An archive of previously unreleased material by Rik Mayall is set to be shown at the second annual Rik Mayall Comedy Festival when it begins on Friday in his home town of Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire. The material will be presented as a Q&A session with producer Elene Hadjidaniel, with Bob Baldwin also due to appear to reflect on their friendship and screen work together.
Baldwin said the archive reaches back across more than 30 years of shared work and included unseen excerpts from projects he made with Mayall. “But where do you start with a relationship that was over 30 years long?” he said, adding that the presentation was built from “a collection of stuff from our time together as creatives, as director and performer, and as our friendship developed.”
The festival is being held to celebrate the legacy of Mayall, who died in 2014 at the age of 56. Last year’s first event was launched to mark the work of a performer whose name was already fixed in British television history through shows such as The Young Ones, Blackadder, Filthy Rich & Catflap and The New Statesman. This year’s showcase reaches into a less familiar part of his career, one that Baldwin says showed how far Mayall could stretch as a performer.
Baldwin and Mayall first worked together in 1989 on the children’s television show Grim Tales, in which Mayall retold stories by the Brothers Grimm. Baldwin said the idea came after Mayall had spent a week-long stint reading George’s Marvellous Medicine on Jackanory, then the pair went to the pub and started shaping the format. He said presenting a children’s programme was a natural progression for Mayall, even if the work demanded constant reinvention from one story to the next.
That flexibility, Baldwin said, was part of what made Mayall so hard to pin down and so easy for children to follow. He described him as a “multi-dimensional performer” who was sometimes playing five characters in each story and moving between them so quickly that the audience was pulled along with him. “He was playing the character, the actor playing the characters, and himself watching the actor playing the characters, sometimes all within the same breath,” Baldwin said. “Every actor has a contract with the audience to suspend disbelief. But somehow, Rik was complicit with the audience in that disbelief, he was never above it.”
He recalled the reach of Mayall’s work on Jackanory, saying: “On the Monday, it started with one million as an audience. And on the Friday, it had gone up to five million.” For Baldwin, the numbers mattered because they showed how Mayall could cross from adult comedy into a children’s slot without losing the sharpness or the mischief that defined him. “So the kids just warmed to it, I think, because they felt he was one of them,” he said.
The event in Droitwich Spa now gives that wider legacy a local setting and a direct voice. What will be shown this week is not a retrospective built only from famous clips, but a personal record of how Baldwin and Mayall worked together, laughed together and turned an improvised idea in a pub into a children’s series that still sits apart from the rest of Mayall’s television career. That is the answer the festival is offering: not just what Mayall was famous for, but how he kept finding new ways to perform.
