Session with his Grim Tales collaborator Bob Baldwin

A treasure trove of previously unseen material from Rik Mayall’s career will be showcased at the second annual festival held in his honour.

Director Bob Baldwin, who collaborated with the late comedian on the Grim Tales children’s series is hosting a session at the event in Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire, on Saturday.

He promises ‘some work that has never been broadcast before’  from their work together, which also included:

• Tales of Uplift and Moral Improvement – a dark 2001 BBC Choice comedy-drama in which Mayall played a 120-year-old Edwardian woman named Ffine Carmody 
• The 1993 experimental TV musical and comedy film Horse Opera, composed by The Police’s Stewart Copeland and with Mayall as Wyatt Earp in the badlands of the American West
• Violent Nation, a 2004 Discovery documentary  series Mayall narrated about hidden violence in Britain's past.

Speaking to the BBC about his session, Baldwin said: ‘Where do you start with a relationship that was over 30 years long? 

‘[The festival show] is a collection of stuff from our time together as creatives, as director and performer, and as our friendship developed.’

He said the pair came up with the idea of Grim Tales, which ran on ITV and Channel 4 from 1989 to 1991, in a session down the pub after Mayall had completed a stint reading George's Marvellous Medicine on Jackanory.

‘He was a multi-dimensional performer,’ explained Baldwin. In Grim Tales, he was sometimes playing five characters in each story. He was playing the character, the actor playing the characters, and himself watching the actor playing the characters, sometimes all within the same breath.’

‘He was a lovely, generous, thoughtful friend,’ he added. ‘He had the most brilliant laugh, a generous and beautiful laugh, that was infectious.

‘He was the kind of guy that if there was a party, and there was somebody in the room that didn't quite feel comfortable or fit in, he would make sure they did.’

The festival, which opens on Friday,  was launched last year to celebrate the legacy of Mayall, who died in 2014 at the age of 56.

This year, the nine-day event features more than 300 performances over 30 venues and organisers say that with four days still to go, they have already sold more tickets to this year’s festival than they did for all of last year’s.

» Festival website

Published: 25 May 2026