprobate students getting a video recorder (oh, and a vampire). The reason that this episode has stuck with me is because (ironically) it was one of the first things we recorded off TV using our own VHS player. I was getting into horror films then too and Nasty has a horror-film vibe, so I would watch that one episode over and over and over again. To the point that, when we did get our VHS player and people would ask about it, I would reply (doing my Vyvyan impression) “Yes we’ve got a video.”

Anyway, because I used to watch The Young Ones at the time and when Saturday Live with The Dangerous Brothers would come on, I absolutely loved it. It was all the comedy and violence of Vyvyan and Rick condensed into smaller chunks of entertainment (like the time when Rik actually set fire to Ade and it all went terribly wrong) and this was where the staples of their future characters were born. Over the years, Ade and Rik have played a lot of sad, lonely downtrodden, degenerate characters who enjoy a bit of violence. The unnamed Dreamytime Escorts from Mr Jolly Lives Next Door. Edward Didgeridoo Catflap and Gertrude Richard “Richie” Rich from Filthy Rich & Catflap and of course, Edward “Eddie” Elizabeth Hitler and Richard “Richie” Richard from Bottom. Say what you like about Ade and Rik, they stuck to a formula (and often similar character names) that worked.

I think, for me, seeing Rik Mayall play Kevin Turvey was where I really fell in love with the man behind the characters. Rik’s Kevin Turvey character predates both The Dangerous Brothers act and The Young Ones, but I didn’t come across him until several years later in the mid ’80s. It was the fact that Kevin Turvey had this thick West Midlands accent (because Rik grew up in Droitwich) and I was from Birmingham is why I found him appealing. I’d never heard someone on TV with an accent very similar to what I grew up with, and it just seemed rather magical to hear that accent on TV at the time.

By the time that Blackadder II came on TV in ’86 with the Bells episode, I was very much into my comedy So when Rik turned up playing Lord Flashheart (“Thanks bridesmaid, like the beard. Gives me something to hang onto!”), he stole the entire episode even though he only appears for a couple of minutes. By now, I was a massive Rik Mayall fan. I remember coming home from school one day and the storybook-based TV show Jackanory was on and there he was, Rik Mayall reading Roald Dahl’s George Marvellous Medicine. This just blew me away because we had been studying Roald Dahl and my teacher (Mrs Matthews) had been reading us George Marvellous Medicine at the time too. There was this guy I loved watching on TV reading the very book that we were covering at school. Of course, I sat there and watched all of the parts. The BBC ended up getting a lot of complaints about it too. The book is basically about a grandson poisoning his grandmother, coupled with Rik’s anarchic style of reading, and it was just too much for some people, so they complained. Yup, we had snowflakes back then too. Still, Rik Mayall’s turn on Jackanory is legendary and is well worth seeking out.

It was around the late ’80s when I first learned of The Comic Strip Presents… show and films. There, I found more Rik Mayall that I had not seen before, and it was like digging up a long-lost and forgotten treasure. We had to work to find TV shows back then too. This was pre-Internet and streaming services. I couldn’t jump online and search “The Comic Strip Presents…” and boom, every episode/film at the touch of a button. I had to scourer newspapers, TV magazines or even get on Teletext and patiently wait for the pages to slowly change to see if Channel 4 would be repeating any The Comic Strip Presents… and thankfully, they did.

I never understood politics as an 11-year-old in 1987, but I’d still watch The New Statesman where Rik played Alan B’Stard, a Conservative MP. 99% of the humour was lost on me as I had no idea what the show was referencing at the time and nor did I care. I was watching Rik Mayall on TV, and that made me happy. Rik was back reading stories in his unique way when Grim Tales came on TV in 1989. Here, Rik retold some of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales as only he could. Just as with Rik’s reading of Roald Dahl’s George Marvellous Medicine on Jackanory, this show was awesome and it got me into the Brothers Grimm in a massive way.

When the ’90s rolled around, I was very much into my gaming. My friend Paul had a SNES and we used to pour many, many hours into playing on it. I was in the middle of my teenage years by 1993, aged 17. Paul would often come around my house on a Friday night and after a visit to a local off-licence to get a couple of crates of cheap (and most probably illegally imported) beer, we’d watch Cheers on TV and then get the SNES set up and pay into the wee small hours. So, when Rik Mayall appeared on TV advertising SNES and Game Boy games, two of my worlds had collided. There was this comedian I adored, making funny ads for a games console I played a hell of a lot of. Rik once said that the money he made from the Nintendo ads bought him a house in London that he called “Nintendo Towers”.

The ’90s was the decade of Rik Mayall and the years when he became a real star and household name. In 1991, Ade and Rik starred in a West End production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Some have said that it was doing this play that inspired them to write Bottom… but that’s not true. Ade and Rik’s appearance in Waiting for Godot was around August/September of 1991 and the first series of Bottom aired on the 17th of September 1991. Taking into consideration, writing, filming, editing, etc. Bottom would’ve already been filmed months before they appeared in Waiting for Godot, so Bottom came first. In fact, in the first broadcasts of Bottom and during the end credits, a voiceover would say that Ade and Rik are currently appearing in Waiting for Godot. I’m pretty sure that the play (which had been doing the rounds since the 1950s) was a massive influence on Bottom, but it certainly wasn’t being in the play that inspired them to write Bottom, even if Wikipedia incorrectly states:

“In 1991, Edmondson and Mayall co-starred in the West End production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Queen’s Theatre, with Mayall playing Vladimir, Edmondson as Estragon and Christopher Ryan as Lucky. Here they came up with the idea for Bottom.”

Anyway, for me, Bottom was Ade and Rik at their very finest. They took everything they had learned over the years with their other characters and combined them into two of the most disgusting and abhorrent… but really fucking funny creations. Ade’s Edward Elizabeth “Eddie” Hitler and Rik’s Richard “Richie” Richard are still two of my favourite comedy characters, and Bottom is one of the greatest comedy shows the UK has ever produced. I always imagined that Eddie and Richie from Bottom were Vyvyan and Rick from The Young Ones, just older and more stupid.

In 1994, I was staying at my brother’s place for the weekend and he had a copy of Bottom Live on VHS. I can still remember having a few beers while watching the live show and having serious belly laughs. The kind of laughs where it starts to hurt your sides and you struggle to breathe. When Bottom Live: The Big Number Two Tour was released on VHS, I went to Woolworths and bought the two live shows and a double pack of Bottom series 1 and 2. I was mad for Bottom in the ’90s. Rik’s career was huge then too, he starred in the critically panned Drop Dead Fred with Phoebe Cates in 1991. While the film was panned, it has since gone on to find its audience much later and is now considered quite the cult hit. I’d not seen the film in years and the only reason I watched it back then was because Rik was in it. But, I thought I’d give it a rewatch for this article and I really liked it. Watching a film as a 47-year-old feels very different to watching the same movie as a 15-year-old.

Drop Dead Fred hit me much differently over 30 years later. I was still totally enamoured by Rik’s childish and anarchic but funny performance and I was completely in love with Rik Mayall being Rik Mayall as much in 2024 as I was in 1991. But, the plot was nothing like I remembered. I didn’t recall much of the film before my recent viewing, I just remembered it as that film with Rik in it. but yeah, Drop Dead Fred has a really deep and dark psychological edge that I bet some YouTuber could do an in-depth analysis that would last longer than the film itself.  It’s a film about childhood repression, abuse and depression. It was a film that was a few decades ahead of its time and if it was made today, it would most probably be getting high praise and not the panning it did receive in 1991. Director Ate de Jong even mentioned his own childhood trauma and how it shaped Drop Dead Fred when talking about it to The Telegraph newspaper in 2021.

“I was molested as a very young child by my older half-brother. I have no memory of it – it was very suppressed – but my body does. The trauma of child abuse goes deep and its claws reach far in time. It was not something ever spoken about on the set, not with Rik or anyone, but for me it existed.”

Rik Mayall’s performance in the film is absolutely amazing though. While he spends most of it behaving like an overgrown 6-year-old and making crass remarks, the ending just showcased what a fantastic actor he could be. The way that Rik goes from hyperactive, ADHD, puerile and chaotic performance, to Drop Dead Fred saying goodbye in a heartfelt and heartbreaking way is wonderful. Because Drop Dead Fred was not exactly loved when it was released in 1991, Rik’s movie career took a massive nosedive and he never did star in another American film. The Yanks had no idea who he was over there and they had no idea about all of his great work in the UK up to that point. What was America’s loss was the UK’s gain though because Ade and Rik made more Bottom and more live shows through the ’90s. They even made a (kind of) Bottom movie with 1999’s Guest House Paradiso. With Ade and Rik playing Edward “Eddie” Elizabeth Ndingombaba and Richard “Richie” Twat (pronounced “Twaite”) respectively. They were basically the same characters from Bottom, but with different last names. Rik always said that Guest House Paradiso was never meant to be a film version of Bottom (even though it was marketed as one) because film versions of TV sitcoms were not very good. Still, it really was, even if not officially, this was the fan’s Bottom movie.

It was before Guest House Paradiso went into production in 1998 that Rik Mayall was almost killed when he crashed his quad bike. An accident that left him with two haematomas and a fractured skull. Rik was put into an induced coma for several days and his family were told to expect the worst and that even if he did manage to survive, he may have permanent brain damage. After 5 days, Rik was brought out of his coma but was left with epilepsy and would have to daily medication. Rik even had a couple of epileptic fits and he was deeply concerned that he may never work again. But he did. He started by doing voice work and small roles, like ads for Virgin Trains. Even when they were filming Guest House Paradiso, Rik would have to take regular breaks and could only work in the mornings and afternoons as he needed to rest. Thankfully, that film was directed by Ade Edmondson, who was more than happy to cater to his best friend and long-time work college. Still, the people who knew him best said that he was a very different person following that near-death accident.

Rik was even cast to play Peeves in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. He filmed all of his scenes, only for the character to be completely cut in the final edit. Rik talks a bit about exactly that in this video. To this day, and despite fan pleading, Rik’s cut scenes have never been released. All through the 2000s, Rik continued to work. I can’t forget his awesome voice acting for the game Hogs of War. I didn’t care much for the game myself, but I played it just because Rik Mayall did a load of the voices. Rik also brought back Alan B’Stard with The New Statesman 2006: Blair B’stard Project which was a nationwide live show. We even got two more live Bottom shows. Though, if I’m being honest, I felt they were pretty weak and not as funny as the earlier ones. We almost got a fourth series of Bottom when the BBC announced in 2012 that Bottom was coming back.

“Next year it will be 18 years since Richie Rich and Eddie Hitler last graced our television screens in cult hit, Bottom. So what has happened to these titans of comedy? Are they still living in one of the dirtiest and least hygienic flats uncondemned by Health and Safety? Are they still drinking neat furniture polish whilst hitting each other over the head with large metal objects, setting fire to each other as they seek to impress gullible members of the opposite sex, and each other? Or are they down the pub?

No, they are abandoned, lost, shipwrecked on the tropical hell hole that is Hooligans Island and they are still hitting each other over the head with large metal objects, still chasing women, even though there are none on the island, and still waiting for that job seekers allowance cheque as they distil something quite like alcohol, only worse. And they are back on BBC Two in 2013 for six new episodes starring Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson. Be afraid, be very afraid and then just a little bit bilious.”

However, just a couple of months later, it was cancelled. As far as I can tell, Ade never really wanted to do it as he had moved away from comedy by then, he was exploring new ideas and ventures. But Rik really wanted to get back together. The truth is that the pair had drifted apart some years before, partly because of how much Rik had changed since that quad bike crash. Ade actually hoped that when they turned in the new episodes (which were said to be based on the third live show, Hooligan’s Island), the BBC would turn it down. That way it wouldn’t be Ade’s or Rik’s fault that Bottom would not be coming back, but the fault of the BBC. But that is not what happened, the BBC loved the idea and asked for six episodes. This was when Ade had to just fess up and say that he didn’t want to do it, though he did suggest that they could try again when they were older and have Eddie and Richie in a retirement home. The last time that Ade and Rik ever performed together was for Let’s Dance for Comic Relief in 2011.

Rik made several TV appearances following this final Ade and Rik performance, including the sitcom Man Down where Rik played the father of Greg Davies. This was perfect casting (despite there only being a 10-year age gap) because the two did look a lot alike. Rik’s last ever TV appearance was on Crackanory, which was a more adult version of Jackanory. Of course, this was all rather fitting given that Rik gave one of his best performances reading George’s Marvelous Medicine on that show. Rik’s Crackanory episode was shown following his death in 2014. It’s quite difficult for me to watch now without having a tear in my eye.

Earlier this year, there was a documentary looking back on the impact that Ade and Rik’s Bottom had, called Bottom: Exposed. It is a wonderful celebration of one of the greatest sitcoms ever and two of the UK’s finest and most groundbreaking comedians. Separately, I really loved Ade and Rik but together, they were one of the greatest double acts to ever grace our screens. It is a shame that their relationship kind of fizzled out in the later years. I’m not sure, speaking as a die-hard fan, that I honestly would’ve liked to have seen another series of Bottom. I agree with Ade that they were kind of past it at the time. We got three great series, a few fantastic live shows (and a couple of not-fantastic ones), a movie and for me, that was more than enough. Both Ade and Rik were so much more than just Bottom though and I have only included a few of Rik’s career highlights here (also check out Rik Mayall Presents from 1993) but, the man was a big part of my childhood and adulthood. I just need to go back to that Bottom: Exposed documentary and let Ade Edmondson put his own words across of what Rik meant.

“It’s very weird being in a world without him. Very weird thinking that he, you know, didn’t know anything about Brexit, didn’t know about Covid, you know? I mean, our relationship was strained towards the end and… when I do things like this and I remember the absolute joy of sitting in that little office in Richmond, opposite the Hole In The Wall pub. It was, it was absolute… distilled joy, the most joy I have ever had in my life I think. Making each other laugh, properly laugh, big guffawing belly laugh-laughs. Proper can’t stop laughing laughs. Very rarely you get a relationship like that with someone.
I mentioned… the way we used to write each other’s characters and, we were in love with each other’s characters. I miss… that love. I miss that other opinion of me, a very loving opinion.”

Just like that fella in the chip shop that I politely ignored at the start of this article, I too grew up watching Rik Mayall and even now, 10 years after his death, I miss him. I never knew Rik Mayall and (as a fan) I never did get to meet him… but I still really fucking miss him.