Maintain Radio Silence: June 2014

On the morning of Tuesday the ninth of November, 1982, before going to school, I had a look in my parent's copy of the Sun while I had breakfast. In the centre of the TV listings they featured a photo of a programme that was starting that evening. The photograph didn't contain anyone I recognised, but something about the four people in the photograph and the write-up of the show made me think it looked interesting. I think it was probably quite understated, because I distinctly remember thinking it looked interesting, in the way that a BBC Play For Today might have been. I remember being very intent on watching it.

So that night, in my last year of primary school, I watched the first episode of The Young Ones.

And the world changed.

If I look back at all the influences on my life, all the music I've loved, books I've read, I can't think of anything or anyone that's had such a profound influence on my world as that tv show. It was still a very long time before I would be the age of its' target audience, but over the years that followed I would eventually become an amalgamation of all the characters, in shared houses with mental landlords, lots of metal, lots of hashish, bad poetry and punk politics. With the total absence of university to worry about and a very easy ride in dole culture if you were happy to live on a pittance, which I was, it was easy to become the people I'd been studying for the preceding years, in every Young Ones' related book or record that came out. They had completely taken the piss, but hanging round in a house doing nothing but getting high or shouting had actually been quite an attractive proposition, as it turned out.

But ultimately, the humour. I can't imagine what my life would be like if I hadn't grown up with Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson shouting at me. Rik completely coloured my world.

When I finally got into a senior school that I liked, after some hiccups with the first one (another story) and a long winter spent on my own waiting for things to be sorted out, I became friends with a lad called John, whose humour was also utterly defined by the surrealism and insanity personified by Rik, Ade and the rest of them. We became the two Johns, a miniature version of the Dangerous Brothers, at least in our own minds.

I hung on to every thing Rik did. One week he was on Jackanory reading Roald Dahl's 'George's Marvellous Medicine', and was scheduled to appear live with the children's presenter on one of the days it was shown. From the first creepy "hello children...!!!" you could feel the children's BBC team wondering if they'd done the right thing.

Sometime in the early nineties, my sister Joan and I went to see Rik Mayall live at Middlesbrough Town Hall, supported by Andy De La Tour (the 'think once, think twice, think don't drive your car on the pavement' man). When the lights went down for Rik's appearance, the stage remained empty, and we just heard him whimpering over the PA in fear... "will they love me...? (whimper, whimper, fart) Wait - of course they will - I'm Rik Mayall, the funniest man in the fucking world!!!" He then gave himself the big introduction and burst on stage with pyrotechnics blasting, with his hair gelled up into a single spike "for picking up chicks." His whole act was totally insane, didn't seem to have any linear logic to it, had some story about a fish that he kept going back to, and was unbelievably funny. I remember seeing the Town Hall ushers stood around, doubled up and crying.

Rik Mayall is an absolute hero. It's not just any old famous person that we've lost here; he was the absolute core of something immensely special. He was massive. A force of nature.

I wanted to put a link here to Rik and Ade's masterpiece, Mr Jolly Lives Next Door. Youtube and probably some copyright business doesn't want me to though. Never mind.