Rik Mayall: Great review of B’Stard – Ade Edmondson still visibly upset by his loss | TV and radio

Rik Mayall: Magnificent B’Stard is a tribute to the man and an elegy to what you must assume was the lost youth of most of the viewing public. I don’t know what the current youth will do with it. I assume they don’t watch TV anyway, so the question is controversial.

Plus, of course, it doesn’t matter. This is 90 minutes of television for us – the generation who grew up with Mayall on screen as Rick the Poet (“This is my angriest poem – theatre!”), then self-proclaimed investigative reporter from Redditch and mostly in Redditch, Kevin Turvey, then on The Young Ones as anarchist sociology student Rick, and through his less popular follow-up Filthy Rich & Catflap. Then there was his memorable role as Lord Flashheart in Blackadder II (and as the equally horndog Lord’s descendant of Squadron Leader Flashheart in Blackadder Goes Forth); The unexpected pivot towards a more restrained display of his comedic talents as the corrupt, cruel, corrupt and completely fictional Conservative MP Alan Bestard in Marks and Gran’s brilliant film The New Statesman; Hollywood kick as Drop Dead Fred; Then the great success that “Bottom” achieved as a comedy series and live show throughout the nineties until he suffered a horrific quad bike accident in 1998, which cut off his sails.

Sky’s documentary covers all the fun and famous bits (“Can you really kill yourself with laxatives?”) but fills in the other stuff, too. It covers, for example, the debacle that was the 1995 production of Simon Gray’s play Cellmates, starring Stephen Fry and Mayall as the main characters until Fry disappeared, in the grip of a crisis caused by his as-yet-undiagnosed bipolar disorder, shortly after the play’s opening and closing nights. This, like the physical and mental suffering that Mayall privately endured in the aftermath of his bicycle accident, is viewed with sadness and sympathy on both sides.

There is footage of his early work on stage with his great friend, writing and performing partner Addie Edmondson in the 20th Century Comedy Troupe Coyote (Edmondson lights up when he recalls a woman in the audience telling her daughter they were “just rambling players”) and later with the Dangerous Brothers (precursors to Richie and Eddie, Bottom’s degenerate heroes). We see them working together as gracefully and happily in Beckett’s 1991 film Waiting for Godot (“The bottom had a kind of Wile E. Coyote violence put into it,” Edmondson says, lighting up again) as they did as Rick and Vivian in The Young Ones or elsewhere.

This makes their breakup after a decade or so, which Edmondson first comments on here, all the more sad. He did not go into detail but it appears that a combination of Mayall’s worsening drinking, behavioral changes after the incident and the additional responsibilities placed on Edmondson during Bottom’s subsequent tours (which was already a stressful time in any relationship) led him to tell Mayall that he did not want to work with him anymore. “We never came to an understanding about this,” says Edmondson, now visibly upset. Mayall collapsed and died of a heart attack on June 9, 2014.

However, the overall tone is celebratory without being saintly, although Mayall’s friend and colleague Ben Elton does his best to push it above that line more often than not. “Everyone knew they were having the best time they’d ever have at a comedy experience,” he says of Rick the Poet’s early appearance at the club, while Rick the Student was “an instinctively brilliant performer…one of the really great comedic characters.” It’s a good job Stephen Fry wasn’t also in flow mode – we would all have been swept up in a wave of nausea, which, although Mayall loved the attention, wouldn’t have suited his sinister good looks at all.

If young people watch it, they will get a good idea about the performer and his place in the alternative comedy firmament. They’ll get a good idea of ​​the man too – perhaps not so much from oral testimony but from the collective fondness of the contributors and the generosity of spirit that infuses their memories, the enduring love emanating from his children, and Edmondson’s equally enduring longing for the couple to have more time to put things right.