Review of a new documentary about the comedy genius

The screen never could contain Rik Mayall, and even this feature-length documentary can only scratch the surface of his phenomenal talent – while also covering the demons that dogged him when his career supernova started to cool. 

He seemed to explode into the world as a fully-formed comedy genius.  Ben Elton recalls first seeing him performing at a comedy night at Manchester University in 1977 getting huge laughs from saying ‘Hi. I’m Rik Mayall’, simply from the attitude he brought – this ‘slightly spotty 20-year-old’ carrying himself with a swagger that said: ‘Look, I know I’m going to be a star, you know I’m going to be a star, let’s get it all out of the way and just celebrate.’

And Adrian Edmondson, who also met him at uni, recalls him being ‘thoroughly uncomplicated’. ‘He was a boy out for a good time,’ his long-term double-act partner says. ‘He wanted to have a few beers and go to bed with ladies and he wanted for everyone to think he was great. 

‘It was very funny. It was very amusing. He was a charmer. People loved being with him because there was no side because he was out for a laugh.’

We also hear from Lloyd Peters, the third member of the sketch group 20th Century Coyote, and often unfairly relegated to a footnote in the history of alternative comedy.

The first part of Magnificent B’stard is packed with great archive footage of both Mayall and the cultural landscape of the late 1970s, defined by punk and social unrest, from which his over-the-top act erupted with such seismic force.

This includes reportage from the opening night of the Comedy Store, where Rik and Ade found fame as the furiously bickering Dangerous Brothers; and the Edinburgh Fringe, where a rather snooty journalist’s voiceover reports that the open-access nature of the festival means that ‘even this undergraduate manic conductor​ has his place.’ The student in question being one Rowan Atkinson.

More surprising for any comedian bracing themselves for heavy losses at the Fringe in August might be the fact that Rik and Ade’s show, Death On The Toilet, earned them more in three weeks than they’d net in three months in the factory jobs they were doing at the time.

Without covering every beat of Mayall’s career trajectory, the film gives space to his contemporaries (often shot in a rather confronting overhead close-up) to offer analysis of what made him special in those early years. Elton assesses that Mayall so accurately skewered the ‘vainglorious’ drama students who surrounded him, while Edmondson attributes their appeal to the fact ‘we don’t let up’, acknowledging that they had ‘shit material, but we performed the bollocks out of it’.

The career tentpoles are covered: The Young Ones, Filthy Rich and Catflap (a series Mayall thought was among his finest work, even if audiences did not agree), Bottom, Lord Flashheart in Blackadder, and The New Statesman, where his portrayal of venal Tory MP Alan B’stard reflected a slight maturing of his comedy grotesques. The mention of any of these might easily have you reaching for YouTube to rewatch the rightful classics. 

On stage, there was Waiting For Godot with Edmondson – who says that the futility of Samuel Beckett combined with ‘Wile E Coyote violence’ was the essence of their double act – and Cell Mates, where Mayall’s involvement was overshadowed by Stephen Fry fleeing the production because of what turned out to be a little-understood mental health crisis. With the media referring to the mysteriously absent Fry as the star of the show, Mayall, for the first time appeared overlooked, a feeling he was not at all happy with. It heralded the start of a period of being in unfamiliar territory when he was ‘suddenly not able to do what he wanted’.

This is the beginning of the tears-of-a-clown narrative that gives the second part of the film a different tone, reflecting the more troubled second half of Mayall’s career. And while he was always the life and soul in public, his daughter Bonnie confesses that ‘he wasn’t always "on" with us’, without going in to too much detail.

It is here that Magnificent B’stard most significantly differs from the BBC tribute Lord Of Misrule, which aired in 2014, just months after his death at the age of 56 while out jogging. Edmondson’s very notable absence from that project was assumed at the time to be down to simple grief. But, as it has later emerged, the truth was more complicated than that as their relationship had, by that time, completely broken down because his erstwhile colleague’s drinking had become an insurmountable problem.

‘The worst thing that happened to him was getting paid, because he could afford to drink spirits,’ he says in this film, recalling how he confronted Mayall about how his drinking was ruining  a live tour of Bottom. It seems the convivial bon viveur could not take the advice of the gambling ads: ‘When the fun stops, stop.’

Mayall’s 1998 quad bike accident also had a greater effect than was assumed at the time – the brain injury leaving him with epilepsy and memory problems that diminished his later work. Though by the time he was playing Greg Davies’ dad on Man Down – a definite career renaissance – he appeared to be managing it well, by his co-star’s account. 

For his part, Edmondson now seems to have come to terms with Mayall’s later-year problems, and the devastating effects they had on their partnership and friendship. He sums it all up perfectly by stating: ‘Something went a bit awry but we should mostly remember that he was a fucking genius.’

This fascinating film is effective in covering both parts of that appraisal.

• Rik Mayall: Magnificent B’stard is on Sky Documentaries at 9pm tonight.  It will be followed by a compilation entitled Rik Mayall’s Sketches: Rare and Unseen,  at 11pm on Sky Arts.

Review date: 25 Jun 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett