A F***ing Good Life: Remembering Rik Mayall
Remembering Rik Mayall – An American perspective
I fell in love with a man on the day he died. They say you learn a lot about a person by reading an obituary, but I was never one of those maudlin obit collectors. But I saw the name Rik Mayall cross my screen early on the morning of June 9, and I felt a rush in my ears. My Facebook post about it only garnered one comment. There were only a few of my friends who even knew, or cared, who Rik Mayall was. And that broke my heart.
I learned about Rik Mayall when I was 22-year-old college student in 1985—the first time his landmark comedy series “The Young Ones,” which he created, wrote, and starred, splashed across MTV. We knew at the time that we were living in a unique time in history; we were very aware that the ‘80s were going to be written about and satirized and romanticized later, and for me, Rik Mayall represented a comic version of everything I loved—and hated—about the 1980s.