by Rik Mayall
Oh yeah, listen up Herpar this is important—you know how last night you mentioned something about someone or other editing my book? Well, I want to say right now and I’m doing it right now and what I’m saying is this—no I’m not, I’m commanding it (in a close up), NO ONE FUCKS WITH MY WORDS. Read it again, you lefty twat, NO ONE FUCKS WITH MY WORDS. Because if I read through my book and find that someone’s been messing about with my oeuvre, I’ll be straight round to your little office with some of my associates to rip your head off and shit in the hole. And I won’t wipe my bottom. Is that clear? You’ve been warned. I’m pretty sure it was the great Graeme Green himself who said, “don’t fuck with my words, man,” and I’m down with that. (Down means down which means – oh just look it up). And another thing, Harps, and this is a biggie. A really important big biggie, so take all your clothes off and kneel down in front of me, sweating and paying attention. Right? I have got in my possession a fabulous mesmerising archive of correspondence that has been gathering and breeding and swarming around me like napalm throughout my raging blood-drenched Hiroshima of a professional north AND south career. See that! Did you see that? That’s creative writing that is. And that’s what I’m going to put in my book. Everything I’ve ever written and ever done in my life is creative and it’s all going in, man. Notes, poems, journals, letters, great letters too. That’s what they are. Great ones. And if you don’t think they are then you’re a cunt. Point proved. Anyway, I just want you to know that I’m very very very very committed to righting enough words. Who knows, I might even put this letter in. No one likes a little one.
As far as publicity for the book is concerned, this is really where I’ll come into my own (that’s not a media expression although I did once see someone do this in Bangkok—not that I’ve ever been there). I am very well known by all the global media networks—they follow my every move—I only have to crack one off and it’s in the papers. I’m talking metaphorically, I have never—repeat never—been caught masturbating.
So, I think that just about raps things up. I’m sure Heimi will be in touch soon to tie up all the loose ends contract-wise.
Big up Harpo, respec (that’s “street” slang),
Rik Mayall, The.
P.S. Don’t fuck any of this up Harper—you’re dealing with frightening people here.
P.P.S. Love to the wife.
P.P.P.S. Did it heal up for her?
DIARY EXERT
March 7th 1966
A prare to God.
Dear R. Father, what are in heaven, hello be they name. How are you today? My name is Richard Mayall. And that’s not a lie. Firstly, many thanks for choosing me above all other people. I want to make sure that thine choice is the right one oh Lord. And it is so thou knowest that already. I want thou to know that I have never doubted you, ever ever. I wanted to ask you a question which I thought I would write in my diary so thou could read it as well. We could read it together—thou and me—as I write it. I am going to start a new paragraph now Lord because I want this question to be important.
There. You see, Lord, what it is is that often in the middle of the night I find myself thinking about the angels and the heavenly host—and hostess—and I was wondering, Lord, if thou could clear something up for I. You know how like in the pictures of angels that you see in books, all the lady angels always wear sort of short white shirt kind of things, well if I were to be surrounded by angels, both man and lady angels, and they are all flying around above me up in the air over my head, and if I looked up in the air and saw these angels flying above me and thought to myself “Oh look, there are some selestial bodies. I’m so glad that God has chosen me to be his special one.” Well, what would happen if at that very moment I looked up and there was a lady angel just above me and I accidentally saw her girl’s pants? Would I go to hell? And if I did, would I have to fall all the way down from the sky to the middle of the earth and hurt myself? And will there be hospitals in hell for me? I’ve been worrying about this a lot, dear Thou. If you could clear this up for me as soon as possible, I would be eternally greatful.
I hope thou ist keeping well.
Best wishes,
Richard Mayall.
Mr Clutterbuck Masters Common Room King’s School Worcester
August 20 1969
Dear Sir,
I know you said I should not write to you again because you might have to tell the Headmaster but I felt I should tell you that I now know who let off the fire alarm during break last Thursday. It was not me, it was Lancaster, which proves that he is not handicapped because he would have had to stand up out of his wheelchair to do it. I also saw him doing the hundred yards sprinting practice last week as well so he is a bloody liar. Sorry to swear Sir, but it makes me so cross when other pupils break school rules. If you like, I can help you lift him out of his wheelchair so that you can beat him. One day he will thank us all for this.
You are very good at beating, Mr Clutterbuck. You have a very good slipper action and it certainly hurts a lot. You are much better than Mr Cunley, who said he was going to beat me the week before last for cribbing and then he put his hand down the back of my trousers. I am sure this is against the law but I do not like to tell tails. He smells of LSD and he doesn’t cut his hair very much so I think he must be a hippy. I will say no more.
I hope you have a very nice holiday in Benidorm with Mrs Clutterbuck.
Best wishes,
Richard Mayall.
MY GREAT LIFE
“Fucking hell, look at the size of his cock!” said the mid-wife who delivered me. “It looks like he’s got three legs. Perhaps he should be called The Tripod.” This is true. She really said this. But I was called Richard instead and the rest is history.
I went to school at the local primary school, right? That’s where I went to school. I didn’t have to pay anyone, I just got in. No questions, no bodies. I was in. The infants. I don’t want to talk too much about it because it was like sucking shit through a shoot. But I tell you what. And I’ll tell it you now. It was a Tuesday night, 17th December 1968. Choir concert. Got that? Me too. All the infants were there. All the parents were there. This is true, this. My fucking class teacher, Mrs “please kick me in the face violently” Andrews lined up all the tables against the wall and told us all to stand on them facing the audience.
“Call that a stage?” I thought, “I’d rather slam my bollocks in the fridge door.” But I got on the stage and I was right, it was a shit stage. And that bitch Andrews stuck me right up at the left hand side of it, right at the edge and at the back. I was practically off stage (which means not on stage). And I’m never off stage. I’m always on. I’m on now, look. And guess what. No but really, guess what. No don’t actually, I’ll tell you. I’m doing it right now or I will after I’ve done this sentence. And I’m getting there now. Right here we are, I’m there. Told you I would be. So shit off if you don’t believe me. Right what was I going to say? Bollocks. Oh I know, shut up and listen. New paragraph—this is good.
Mrs Andrews said to me—and get this because this is true—“Now Richard, pay attention and stop doing that to Penelope. I have something important to say to you. The success of the whole of this evening’s concert depends on it. So pay attention, it’s very very important. Now Richard, I don’t want you to sing this evening. Not at all. Not one note. I want all of the other children to sing but not you. Because you’ve got a horrible voice. So what I want you to do is just move your mouth as if you’re singing but not actually sing. If you sing, you’ll spoil the whole evening’s entertainment. Have you got that?” she said rather too emphatically an inch from my face. What do you think of that? Me too. I wasn’t going to take that. Me neither. Or me. She was dealing with Rik Mayall (i.e.* me). That’s what she didn’t know. She used to call me Richard. Bitch. I wasn’t going to take that lying down. “Right, Richard,” I said to myself. “What are we going to do? I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to steal the show. Let’s do it
. (Like a firestorm, obviously.)” So, what I did was just that. Fantastically too. I pulled faces at the audience while I was mouthing the wrong words to Away in a Manger, made extremely vulgar gesticulations and upstaged the entire cast (there were about thirty opponents up there, don’t forget. This was thirty to one.) I transformed the whole evening into a breakthruough comedy entertainment format. You should have heard them laugh when Annette Jennings’ knickers and tights suddenly came shooting down her legs, tangling up her shoes and she fell into the front row. It was all going on. Hilarity prevailed. Quite a few people had a good time until suddenly, the Headmaster grabbed me by the ear, pulled me off the stage onto the floor of the auditorium (form 3B) and marched me to the corner of the room and made me stand face to the wall in FULL FUCKING VIEW OF MY AUDIENCE thinking it would humiliate me. Like fuck. That’s when it all kicked off big style. So the Headmaster ordered me out of the hall. And that’s when I threw my first really good tantrum. I bit Mrs Andrews in the face, ran a mock with my matches in the cloakroom causing over eight thousands pounds worth of damage, flooded the girls’ toilets, and shat in the gym master’s holdall*. As a seven year old, you can only take so much.
The thing is, I was very misunderstood at school. Quite often, when the other children were playing kiss chase in the playground, I was tied up in the toilets with my pants stuffed into my mouth. Even the teachers used to spit on me as they passed me in the play ground.
I’m putting all this in the book, viewer, because I want to show you what a hard life I’ve had and how I rose above it. It’s really very Jesusy when you think about it. I remember as though it was yesterday when the Headmaster was beating me in his study one day and I looked up at him and said, “Judge not lest ye be judged you fat motherfucker.” He just went on beating me. His house burnt down shortly afterwards. I had nothing to do with this.
Picture the scene: Spring 1967. Got it? Everyone else was on the Isle of White watching Jimmy Hendrix burning his guitar but I was at school. They had decided to change the state school system so that no one would be equal anymore. The rich would go to one sort of school and the poor would be put in holding pens before they were taken off to factories. It was different in those days. We had factories and people went there and made things. They were called jobs. You don’t have them now. There was still a Labour Party in those days. Nowadays there are just slaves on the other side of the world that make stuff for us. Unless we bring them over here to do it. Then we call them immigrants and pay them fuck all and make them live in the old holding pens that the white working class used to have. Until they’re fucked up and knackered and useless and then we send them home again. Or to somewhere in Croatia where they’re made into dog food.
Now, it’s worth knowing, viewer, that the old education system was governed by an exam called the Eleven Plus. This was an exam which separated the creepy frightened kids that behaved themselves at school and managed to learn something from the stupid kids who didn’t give a shit and were happy. You took it when you were eleven and, rich or poor, you were divided into two groups and “educated” in one of two separate schools depending on your ability. But the rich who were in control of the state at the time decided that they were going to destroy this system and replace it with two different kinds of schools—good well-equipped schools for the children of the wealthy, and sad empty blank voids for the children of the poor. So, I was in the shit. Big time. Lots and lots of shit. You had to be eleven to take the Eleven Plus, you see. It was the last year they were doing it before they scrapped it forever and I was only nine! Plus my mum and dad weren’t rich so I had no chance of an education. Fucky-fuck-fuck, shitty pants and deary me, I’m bollocksed, I thought. EXCEPT, my mum and dad just happened to be teachers*, so they prepped me up for the Eleven Plus exam and I got into an expensive school full of posh kids called the King’s School Worcester—when I was nine! How’s about that for cool? And that’s where I taught people how to drink and lose their virginity and be happy because I was a nice bloke and they were all wankers. I’ve always been like that, I’ve always offered a helping hand to others on life’s, you know, whatever. I was the youngest in the school but almost straight away I fell in with the hard guys like Simon Rex and that other one with the ginger hair, you know, that psycho who liked to do that thing with cats and a screwdriver. He’s dead now, thank fuck.
So nobody knew anything about anything. No one found the bodies. There were no traces and I passed the Eleven Plus! I did it. All on my own. Yes I did. Prove it if you can then. Get this, I was the youngest kid in England to ever pass the Eleven Plus. And I still am. Didn’t put that in the credits for Filthy, Rich and Catflap did they? BBC fuckholes. I’d got into a big posh school. But it was the very last year they were allowing kids like me to sit the Eleven Plus. After this, ordinary kids weren’t allowed to have well-equipped schools and teachers that could teach. But then. Now wait for this. You’ll like this, this is nasty. Just when everything was great, suddenly there’s this other kid at King’s called Gretisson who grassed (this is cool prison slang for told on) on me to Mr Cunley. The little shit (ugly too. And probably still is. I hope so.) gave him a list of all the boys who he thought were smoking and Cunley went through our desks at lunchtime and found our cigarettes. It was either six of the best or a one pound fine.
“How about this?” I said to him, “what about a ten shilling fine and three of the best? Do you play that kind of game?”
“Hold on a minute, Mayall. Did you say what I thought you just said?”
“Believe it if you need to, Mr Teacher Man,” I intoned moodily. Or was it huskily? It was a long time ago. I can’t remember*. “How do you want this baby to come down?”
His face fell. He held both of his hands up defensively, backing away. “Whoah…Hold on there Mayall,” he croaked (no he didn’t really, he died a long time later. I had nothing to do with that either.) “Listen, I’m way out of my league here or whatever it is that they say in films. I’m not used to dealing with guys like you. I’m scared, man.”
I leant forward, took my ten Number Six back out of his top pocket along with the five pounds that he had fined the other guys in my posse.
“Shall we just say this never happened?”
“Thanks.”
“Not a problem, friend,” I said and patted him encouragingly on his shoulder. Then I turned on my heel.
“Ow fuck,” I said, “why do I keep doing that to my heel?” And I breezed, well, hobbled, looking cool, out of the room. Closing the door. After I’d left, obviously. Never works the other way round. I’ve been in that situation before. Told you it was nasty.
I swore a lifelong debt of hatred to Gretisson for that. And as for Cunley, I still have sharp stabbing memories of him when I run up the stairs quickly. Enough said.
I fucked up my “O” Levels not because I was stupid and naughty but because I was a wide-eyed anarchist at the gates of dawn even then and the world was against me, especially the teachers and the examination board because they had heard of me and they were jealous. I was like the Outsider and I don’t mean like the one in that shit book by Albert what’s-his-face. The only “O” Level that I did get was in English—it was a breakthruogh cutting edge grade six. And that was a pass, not like they say. That’s right, a pass. And that’s a fact, viewer. Rik Mayall got an “O” Level. In English. Go back and read that last sentence again—and read it out loud. Go on. Although what you do is your own business. That’s the thing about life. People. They’re all over the place. It’s exciting—and dull. And you don’t even have to do what I say if you don’t want to because I’m Rik Mayall, so don’t worry about it or even think about it. It’s as though you haven’t read the last paragraph which if you haven’t, well then, that’s fine. See if I care. Which I do and I don’t. See? That’s the beauty of my enigmas.
Headmaster’s Wife
Headmaster’s Office
King’s School
Worcester
April 14
1972
Dear Headmaster’s Wife,
I think I might be in love with you. I have seen you looking at me and I think you would probably like to do some fucking with me. Please do not tell your husband because he is a real old bloody bastard and I bet he cannot get erections like I can. I bet he needs that stallion cream like they sell in nude magazines. We could make love to each other on his bed. I want to do this to you because I am Gretisson, the nasty one with the curly hair. Please do not tell your husband because I will be expelled. My parents vote Labour as well. Please come round to my study and masturbate me whilst I read my magazines with naked women in them. You can even see my balls if you like and smoke some of my drugs which will make you high like a hippy at Woodstock and you can take all your clothes off and wear flared trousers and show off your midriff and not wear a bra. And you can call me Man and we can masturbate together to the Beatles (but not their disappointing phase) and wear those ridiculous blue glasses like John Lenin wears and sit around and talk about the sky and the trees. We could go and watch Bob Dillon singing out of tune and complain about the Vietman war together and read Oz Magazine and fight the power. I am Gretisson and I want to do it with you all night long.
