Goodbye ‘People’s Poet’. You changed my life forever.

Certain cultural shifts are defined by those figures who embody the energy, vibrancy and immediacy of those periods of change.  For my father’s generation, that figure was Buddy Holly, for me and my group of friends growing up in West Cumbria in the 1980s, that figure was Rik Mayall.

If there’s a real critique of the cultural effect of ‘alternative comedy’ upon teenage boys in the 1980s, I’ve yet to see it. It’s impossible to overstate the impact Mayall had upon my generation. It was a satirical, screaming, intellectual punk – accessible to bookworms and cool types alike – and for boys my age, Rik Mayall was its leader.

When the ‘Young Ones’ tore into my living room in 1982 my life changed. But for the ‘People’s Poet’ I would never have wanted to experience the squalor and madness of university life, and without that I wouldn’t be writing this tribute sat at my desk in Westminster today.

Buddy Holly made my father pick up a guitar, Rik Mayall made me crave comedy, satire and politics. He made me want to write, he made me want to think and he made me and every one of my friends want to be him.  The character of Prik (silent ‘P’) was like nothing I had ever seen before. He made me want to hold up a bank and threaten Margaret Thatcher, he made me fancy  Felicity Kendal and I still avoid the rickety chair.

Our playground used to echo with “Vyvyan, you bastard!” and “Hands up who likes me?” Watched for the first time towards the end of primary school; at secondary school the repeats were looked forward to like Christmas Day. There was nothing like ‘The Young Ones’ and nobody like Rik Mayall. For me and my friends, he taught us dissent – the same spirit that drove rock and roll decades before.

Our love for Mayall followed him in whichever role he played. Aided and abetted by Adrian Edmondson, the ‘Comic Strip’ and ‘Bottom’ hit different notes to the ‘The Young Ones’ but contained trace elements of genius all the same.

‘The New Statesman’ was a phenomenon. It set the tone for the school week and it always chimed with my adolescent loathing (there’s no point in trying to dress it up) for the Conservative government of the same period. Rude, funny, satirical, subversive – and as I’ve come to find out – often accurate, ‘The New Statesman’ became a guide for many through those days of Tory rule.

One of Mayall and Edmondson’s greatest pieces of work was ‘Filthy, Rich & Catflap’. A sitcom in the vein of ‘The Young Ones’ and a satire of celebrity, vanity and sloth – it never received the acclaim it deserved.

Rik Mayall outlived satire in England, nobody knows when this died, but nobody has seen it for years. He was a genuinely important and original cultural figure. He enthralled and excited. He was a genius. He made my life and the lives of my friends better. When I went to university, I realised it wasn’t just me, but a generation of working class and middle class boys from all over the country who felt the same way. Whatever he was saying, he spoke for us: he was our hero.

I remember the first time a joke made my mouth fall open, sent electricity up my spine and tears of laughter down my face:

“Neil! The bathroom’s free, unlike the country under the Thatcherite junta.”

Goodbye ‘People’s Poet’. You changed my life forever.