‘Rik Mayall gave me glorious creative moments’
Tammy GoodingBBC Hereford & Worcester
BBC
Ben Elton said his late friend Rik Mayall featured heavily in his autobiography
Comedian Ben Elton said working with the late Rik Mayall gave him some of “the most glorious creative moments” he had ever had and writing about him helped him to deal with some of his grief over his death.
Mayall, who grew up in Droitwich, Worcestershire, became one of the country’s most famous performers before he died aged 56 in 2014.
The pair met when they were teenagers at the University of Manchester and went on to work on the BBC comedy The Young Ones, as well as Blackadder and Filthy Rich and Catflap.
“Rik was a dear, dear friend – we had our very first professional associations together, which resulted in a spectacular success with The Young Ones,” he told BBC Hereford and Worcester.
“I met him when I was 18 at university but he wasn’t a perfect person, no-one is.”
Elton has just released his autobiography – What have I done? – of which he said Mayall was a large part.
Steve Rapport/Getty Images
Rik Mayall died in 2014 at the age of 56
“He’s sort of part of the DNA of the book and he’s threaded through it a great deal,” he said.
“My relationship with him was so…I would say passionate, in as much as we had a creative meeting of minds which was explosive, and that of course can lead to frictions and can lead to difficulties.”
Elton said it was a “complicated” relationship.
“It was a very close friendship and a very fractured working relationship,” he said.
“As it broke away, there was a lot of pain there as well.
“The book actually opens at his funeral because that was the first really true major tragic loss of my life.”
He added that writing it allowed him to work through some of his grief over Mayall’s death.
“Losing somebody far too young, that is a tragedy and Rik’s death, I think, shocked us all so very much and I still think about it all the time,” he said.
A patron of the comedy festival in Mayall’s memory, which was held for the first time in May, Elton said if he could be involved with next year’s event, he would.
“I was so honoured to be a part of it this time and to sort of be the face on the front of the brochure,” he said.
“Rik would be laughing: ‘Get off my festival… it’s about me’ he’d say.”
