a five megaton nuclear warhead thereby forever changing the face of British broadcasting and leaving a big fuck off crater in the middle of it?”
“The very same.”
And the make up girl—we’ll call her Wendy for safety (her real name was Carol)—asked if we could go and take a look at the house later that day after I had finished doing my edge cutting acting in whatever it was I was there to act in [get someone to look this up, publisher]. So we did. We got a taxi and I paid for all of it—I didn’t split it 50:50 or anything. When we got there, we got out of the car. It was as if the rain was falling. No, the rain was falling. We got out of the car. Sorry, done that bit*. Look, we got out of the car and it was raining, okay?
“This is what saved BBC2 from being cancelled,” I told her. But when I looked round, she was crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked careingly. And she pointed with her hand. Like that. And I looked up and saw what she had just seen. They had knocked down my Young Ones house! She fell to her knees. What could I do? What do you think? It seemed to help a bit. Then I walked off into the sunset (although it was still raining) and I never saw her again. Good job too. You should have seen her teeth. Disgusting.
Manchester University drama department didn’t know what had hit it when I arrived. (This is years before. Not with the make up bird. That story’s over now. File closed. Move on. You’ll thank me for being brutal with you viewer, when you hit some really serious wordage later on when I spill the beans (this means sing like a canary†) on where the corpses are really buried. It’s a blood drenched, charnel house of bodies and still-quivering organs when we really get up to our elbows in the viscera and gristle of British light entertainment. In the meantime I’m going to tell you about the young Rik Mayall in Manchester when he meets Adrian Edmondson (a towering inferno of genius-even more towering and inferning then me—and I don’t say things like that lightly. You’re hanging with the big boys now. I remember once when we were writing a Bottom series together (an earth-shattering genre-busting situation comedy that has been butchered, raped and copied by every successful comedy series since), I say we, really it was all just Adrian, but he kindly let me put my name on it as well so that I could earn some more money in order to meet my payment schedule to him*. Anyway, we were sitting in a pub in Soho. Adrian had the pad and the biro and it was my job to buy all the drinks and the food and fetch it all from the bar and clear it away and fetch coffee and cigarettes and pay for Adrian’s executive massage around the corner afterwards. It was so funny. Honestly, we were roaring. And other people in the strip club, [delete this], pub looked around and saw the two of us and commented, “Look, there are the two giants of British comedy, laughing together—what great mates they must be and what great lives they must live as they ride the out of control rollercoaster of hilarious crazy good times together.” And they were right, of course. And the reason we were laughing so much was—honestly you’re going to love this, we [fill in amusing and heart-warming anecdote here].)
I was terribly excited on my first day at Manchester University. I put on my student’s uniform, got there early and bagged the best place so that the lecturer would see that I was the keenest. At King’s School, we were all very well brought up and when Sir came into the class, we all stood up. So when Professor John Prudhoe, the man who invented the Manchester University drama department, came into the lecture theatre, I, of course, stood up. But I was the only one. No one else moved. They just sat there looking at me. Then one of them laughed. He didn’t even have a proper student hair cut. He had long wispy nasty hair and had his feet on the desk and he was smoking a cigarette. Smoking a cigarette in lesson! In LESSON!!! Was he suicidal? He would get at least six for that. But he didn’t seem to care, and Sir didn’t seem to bother about him either. This fellow student was the Adrian I hadn’t yet met and he just stared and pointed at me and he said, “look, look!” and everyone started laughing at me. I mean, I know I’m a comedy genius but I didn’t really know what the gag was. Had my fountain pen leaked ink or something? And then I saw that the Professor was laughing at me as well. Ice ran down my spine. So this was university was it? I thought to myself. Anarchy, no laws…no future? Punk type pop music? What sort of world had I got myself into? I quickly unbuttoned the top button of my shirt and tried out some swear words. I was evolving. This pack of freedom-fighting wolves had a new brother with them. It was Rik. Okay, I couldn’t pronounce my Rs very well, but I knew that as soon as I reached the onset of puberty, I wasn’t going to shave. I was only seventeen. Who was this innocent young seventeen year old I could see them thinking. We’ll have him for breakfast. Sweet seventeen and never been kissed? I don’t think so. You’ve got a Rik Mayall on your hands I said to them. Well, I didn’t actually. Not out loud. But I wrote it in my notebook. My special secret One for “certain” occasions.
The wild terrifying unconventional non-sexist hell-for-leather student accommodation that I collectively occupied in Manchester with my three undergraduate amigos, Lloyd*, Ivor and Max, was like living in Golgotha. No, Sodem. No fuck ’em. No fuck it. No fuck it all. Bollocks. Oh Christ, look, we were just dangerous guys who lived life to the max right, and pushed everything to the hilt despite the endless homework and cleaning and squabbles about the washing up rota. I’d like to see Charles Bronson survive in that frightful little house in East Allington that only had one name, Limes Cottage. Anything could happen and often did. Sometimes we wouldn’t even do the hoovering for a fortnight and sometimes we’d come home from the chip shop and instead of putting the fish and chips on plates, we’d eat them out of newspaper on the floor just like we were really working class. It was extraordinary. Regularly, I quite simply wouldn’t do my homework when I was supposed to. We were the hard guys, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. There was strong drink, sex, and drugs all over the place (that none of us ever took). We even got dirty videos out from the video store. And Max’s mate rode his motobike* up the stairs, turned left and went straight into my bedroom and parked it on my bed. He did. He bloody did. I’m not lying. This was serious. No way could I accept that. There was going to be a fight. And there was and I was so badly beaten up that I nearly had to go to hospital. I’m not going to put his name down here. Not because I’m scared or I can’t remember. Just because I’m hard.
Every Monday night at Manchester University, the drama department hosted what was called Studio Night which was where all the students who went to lectures and knew how to write used to put on their very own productions. Anyone could get up and do their thing†—like a sex machine man—sorry, wrong format. Someone might think of a monologue or a play or a love affair with a chair. That was where me and Ade started. Or rather, where Ade let me start with him. No, that sounds a bit rude. It was where Ade and I started to do our thing together. Not that we had a thing or anything. We’ve never done it to each other. Not like that. Well, not in any way at all, really. Adrian is far too great a talent in the world of international showbusiness for me to ever dare assume that I might try to cop a feel. So, just leave it now and move onto the next paragraph. Pretend you didn’t read any of that last bit. It’s just a blanket denial, okay?
So, me and Ade started doing our stuff together on a Monday night at the studio until we thought bollocks to the Marxists (some of the students were terrifically well educated) and went into Manchester and started doing our thing in pubs where we got paid and got to drink more. We were known as things like Twentieth Century Coyote and Deathsquad Theatre Company. We learnt how to be funny (although Adrian was always funnier than me) and how to live life without rules.
If it wasn’t for Adrian I would never have met Little Ben-Elton. Me and Ade were in the third year and one day I masculined my way into the drama department and heard this disgusting squealing animal noise. Jesus, it’s a fan I suddenly didn’t think because I wasn’t huge famous yet although I was deeply popular in Manchester. Doctor Nightclub they used to call me. Anyway, one of the things that I love about Ade in a butch matey kind of hard sort of way is the way that he likes to beat people up, and sure enough there was a churning