Ten years on from his death, did any of us know the ‘real’ Rik Mayall?

It’s hard to believe it’s been an entire decade since we lost one of Britain’s most outrageous comedians, writes Darren Richman. But can any of us really be sure which of the Bottom star’s many personas was the real him?

Mayall belongs in the pantheon of British greats alongside Peter Sellers and Steve Coogan (Getty Images)

Rik Mayall lived many lives. He was Rik, of course, and Richard “Richie” Richard. There was Sir Richard Dangerous, Alan B’Stard, Drop Dead Fred and Lord Flashheart. Then there was the actual Rik, before and after the 1998 quad bike accident that left him in a coma for days and changed things for good.

Mayall packed a great deal into those 56 years of blazing, brilliant life and today marks a decade since the death of the people’s poet – news that hit us as hard as a frying pan to the face.

It certainly hit me. Rik Mayall was one of those people who always felt like he’d be there, and for me, as a comedy writer myself, losing him was like losing a member of the family. At primary school, my friends and I formed a “Bottom Club”, as the only three boys in the class who watched (or were allowed to watch) Richie and Eddie’s antics. I suspect Rik would have enjoyed that name, corrupting our young minds in his own inimitable style.

For my 11th birthday I was gifted the script book of the first series, and with it the revelation that people on television weren’t just making it up as they went along. In 2006 I took a play to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival involving two blokes sat on a sofa talking nonsense, marking the beginning of my career as a professional writer. It would not be overstating the case to suggest that, were it not Rik Mayall, I wouldn’t be writing this now.

The greatest of Mayall’s characters was the one he played in public, that of the pan-global phenomenon, “The Rik Mayall”. There is footage of the man being surreptitiously filmed on a camcorder in the audience at an event in the 1990s and, once he clocks the camera, the comedian pulls an array of the funniest and most lascivious faces for the benefit of what he would have assumed at the time was precisely one person.

He couldn’t not be funny, and he lived to make people laugh. The letters he wrote to fans were in character, as were the poses he adopted in photographs. Like Groucho Marx, there was a selflessness in the way Mayall allowed the persona to overtake the person. Most of us had and have no idea who these people really were, and we couldn’t care less.

As a comedic shapeshifter, Mayall belongs in the pantheon of British greats alongside Peter Sellers and Steve Coogan. Whether he was playing a pathetic virgin, smarmy politician or incomparable sex god, he inhabited the role entirely and the audience bought it.

It seems staggering to think a man with the same face could legitimately play a sex-starved loser in Bottom and an oversexed cad in Blackadder. Indeed, he reportedly only accepted the role of Flashheart in the latter on the condition he get more laughs than Rowan Atkinson in the title role. According to Tony Robinson, at the conclusion of filming that immortal final scene (“Woof!”), Mayall turned to his esteemed colleagues and asked simply, “Did I win?”

We certainly won, since we got 16 more years of joy after the accident that so nearly ended the comic’s life at the age of 40. In one of his first public pronouncements in the aftermath of the incident, Mayall proved he hadn’t been humbled by his near-death experience: “I was dead for five days over Easter, which means 2000 years later, I beat Jesus Christ 5-3.” References to the quad bike would become a staple of the Bottom live shows, raucous events at which fans like myself really did feel as though we were kneeling at Christ’s feet (albeit with far more references to masturbation).

The Rik Mayall was larger than life. He was a dizzying force of nature who would berate scenery when it was required (“You’re just a door, I’m Rik f***ing Mayall” replete, naturally, with thrusting gestures). His passing came as such a shock, and for many of us was the hardest celebrity death to take, in large part because of that seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. He was too old to die young and too young to die old, but it felt as though the world was a little less manic and unpredictable without the self-proclaimed “greatest man that ever lived” around.

Appearing on Desert Island Discs last year, Mayall’s comedy soulmate, Adrian Edmondson, broke down in tears as he recalled his friend and collaborator. The Ade to Rik’s Rik spoke of exchanging letters with Mayall’s mother in the wake of his death, explaining:

“His mum wrote me a lovely letter. I wrote to her after he died, and she wrote back, saying all she could remember was us … She could see us out in the garden, on a couple of deckchairs, just laughing and laughing and laughing. And she could never tell what was quite so funny.”

She might not have been able to tell but the millions of fans were in no doubt. There is a moment in the first series of Bottom when Richie the character discovers he has won a bet on the horses and utters the immortal words that equally apply to Rik the man: “I knew I was great.”

So did the rest of us.