Goodbye Rik Mayall

I just heard the news about Rik Mayall and I’m so sad. When I was 10, I used to strut around the playground sticking two fingers up at people and snorting and calling them fascist and Thatcher and drawing anarchy signs on my homework diary because I wanted to be Rick from The Young Ones. I had no idea who Trotsky was but thanks to Rik Mayall, Trotsky was part of my vocabulary. Rick was my first grown-up hero.

One night on a primary school trip to the Isle of Wight, I persuaded the teachers to let me put The Young Ones on the telly in the lounge for us all to watch before bedtime – I was so happy that I wasn’t going to miss it. The teachers, who hadn’t seen it before but sat down to watch it with the rest of the class, were horrified that my parents allowed me to watch it and threatened to write a letter to them. Until that moment, I had no idea that watching it was an act of rebellion, but now my teachers had made it one and I felt brilliant because it’s just the kind of thing Rick might have done as a 10-year-old anarchist.

A few years later, I got my own second-hand black-and-white TV in my room, and on Sunday nights after bedtime, I’d watch The New Statesman with my finger pushing down the silver plastic power switch on top so that if my mum came up the stairs I could snatch my hand back and turn it off in an instant.

As a teenager, when I was learning to play Metallica songs on the guitar, I discovered The Comic Strip Presents… Bad News.

And then there was Drop Dead Fred, also starring the lovely Phoebe Cates who’d been a teenage crush since I saw her in Gremlins.

And not forgetting Grim Tales! No one tells a bedtime story like Rik Mayall.

As I grew up, Rik Mayall was always there. So much of my childhood was made so much happier because of that marvellous, revolting man.

Goodbye Rik, and thank you.