The character who first brought Rik Mayall to showbiz notice was called Richard Dangerous, and the name Mayall gave to his creation proved prophetic: a sense of danger informed his stage and screen performances and even how he spent his spare time. Although his death yesterday morning came at the shockingly young age of 56, his past decade and a half of work and family life were in a sense a bonus after he was almost killed in a quad bike accident in 1998.
Successfully brought out of a coma after five days close to clinical death in intensive care, he liked to point out that his period before 'rising from the dead' was longer than the one that led to Easter becoming a public holiday. His 2005 memoir had the typically taste-baiting title Bigger Than Hitler, Better Than Christ.
As the son of drama teachers, Mayall was drawn to performance from early in his childhood in Essex and Worcester, but opted for comedy after meeting Ade Edmondson, his most frequent collaborator and closest friend, at Manchester University. Their double act, under names including 20th Century Coyote and The Dangerous Brothers, often featuring comedy stunts involving explosives and violence (both men were hospitalised by sketches), brought them to the London stand-up venue, the Comedy Store. This venue was the HQ of younger comedians, generally university-educated and politically leftwing, who, under the banner of 'alternative comedy', more or less declared war on an older generation of seaside pier and TV variety show comics, usually Tory-voting, such as Bernard Manning and Jimmy Tarbuck.
With other Comedy Store talents including Dawn French and Alexei Sayle, Mayall created The Comic Strip Presents, a long-running series of literary and cinematic spoofs that was part of Channel 4's launch night in 1982. In the same year, Mayall developed The Young Ones for BBC2 along with fellow Manchester Uni alumni Ben Elton and Lise Mayer, who wasMayall's partner. He later married make-up artist Barbara Robbin, with whom he had three children.
True to the manifesto of alternative comedy, The Young Ones took a conservative format - the flatshare sitcom - and made it dark, anarchic and dangerous. Mayall played a preening, lisping political radical and writer of bad poetry called Rick, one of his three TV characters with variations on his own first name: the others were Richie in Bottom (BBC2, 1991-95) in which he and Edmondson played wasters on the dole, and Rich in Filthy Rich and Catflap (1987). Such was the threat and energy of which Mayall was capable on TV that viewers were often glad there was a sheet of glass between them and him. His most memorable screen roles away from the partnership with Edmondson involved outrageously over-the-top characters: hero flyer Lord Flashheart in two episodes of Blackadder and the obnoxious and homicidal Tory MP Alan B'Stard in the ITV series The New Statesman.
The savage charisma that Mayall projected in his TV comedy roles led the director Richard Eyre to cast him, in 1985, in a National Theatre production of Gogol's political satire, The Government Inspector. Some members of the cast who had taken more traditional routes into theatre were doubtful that Mayall had the discipline to stay on script, but he proved his professionalism both then and again, a decade later, in a notoriously troubled production.
When his co-star Stephen Fry fled to Bruges after being bruised by the reviews of Simon Gray's 1995 play Cell Mates, Mayall held the production together, performing first with an understudy and then a replacement actor. Gray's published diary of the episode, Fat Chance, is dedicated 'To Rik' and ends with the tribute: 'Will I again chance upon an actor with the gifts of Rik Mayall, the man who, for all his anxieties and vulnerabilities, was always there?'
Gray's reference to the angst beneath the blustering manner is expanded in a striking account of a conversation during rehearsal when Mayall, complimented on his acting skills, 'went into an intense, introspective monologue. The burden of it was that he could get through life only by pretending to be other people. He ended with an abruptly fatalistic declaration that sometimes in private - even completely in private and on his own - he seemed to be pretending to be Rik Mayall.'
The darkness of those reflections startled those who knew the actor mainly from his TV comedies and, if he was already that vulnerable, he inevitably became even more so after the bike accident, which had lasting effects, including epilepsy, that required medication. In 2006, resuming the part of Alan B'Stard in a stage show, he had to leave the production due to exhaustion.
To the end of his life, though, he continued to contribute stand-out cameos in TV shows and films, including the recurring role of the odd cop DI Gideon Pryke in the Jonathan Creek series and, last year an enjoyable turn as the father of the central character in the sit-com Man Down, written by and starring the comedian Greg Davies. The fact that the character was a deranged prankster now neatly completes a circle that had begun with Richard Dangerous. The sense of danger and taboo-challenging always remained and it seems oddly characteristic that one of his final screen roles should have involved personifying the role of Death in a 2013 short movie called Don't Fear Death, so that even his movie credits now seem to end with a bad-taste joke.
Mayall will, dismayingly, now never have a career as an Old One, but his talent, on screen and stage, stretched far beyond The Young Ones, the show that will give him TV rerun immortality.
Post By http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/09/rik-mayall-dangerously-funny
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