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Rik Mayall: The People’s Poet Is Dead!

James Robert Shaw

By James Robert Shaw (The Wind up Geek)

(left) Rik Mayall, (right) Adrian Edmondson

Rik Mayall, comic actor and Primetime Emmy Award winner, has sadly passed away early this morning in his home, in the district of Barnes at south-west London. He was 56 years old.

The Metropolitan Police was called in 13:19 BST on Monday. They ruled out that his death is not suspicious.

The London Ambulance Service said, “a man, aged in his 50s, was pronounced dead at the scene.”

Rik Mayall was a student at Manchester University where he met his friend and comedy partner, Adrian Edmondson. Together they would form 20th Century Coyote and perform at such venues as London’s The Comedy Store. It was at the Comedy Store where Coyote along with other talented performers brought alternative comedy to a larger audience under the group’s name The Comic Strip.

The year 1982 would bring Mayall to a wider audience on television in such series as The Comic Strip Presents, a series created to showcase the talents of The Comic Strip performers in hour-long plays. He would also create the character of Rick in the sitcom The Young Ones written by himself, Lise Mayer and Ben Elton. Mayall would portray Rick, a pompous would-be anarchist who saw himself as the people’s poet, who would lead a people’s revolution against the pigs (police) and Margaret Thatcher’s government.

Mayall’s anarchic comedy style would be applied to such characters as the lecherous loud-mouthed Lord Flashheart from the Blackadder series, Sir Richard Dangerous from The Dangerous Brothers sketches (the other played by Adrian Edmondson) on Saturday Live, and as Sir Richard Richard, the sad and pathetically lonely flatmate to Edmondson’s drink-obsessed Eddie Hitler in the hit comedy series Bottom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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