The BBC is reporting the death of Rik Mayall, the British comedian and actor best known for playing the pretentious, callow anarchist Rick on The Young Ones, and for roles in films like Drop Dead Fred that made similar use of his skill at playing snot-nosed annoyances. Mayall was seriously injured in a quad bike accident in 1998 that left him comatose for several days, but he had since made a slow yet triumphant return to performing, often alongside his longtime comedy partner and Young Ones co-star Ade Edmondson. Mayall’s cause of death has not been released. He was 56.
Mayall and Edmondson first met at the University of Manchester, where they forged their partnership amid the burgeoning “alternative comedy” scene at The Comedy Store. In addition to fostering their particular chemistry as “The Dangerous Brothers,” one marked by cartooonishly violent outbursts and explosions, that club also saw Mayall first develop the character of “Rick,” an anarchist poet who was also a total prick, as well as Kevin Turvey, an investigative reporter whose “reports” mainly consisted of long, rambling monologues about his own life. Turvey became part of the 1981 sketch show A Kick Up The Eighties and landed his own one-off BBC special, while Mayall’s continued work with Edmonson and other Comedy Store alumni like Alexei Sayle, Nigel Planer, and French And Saunders—all of whom had since formed their own club, The Comic Strip—led to the Channel 4 series, The Comic Strip Presents.
Around the same time, the BBC commissioned The Young Ones from Mayall and his then-girlfriend Lise Mayer, adding their university alum Ben Elton as a writer. The series—about four undergrads whose only commonalities were slovenliness, their desperate unpopularity with women, and a shared distaste for work and for each other—saw Mayall reprising his pompous, Cliff Richard-loving poet character Rick, alongside Edmonson’s destructive punk Vyvyan, Nigel Planner’s irritating hippie Neil, and Christopher Ryan as the unctuous “cool person” Mike.
While each have their own particular charms—or lack thereof—it’s Mayall’s Rick who tends to dominate Young Ones episodes, often by virtue of the character’s relentless, hyperactive toddler’s need for attention. Mayall’s portrayal treads that fine line between obnoxious and pitiful, as the sniveling Rick’s self-satisfied—and woefully ill-informed—political diatribes and awful slam poetry is that of every irritating college leftie writ loud. Yet, as Mayall plays him, you can’t help but feel for the little wanker.
After The Young Ones reached its appropriately cataclysmic conclusion in 1984, Mayall would reunite with Edmondson on several other TV projects—most immediately Filthy Rich And Catflap (also co-starring Nigel Planer), where he played a similarly lazy, self-important actor. Their most successful reteaming was the early-’90s comedy Bottom, which once again found Mayall and Edmondson playing, respectively, a pompous nitwit and an irascible drunk living in a dirty flat, once more taking out their frustrations on each other in insanely violent ways. The duo reportedly dreamed up the show while co-starring in a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, a play whose blackly comic nihilism can be seen threading throughout all their work. (Maybe that plus Tom And Jerry cartoons.)