After he survived an horrific quadbike accident, it's good to see Rik Mayall back on screen, and having fun with friends and family.
There are moments when you're filming that are truly surreal!" says comedian and actor Rik Mayall. He's thinking about a break in filming of his latest TV project, All About George.
"I looked around, and there were four of us. The veteran actress Edna Dore, who plays my granny in the series, was the formidable Butcher grandmother in EastEnders. There was Francis Matthews, who played Paul Temple in several BBC series and who was also the voice of the hero in Captain Scarlet. There was Julia Ford who plays my wife Annie in All About George.
"Like me, she also does voice-over work for TV commercials and we'd worked together in an ad for toilet tissue - I'm the 'vocal talent' of the Andrex puppy, who pulls yards of loo paper across Julia's character's bathroom floor. I thought to myself, This is so cool - a TV icon, an animation hero, Julia and me, Julia's Andrex puppy. It made me laugh!"
Mayall is now firmly back in the saddle and his career is once again forging ahead after the horrific accident he survived seven years ago. He plunged from a quad bike that he was driving on his Devon estate, and his head injuries were so severe that he spent the next five days in a critical condition in deep coma.
"Effectively, I died," he says. "Coming to was a strange process. About three-fifths of my brain was clogged with blood, and the rest was barely functioning.
"The most used bits were bounced around, and - to try to explain this - I was hearing colours and seeing sounds. It was a case of pushing hard to try to make it all function in the right areas again. I think it was about seven months before things started to slip properly into place. It was a terrifying time."
Even now Rik (47) will ask if he's repeating himself or if he's answered a question correctly, and he agrees that stage shows, where lines have to come in precisely the correct order, are, if not impossible, then something of a strain.
You'd never guess. Wisecracking, brilliantly alert and self-deprecating, Mayall is a man clearly at his peak.
The biggest difference between the Rik of old and the Rik of now is his mane of grey hair, clipped trimly short. The last time that he toured with Adrian Edmondson, his Bottom and The Young Ones co-star (and Fame Academy for Comic Relief graduate) he admits that he was dyeing his hair in order to perpetuate his youthful image.
"But then I just thought to myself that it was all stupid, and that I was going grey, and that it was far better to go with the flow. So I had a very short haircut for the rest of the tour. That was the tour where Ade famously slapped me in the face one night with a real cast iron frying pan, and I had to take an ambulance to the local hospital with blood spurting out of a gash above my eye. I've still got the scar to this day.
"The audience thought it was all hilarious, and the special effects were just marvellous. But the reality was that I had to be ambulanced off to the local hospital as soon as the interval arrived, and I spent the next few hours in the casualty department. Getting stitches on a Saturday night is, well, pretty tough. Not one of the best nights of my life!"
The new series, All About George, came to me out of the blue," says Rik. "It's very, very different from anything else that I have ever done. It's a drama comedy, or a comedy-drama, whatever you would like to call It. There are so many things that are true to life in this series, which is a complete departure for me.
"I guess that I did The Young Ones about being a teenager, I appeared in The New Statesman which was about being in my twenties, Bottom was about the time that I was in my thirties and now All About George focuses on a man who is in his late forties and who is in the middle of a huge family, with a ton of responsibilities.
"George is so many things to so many people. He is a son, a grandson and a husband. He is a new grandfather, a father and a stepfather, and he has a large extended family. He's a father-in-law - the permutations go on forever."
"The only area where I am remotely similar to George is that I've got children and that I'm married. But I think that I am a very different father to my three than George is to his brood. And I'm very lucky because my wife Barbara (they've been married for 20 years now) does everything around the house. All I seem to be put in charge of is letting the cat in!"
Barbara and Rik have three youngsters, Rosie (19), Sydney (17) and Bonnie (9), and all he will say about them is that, "Sydney is a terrific rock drummer - he has a huge talent. He's possibly the greatest in the world - but then I would say that, 'cos I'm his dad!"
When you ask him about his own comedy heroes, he gives you the unlikely team of the now disbanded BBC Special Effects Unit at White City in London.
"They could bring to life any bizarrely whacky idea that we could come up with when we were making comedy series for the BBC," he says. "You could say to one of those guys, 'I need to have my head to be taken off and for it to be replaced by a goldfish,' and he would say, 'Interesting, I can do that by half past one this afternoon, is that OK?' They'd go with any bizarre nonsense you came up with.
"Ade and I will definitely go out on the road in live shows again," he promises, "but it will be in a different form. We're getting older every day, let's face it. And in the offing are a new film and my new book, called The Rik Mayall." (His autobiography, naturally.)
He is always "chuffed" when someone comes up for an autograph.
"A lad did in Devon the other day, asking me to sign the DVD of that film I did called Drop Dead Fred, the vast profits of which saved the British film industry, though I never seem to have seen any of them."
He's kidding, of course, since the movie was a complete dud, and didn't do him any favours.
"Oh," he says, "just to be recognised, and for people to tell you that you've made them laugh - well, that's the greatest thing of all."