The BBC once rejected Rik Mayall for the lead role in a Ben Elton sitcom, because they feared he was too over-the-top for a mainstream audience.
But perhaps the Bottom star had a narrow escape – for the project was The Wright Way, a show critics dubbed ‘the worst sitcom ever’ when it was broadcast in 2013.
In his new autobiography, What Have I Done?, Elton, below reveals that he conceived the comedy with Mayall in mind for the lead role of divorced council health and safety officer Gerald Wright.
He admitted the BBC expressed ‘nervous doubt’ about reuniting the writer with Mayall, despite the success they had in the 1980s with The Young Ones.
However, executives agreed for Mayall to do a table read for the role, a common process Elton calls ‘a grim practice in which a group of actors gather in a meeting room and read from scripts to a fiercely non-committal comedy politburo’.
He writes that the session in Television Centre went ‘terribly well,’ writing: ‘Rik was (as ever) on fire… His massive, exuberantly scene-stealing performance [was] so bold and so grotesque it seemed to be pushing at the very walls of the mean little meeting room into which we were all squeezed.
‘Perhaps that as the problem. He was just too big for that small room. Not that we realised it in the fun of the moment. In fact, as the stone faces of the execs broke into smiles - occasional laughs even - we thought it had been a success.’
Elton said that the commissioners called him that night to greenlight the show, but without Mayall, who they described as ‘too rich a presence’ for a mainstream piece.
He says: ‘The knock-back on The Wright Way was a hammer blow for Rik and telling him so hard. He’d been convicted that the read had gone brilliantly and that we’d won the day. It was an awful, awful shock.’
Instead ,David Haigh, who had previously starred alongside Rowan Atkinson in Elton’s police comedy The Thin Blue Line was cast in the lead role alongside Joanne Matthews as his daughter and Beattie Edmondson as her girlfriend. And in the end, it went out not in the mainstream early-evening slot as originally, but at 10.30pm.
Critics slated the show, Adam Postans in the Daily Mirror called it 'the worst sitcom ever’; The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage said ‘the whole thing is irredeemably dreadful’; and in the Radio Times,David Butcher called it ‘creaky and laboured’ and ‘irrelevant’.
In his memoirs Elton says the show was ‘savaged out of all proportion to its quality (even if it was shit) or its ambition (which was light entertainment) and Rik was furious at on my behalf’ – adding that Mayall sent him a text offering to ‘kill the cunts’.
While the BBC rejected Mayall for the Wright Way, the following year they would commission a new series of Bottom, based on the Hooligan's Island stage show he performed with Adrian Edmonson (Beattie’s dad).
However it led to a falling out between the partners, with Edmonson believing the project wasn’t working despite Mayall being desperate to make it happen.
Mayall died on June 9, 2014, aged 56.
• What Have I Done? is available from Amazon, priced £12.50 in hardback – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.
Here is episode one of The Wright Way:
