A fall from his quad bike led to an extraordinary near-death experience for the anarchic comedian Rik Mayall. He tells how one result is that he is now a happier man
Rik Mayall is in character. Let's get a room, he suggests. "We're having an affair," he informs the hotel concierge. I steer him into the afternoon tea hall, where he launches into a grand and comic speech in which he lists his achievements and invites his legions of followers to be happy.
"I've entertained the globe, met God, I'm a globally acclaimed international phenomenon. That is why I've decided to spread my largess to my people."
And so on. And then, after a minute or so, he struggles to recall the name of an actress with whom he once worked. "That's because I've been dead for five days. I have my weaknesses. Well, we've got an hour, so I can pause. And you won't write what a brain-damaged old todger he is."
Two things are going on here. The first is that Rik Mayall has spent almost 30 years hiding in public behind layer upon layer of cultivated anarchy, and is determined to keep the mask in place. Think of him as Rick in The Young Ones, as Rich in Filthy Rich and Catflap, as Alan B'stard in The New Statesman, or fooling around with Ade Edmondson in Bottom. Think of him as an acclaimed serious actor if you must - he 's earned his stripes there too - but please don't try to peep behind the bigged-up persona he so assiduously presents.
Second, as is well known, in 1998 Rik fell off a quad bike, spent five days in a coma and nearly died. This is both big heavy stuff and good comic material. "I like the fact that I was dead for five days, and then I came back because I haven't finished yet. Implies a kind of power. Heh, heh, heh," he laughs spookily.
There is much more in this vein in his new book, The Rik Mayall: Bigger than Hitler, Better than Christ, 300 pages of egotistical ranting that he refers to as an "autobiognovel" because it is a ludicrous - and in places very funny - fusion of fact and comic fantasy. But within it are a few pages in which he is serious, and these concern the fears that propel him, and the quad-bike accident which may have left him occasionally light on memory but which has inevitably made him more ready, at 47, to admit that life is good.
"Of course I'm f***ing happy. Look, I'm not dead," he says, though he feels honour bound to prevaricate. "Now I've got to be careful here. I don't want to come across as 'It's made me cherish things more'," he says in a soppy voice. " 'It's made me love people more'.
"You need my face sometimes to see the irony in a line. Read this the right way - it's made me grateful to be alive and that means more than it sounds. If it's raining and you think, oh f***, it's raining, you think, hey, it's not raining on a corpse. And that's a pretty awkward thing to say. It's pretty amazing, isn't it? So yeah, I'm afraid so.
"There's a kind of male menopause guys get when their tummies get bigger and they don't see quite so well and they're not walking down the street with girls looking at them any more. And there's something nourishing in the fact that I had my menopause like that. Woke up and you're a bit older. For a year or two I couldn't run around the place and dance and things like that, but it was easier than having to go through a big depression, as men do."
This is a big confession, because he is admitting that in spite of his sometimes adolescent humour, he has grown up, and doesn't mind. Well, not much. He still smokes, but otherwise he's healthier because the medication he takes to ward off epileptic fits - he has had two - have forced him to give up alcohol. He certainly looks good, great teeth, and he leans forwards as he talks, animated of course, a physically expansive and, I imagine, needy, man.
"Mornings are some of my happiest times. Often I wake up before the kids (he has three) and I'll be wandering around at five in the morning.
"Being famous, being alone, is a rarity. But I love being famous. I'm a vast, international, globally accomplished shifting cultural phenomenon."
This is the pattern of our conversation: a glimpse of a human being followed by a retreat into caricature. So I yank him back again by reminding him that the reason he went out on the quad bike was because he wanted to be alone. True, he says, he'd been working with Stephen Fry, arrived late at his Devon farmhouse for the Easter holidays, and found his family engaged in "another" conversation. "I wanted to be away from everybody for a moment."
What happened next is described in a chapter of his book entitled A Nation Clenches its Buttocks. As he drove into the fields on his quad bike, he experienced the recurring dream he has had throughout his life and which has always troubled him, in which he is being beckoned by a man wearing a hood.
"I set off into my fields...it was as though the dream came to me in my wakeful state right then. All sensation of sitting astride a quad bike melted away. The roar of the engine faded and there I was in the field from my dream. And there was the man from my dream standing there....wearing the hood. But it was different this time. Every time I had had the dream before, I had been so frightened. This time I wasn't. It was as if I felt comforted by the man's presence. I felt a kind of playful, happy curiosity. I wanted to know where he wanted to take me. It was as if it was something I needed to do."
The man led him to a rise in the field. "It was as though this was an entirely new experience and it was not so much terrifying as fascinating. And as I walked forward with a feeling of lightness in my soul, I saw what it was on the other side of the rise in the field. It was a void, a hug huge huge empty space. I was standing on the edge of the world, the actual edge of everything that is...there I was, happier than I had ever felt possible, smiling and kind and at peace with the universe. We embraced. We became one. It didn't hurt or anything. It was just that everything was suddenly something else. I fell vertically into a complete blackness, a total nothing."I ask why he is obsessed with death - the hooded man of his dream is one of numerous apocalyptic references scattered throughout his book. He pauses and methodically touches the tip of each of his fingers with the lighted end of his cigarette.
"It hadn't occurred to me before. But it's a pretty powerful thing. I like strong things. I'm not violent, but I like violence - well, it's a big subject. I adore Laurel and Hardy - they make me laugh because there's something horrible happening, but it's not happening. And the violence in the attitudes of the Goons - I like the speed and mayhem, sort of like not being alive, isn 't it? Yeah, that's what it is, it's about not being mortal. It's fantastic because you can do whatever you like and there's no responsibility. Laughter is a relief at something not being real. You're getting very close to the things you're afraid of and then they're not there. There's excitement in the act of fear itself. That makes me happy, it does, but I'm happy anyway."
I believe him. He has been married for nearly two decades to Barbara, a former make-up artist. "A tough Glaswegian bird - she'd make me eat broken bottles if I put a foot wrong," he says, and I take this as a sign that she is hugely capable and understands that for all his considerable charm, he is a man who needs to be mothered.
Neither can she miss his raging professional insecurities and his hunger to continue to succeed - right at the beginning of our conversation he admits, in caricature naturally, that he worries that "the ordinaries" - his admirers - will interpret his autobiography as the end of his career. Later, on several occasions, he repeats this concern out of caricature.
Fortunately he is about to appear in All About George, a mainstream ITV drama written by Mike Bullen, a Cold Feet writer, which offers ample evidence that inside the alternative comedian known as Rik Mayall is an engaging and empathetic actor more than capable of loving his wife, as opposed to his frequently expressed preference for shagging top birds. Or saying he does.
George is nice, I say, he's good and kind, ordinary and normal - Mr Mortgage, not Mr Obnoxious Wild Man. Doesn't this expose Rik Mayall? He responds by saying that he has chosen not to make endless versions of series he's been involved with before because it is best to stop when you are at the top. "I'm here for 30 years, I'm here till I drop. I don't pretend to be young. That's why I'm doing George, because it's so different. It's about identity, about growing older, it's about responsibility, about coping. The best stuff you do - there's a lot of you in there.
"All I fear is that people think I've sold out, sold myself soft. But don't write that or I'll kill you," he says with a dangerous leer. "I know where you live."
I'll take the risk.
The Rik Mayall: Bigger than Hitler, Better than Christ, HarperCollins, £18.99. All About George, ITV1, Thursday, September 29, 9pm