RIK

"The people's poet is dead…!"

I'm sorry that this is so badly written. As a vaguely off the cuff "tribute" to the self-styled "people's poet" I ought to have put slightly more effort in, I suppose, but I'm sure that thousands upon thousands of words are already being written about this, most of them with far more forethought being put into them, whilst I remain more that a little bit surprised and shocked from reading the news just before I headed off home yesterday, and am scrabbling about thinking that I ought to write something, but without having a clue what it is that I ought to write.

You see, for people of my kind of age, Rik Mayall has been part of our comedy DNA for more years than we care to think about, and so, hearing of his death on Monday, at the ridiculously relatively youthful age of fifty-six, (incidentally - and probably irrelevantly - only two years younger than Eric Morecambe was…) really did come as something as a shock to us all.

How could one of "The Young Ones" have become old enough for something like this to happen?

"I feel sorry for you, you zeros, you nobodies. What's going to live on after you die? Nothing, that's what! This house will become a shrine! And punks and skins and Rastas will all gather round and all hold their hands in sorrow for their fallen leader! And all the grown-ups will say, 'But why are the kids crying?' And the kids will say, 'Haven't you heard? Rick is dead! The People's Poet is dead!' ... And then one particularly sensitive and articulate teenager will say, 'Why kids, do you understand nothing? How can Rick be dead when we still have his poems?' 

Rick, the People's Poet, "The Young Ones"  

From Kevin Turvey, Rick the poet (…and yes, as students we really all DID know someone a bit like that - it may have been me - even if too much exposure to that world could feel relentlessly bleak…), Lord Flashheart, Alan B'Stard, Ritchie Richard, and so many more unforgettable (and sometimes, quite frankly, terrifyingly edgy) performances his face became as familiar as anyone's to our generation, which isn't bad for a former drama student who did his studying in Manchester, and display a range from the complete social outsider, to the scary, to the smug, and even the downright sexy that people might not quite have realised he had whenever people mentioned his name.

"If word gets out I'm missing, five hundred girls will kill themselves. And I wouldn't want them on my conscience, not when they ought to be on my face! Cancel the state funeral, tell the king to stop blubbing, Flash is not dead! I simply ran out of juice! And before five hundred girls all go 'oh, what's the point in living any more?' I'm talking about petrol! Woof! Send someone along to pick me up. General Melchett's driver will do, she hangs round with a big knob so she'll be used to a fellow like me. Woof!"

Lord Flashheart, "Blackadder Goes Forth"

And, as his alter-ego, Rick, was such a huge fan, we should also not be forgetting that memorable version of "Livin' Doll" performed with the sainted Cliff himself, which topped the charts as a fund-raiser for charity and of which I probably still have a copy of the 12" single lying around somewhere about the place...

A personal favourite performance is possibly a more obscure one; It is from one of those series of hour-long films he once made for ITV and which were collectively known as "Rik Mayall presents…"

It is an immaculately performed moment where, after a one-night stand, he desperately tries to work out how to pronounce the name "Siobhan" from seeing it on an envelope addressed to the girl whose name he could not remember.

I still refer back to it occasionally even now whenever I see that name, even though few people know what the hell I'm going on about.

It's a sign to me of how long he'd been around, and what impact he made, that I can flick through my old sketchbooks and find him referenced there, from my days as an unpaid "fanboy" cartoonist back in the day, when I drew a couple of "Doctor Who/The Young Ones" mash-up pages called "The Young Doctors" and sent them off to be published (or not) in the fan club magazine.

Of course we nearly lost him in an accident on a quad bike sixteen or more years ago, and his career had never seemed quite the same since not least, like another performer from that generation who has gone too soon, Mel Smith, he seemed to be doing his level best to enjoy life whilst he had at and, to be perfectly honest, who could begrudge him that.

So here I find myself, writing about yet another "celebrity death" of someone I never met, whilst soldiers and policemen and children and parents and grandparents who I've also never met or thought about are also tragically dying, in many cases unremarked upon in any way other than by their immediate circle of friends and family.

I'm sure that the man himself would have found this outpouring of emotion at his loss quite hilarious but, well, you know, he touched a generation, and those of us who were "The Young Ones" back then are really feeling a genuine sense of loss right now.

Richard Michael "Rik" Mayall (7 March 1958 – 9 June 2014)