Bigger than Hitler - Better than Christ

by Rik Mayall

  Anyway, Mavis Davis was a big film. It was important. And apart from anything else, it was good. Now, good is a four letter word that we use in the acting world. Especially I. I don’t mean there is an I in good – there are two “0”s as everyone knows. They look like a couple of jugs right in the middle of a really heavyweight word. And if you take out one of the jugs, you’ve got God (or a bird with a knocker hanging out – big gag in the seventies that, kids) and if you add one in you’ve got God with two tits. And they’re big ones and they’re pointing straight atchya. Nuff said. Period. Sorry. (Why do Americans have to be so foul at the end of sentences?)

  The thing is, all that “O” stuff isn’t really important. Unless you’re God. Or a bird with good “double O” jugs. What is really important is learning words and getting into bed with ideas. Then getting out of bed and straight into wardrobe, which is what we call the place where you put your clothes on in films. But I am also very good – look at the jugs on that word – at getting into wardrobes when husbands return home unexpectedly. But I don’t want to get into that at the moment – the topic not the wardrobe – although I could if you wanted me to but it would break the flow of my proase so I won’t. There are other places for everything. And this is one of them.

  What I’m really trying to say to you is that when you go into wardrobe when you’re making a film, it’s important that you get yourself a good wardrobe bird because you get a lot of good zip action in movies. Top flight wardrobe action is essential in my game. You’ve got to get your kit off while your wardrobe bird gets your kit on. And if you’re good, you’ll be able to get it on with the wardrobe bird whilst she’s getting yours off. These are complicated words but you need to know them. So, you get into wardrobe, get it on with the wardrobe bird while she’s getting it on while she’s getting it off, then you get ’em back on, get out, get down, give it some, throw it down, get out, get back in again, get ’em off, get it on with her again (if you’re quick), get out, go home. This is top class showbiz talk for changing your clothes. But not always though. Actually, it’s really complicated this, because when you’re doing nudey porno, costume is a whole different ball game. Oh well fucking bollocks then! You may as well forget all the above and forget you ever read it. Shit, shit, FUCKING SHIT!!! Oh just go and see some other bit of fucking writing somewhere else. Go on. Forget everything. I’m going to have a lie down.

  MEMO

  TO: Ursula Goodson

  Publisher-in-chief, Global Magazines Ltd

  FROM: The Rik Mayall

  Showbusiness Behemoth

  RE: JIZZ MAGAZINE

  12th July 1997

  Dear Ursula,

  You know me, I’m in loads of great sitcoms and stuff. In a multi-tasking kind of modern media way, I’ve now got a great idea for a new magazine. I’ve called a few times to tell you all about it but your assistant keeps telling me that you’re in a meeting or you’ve gone home for the day. Maybe she doesn’t believe it’s me. Her loss. (Sounds like hair loss – I won’t make a joke – I could – because I’m great – like balding saggy flappy-titted witch – but I won’t – I’m not like that – I’m a feminist – always have been. But enough about me.) Anyway, what I’ve got in mind is a hybrid of two different types of magazines. Now everyone knows that porn mags are very popular especially with blokes and broad minded birds; and women’s magazines are popular with women who don’t like porn mags. So after lots of brainstorming and lateral thinkage, I’ve come up with a revolutionary concept. You don’t suffer from stress incontinence do you Ursula? I know a lot of women your age do and if you do then might I suggest that you put a pad down your pants before you read this next bit. Ready? Okay, here it comes. How about a magazine, called JIZZ! both for men who like porn and for women who don’t? That way you’re going to have twice as many people reading it and it’ll definitely become a best sellar.

  Ouch! What’s that noise? Sounds to me like rival magazine publishers blowing their brains out because they didn’t get the Rik Mayall magazine idea first. But you did, Urse. How it works is this: on one page you have a picture of some bird or other wearing nothing but a thin drizzle of baby oil and maybe a bit of string or something, right? And on the opposite page you can have something that birds are interested in. You know, a bit of something or other or whatever, you know, so do you see how this works Urse? It’s such a happening take-it-to-the-bridge media concept (this is guys talk Urse that is rockin’ all the way to the singles bar). So all that it needs to kiss hello to a cultural Nagasaki (no offence) is to have me in charge. So long as I have plenty of assistants (subject to my approval) I think I could probably edit the magazine at the same time as continuing with all my television, film, stage and voice-over work. I mean, how hard can it be? I would also want a really top office in your building where I can approve all the “copy” (remember your Media Studies A-level, Urse?) and brainsteam project ideas with my creative team (also subject to my approval).

  Yeah and check this too, Urse, this could give a Yorkshireman the horn, because as a free introductory offer with the first issue, we could do a charity calendar. It’s just so now. And people will think we’re being really nice to poor people and we’ll make a killing. I’ve thought about the birds we should have on it and here’s the list. As you can see here Urse, there’s something for everyone.

  January: Siân Lloyd

  February: Siân Lloyd again

  March: Jane Mansfield (outrageous head)

  April: Siân Lloyd eating a boiled egg in the nude (Easter)

  May: Condoleeza Rice. Bush optional

  June: Dot Common in an incontinence thong (one for the grandads there)

  July: Siân Lloyd looking fabulously alluring again with something Welsh

  August: Siân Lloyd outside a bank in the nude (August Bank Holiday)

  September: Jenny Bond with a strap on

  October: Siân Lloyd not wearing a witch’s costume (Halloween)

  November: Siân Lloyd holding a box of matches provocatively, looking fabulous (bonfire night)

  December: Siân Lloyd locked in a hotel bedroom with Rik for three weeks and the photographer can’t get in (but he has to pay the bill)

  So, what do you reckon Urse? Are we in bed together on this one? I mean that purely in a strictly trousers on, seriously sensible, media kind of way and imply nothing untoward as regards any potential face to face meetings we might have where you might find yourself lonely for male company. I know that in your job people like yourself do get lonely so maybe we could take ourselves off to a hotel for a night (perhaps on company expenses or something) and go via a sex shop and stock up on some romantic love things like vibrators and handcuffs and a couple of copies of Razzle in case we’re looking for imaginative love ideas. So, Urse baby, if that thought interests you, then get in touch, although obviously I ought to see a photograph of you first – you might be a dog. I mean, you can’t be too careful, can you?

  So, it’s love and business now, Ursey Wursey – our secret – and when it comes to business, I’ve got the Midas Touch, there’s no two ways about it. So, please forward something for me to sign and don’t think you can make out that you never saw this letter and then go ahead and publish Jizz Magazine and cut me out of the deal because I know some serious people – people you wouldn’t want calling round at your house late at night – if you get my drift, and I think you do. We understand each other don’t we, Urse?

  Anyway, keep up the good work. Oh, and I love you and all that.

  I hope you are well.

  The Rik Mayall.

  GOING DOWN ON THE* BILL†

  There used to be a shit programme on the telly called The Bill. And I was in it once. I know you don’t believe me but it’s true. I can do everything. And there’s no point doing everything if you can’t be great. And I am great. So that’s why I did it. And now I have done it, I’m going to tell you about it and include it in my great book. Not least because working with me was probably one
of the most extraordinary experiences of the cast and crew’s lives. It was an important social event. It was a phenomerama actually. Which means it was a biggie. And that’s not toilet stuff.

  Picture the year, 1997, got it in one. It had been a busy year. I’d been working like a Japanese prisoner of war. Which means that I was busy, not thin and nearly dead. Although I was quite slim. I still am. Anyway, I’d just done Jack and the Beanstalk on Jackanory along with now iconic voice overs for Beatrix Potter’s classic revenge thriller The Tale of Two Bad Mice and Johnny Town Mouse and my award-blizzarding portrayal of Toad in Wind in the Willows with the quite talented Michael Gambon (no), Michael Palin was ratty (although he and I got on very well) and that little bloke with the glasses was in it as well, you know him, oh yes, Alan Bennett (yes). I had entered the cyber age with my genre-reversing voice-over as Dick Tate in the classic video game Double Trouble, plus of course, the landmark stand out feature movie films, Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis, and the great, Remember Me? alongside Imelda Staunton (yes), Robert Lindsay (nearly), Natalie Walter (yes), Brenda Blethyn (of course), James Fleet (no) and Emily Bruni (absolutely not) who I would work with again on Believe Nothing (I’ve just told you, haven’t I – the very accusation is an outrage in itself. I never even met lovely Emily.) That’s not to mention the rolling live extravaganza, Bottom 3: Hooligan’s Island which circumnavigated the British Isles in a whirlwind of packed houses, convulsing audiences, hilarious good times and sacks full of cash – all of which we gave away to charity. And I can prove that [maybe delete this]. But what stands out for me in 1997 above all else is my appearance on The Bill. I’m not saying that it stands out because it was a good experience, far from it, it was a hard experience, but hard things call for hard guys and I was hard – and I still am.

  The character I portrayed and realised in The Bill was called Patrick Massie. He was Irish. So I decided to carry out extensive research around the pubs of Kilburn where I lived incognito as an Irishman for three and a half hours, moulding a fully realised Irish sensibility. But when I did my new axent on the producers at The Bill, they said they’d much rather have me do the character as an Irishman. Vicious, spiteful bastards. This led to much more researching in pubs – not just in Kilburn but anywhere really. The researching was taking over my life. Quite regularly I would awake in the morning in a small lagoon of my own piss and vomit and I would dry myself off with a hairdryer before heading out again to the pub for more furious researching. I was enriching my character in order to heighten the drama and make my part fully four dimensional.

  In the script, it stated that at the end of the episode with my line in, I was to stand on the roof of a high building and make out that I was going to jump, but in the end not jump. That was very important – the not jumping part – because there was no safety net. I was supposed to make it look like I was about to jump and then they would do some clever special effect to make it look like I’d jumped when actually I was still standing there on the roof. You get the general idea. But the problem was that I’d been getting into character all afternoon in a pub round the corner and it was Bonfire Night. There were fireworks going off everywhere. I was a bit unsteady on my feet as was essential for my character and just at the bit when I was supposed to make it look like I was going to jump and then not actually jump, I was a bit too immersed in my role and I jumped. And they filmed it live and put it in the programme. What they didn’t film and put in the show was that I landed on the back of a passing container lorry and by the time I came to, I had been delivered to Durham Tesco’s. That’s showbiz. Or rather it isn’t. It’s a screaming abortion of a fuck up that I wish I’d never taken part in. It was the nadir of showbusiness ghastliness and incompetence and amateurishness. Although I want to state here and now in my book that the show has improved enormously recently and if they want me to appear again, I’d be delighted, and I am currently available.

  ALL MY GREAT SHOWBUSINESS FRIENDS

  A NATION CLENCHES ITS BUTTOCKS

  I didn’t want to write about this. And I’m not going to. There, see? I just didn’t. But you know, the more I think about it, the more I think I ought to. It’s just such an extraordinary thing, you see, it’s hard to convey. The thing is, it’s never happened to anyone else in the entire human race except me. How often do you get that in a book? Nice buy, viewer. And, you know what, it’s only in the last few quiet months that true reason and memory seem to have returned to me and it is nothing more than a coincidence that I happened to remember it all after Heimi successfully negotiated my book contract and I needed an extra five thousand words. Anybody who says otherwise is a vicious bloody liar. My lawyers are watching.

  I’ll tell you exactly what happened right from the start. It works best that way. Although not always. But that’s another story. And it’s not as good as this one. So I probably won’t tell it to you. But I might – you can never tell with me. I’m such a wild man. Anyway, I had just finished making a three part television drama called In The Red. There I was, being Rik Mayall with everyone raving about my performance in it as Dominic De’Ath, and they were right to because it was pretty bloody special. The rest of the cast were okay as well. There was Richard Griffiths (yes), Richard Wilson (big yes), John Bird (of course) (you won’t have heard of any of them but they’re hugely talented, take it from me) and Siobhan Redmond (another big yes – hi baby, (not yet, it still stings).) The show took longer to wrap* than expected and I was late for the Easter holidays at my Devon-sized chick ranch in South Cornwall. When I arrived at last – at “bloody-motherfucking-last” as we say in showbusiness – my family were overjoyed to see me, as I was to see them. But something stirred deep within my sub-conscious, and uncharacteristically made me seek my own company for a while. I had recently bought a quad bike and decided to take it for a spin around the fields. Two of my many daughters asked if they could come with me but I felt two drops of rain on my arm and told them to go back to the house. And I remember it so well, fired through the prism of my memory with crystal clarity, as they splashed through the puddles towards the house, and I set off down the concrete drive and into my fields.

  You know how I told you about that dream I had when I was a kid that I have always found so unsettling – the one in the field at twilight with the man in the hood, the one who is beckoning to me but I won’t go with him. Well it was as though the dream came to me in my wakeful state right then. All sensation of sitting astride a quad bike melted away. The roar of the engine faded and there I was in the field, the field from my dream. And there was the man from my dream standing there. There he was, wearing the hood. But it was different this time. Every time I had had the dream before, I had been so frightened. But this time, I wasn’t. I didn’t feel any fear at all. It was as if I felt comforted by the man’s presence. And when he beckoned to me this time, I wasn’t scared. At all. I felt a kind of playful happy curiosity. I wanted to know where he wanted to take me. It was as if it was something I needed to do. Not needed, even, it was something that I wanted to do. He led me towards the rise in the field that I had seen so many times before but been so scared of. But now, it was as though this was an entirely new experience, something that I had waited all my life for, and it was not so much terrifying as fascinating. And as I walked forward with a feeling of lightness in my soul, I saw what it was on the other side of the rise in the field. It was a void, a huge huge huge empty space. I was standing on the edge of the world, the actual edge of everything that is. The hooded figure was standing next to me, looking. Then he turned to me and began to pull back his hood. And as the smiling face emerged from the shadows, I felt a sudden jolt, and there, staring back at me, on the shores of eternity was…me. There I was, happier than I ever thought possible, smiling and kind and at peace with the universe. We embraced. We became one. It didn’t hurt or anything. It was just that everything was suddenly something else. I fell vertically into a complete blackness, a total nothing. It was as though everything was magnifie
d a million times, like my body was a thousand miles long – I don’t have words big enough to do it justice. I was utterly alone and upside down and yet, despite the magnitude of my surroundings, it also felt sort of like what I imagine womb-like must be.

  Close the book for a moment but put your finger in this page so you keep your place. Now close your eyes and think about nothing. Really concentrate on nothing, empty your mind. Well that’s what it was like. Now read on. It’s difficult to put this into words. This is an experience that no one else has ever had. I haven’t been able to share it with anyone until now. That’s why writing a book is the best way I can think of to try to express it. I’m not an author. I don’t like books and I don’t read them. But this piece of the story is the reason for writing the book you are holding in your hands at this very moment.

  It was like I was disintegrating as I fell through the void. My flesh started to melt away like it was wax. I felt my lips disappear. My face had gone. I held up my hands and they were bone and they began to splinter. It didn’t really trouble me, it was just what was happening. I was fascinated and thrilled as I disintegrated and fell, safely and at a slow waterfall-type speed. Gradually I just splintered away upside down until I was reduced to a tiny speck of existence within my aircraft-hangar-sized skull which was all that was left of my body. I was alone and tiny standing on the inside of the empty roof of my skull. I looked up to see my teeth and lower jaw float away and then finally, all I could see were my own vast eye sockets like entrances to giants’ caves, until they too were reduced to dust. But I felt no sense of loss. Normal human emotion did not apply. I felt a sense of warmth, happiness even, and I heard myself laughing helplessly as I remembered the Director General of the BBC as he fell down the stairs. But the laughter turned to tears of sadness as I stood in the sea in Weymouth in 1963 as I lost forever my new blue kite that my Granny and Grandpa had just given me. More laughter followed as though competing broadcasts were breaking into each other’s wavelengths and there I was watching Ade with his Doctor Martens up on the desk laughing at me in the lecture theatre in Manchester when I stood up when Professor John Prudhoe came into the room. Then suddenly, there was a rending cracking sound as I remembered falling out of the neighbours’ tree and ended up in a cucumber frame – blood and glass and cucumbers everywhere and my dad came to rescue me. And then I can hear a whirring from an old film projector and I’m watching my dad’s old Super 8 cine film of two little boys walking down the street wearing red caps and Gabardine raincoats like they’re miniature Russian spies. They look up and see the camera and they pretend to hide behind the hedge, and then one of them – me – jumps out with a silver toy pistol and starts shooting at the camera. There’s my dad telling me how I reminded him of his dad when he saw me on stage in Cell Mates with my Irish accent and my short hair. And there’s Rashwood County Primary School with the girls playing on the climbing frame, their legs making squeaking sounds against the metal poles as they spin around and boys (like me) try to see up their skirts. And there’s Jack Pointer the Headmaster, leading a group of little children wearing gas masks along the pavement to an air raid shelter in Wychbold during the war. These thoughts came to me like curving winds in a wood, and they might not mean much to you, viewer, but they mean a whole lot to me.