The Late Rik Mayall, Comedian

Available for over a year

Rik Mayall was born in 1958 in Essex, but spent most of his childhood in Worchestershire. In 1976 he left home to study drama at Manchester University. It was there he met Adrian 'Ade' Edmondson, with whom he would form one of the most successful comedy partnerships of the 80s and 90s. With a comedic style defined by over-the-top, grotesque and deeply unsympathethic characters, Mayall starred-in and wrote some of Britain’s most memorable comedy series; The Young Ones, The Comic Strip Presents…, Filthy Rich & Catflap, The New Statesman and Bottom - to name a few. Following his death of a heart attack in 2014, he was variously described as ‘energetic post-punk’, ‘equal parts subversive and silly’, and with ‘a manic energy almost too wild for the mainstream.’ Robert Elms spoke to Rik just before the 2010 World Cup, when he’d just released a football song called ‘Noble England’. The track flopped on release, but after his death, which fell a few weeks before the next World Cup, fans began buying it, landing it at number 7 in the singles chart.