AS SHE glanced out of the bathroom window, something strange caught Barbara Mayall's eye.
At first she couldn't quite work out what was wrong. It was like a jigsaw with not so much a piece missing as the wrong piece forced into the wrong place. It jarred.
"Something was odd, out of place," Barbara says. "It was something in the yard, something that normally wasn't there.
"Then it hit me. It was the upturned wheels of the quad bike."
In panic, Barbara, 42, and her elder daughter Rosie ran as fast as they could out of the farmhouse, past the barns to the bike.
"As we ran towards it, all I could see was a head. At first, I thought it was our son Sid. Then I realised it was Rik," she says, speaking for the first time about the freak accident that almost killed her husband.
"He was just lying there on his back, arms outstretched, his face turned up to the sky, not moving."
Only 20 minutes earlier Rik had returned to Pasture Farm, their Devon home, after a two-day trip to London.
He was in good spirits. The meeting to discuss Jellabies, a new cartoon project, had gone exceptionally well. He'd rarely felt happier.
At 40, he had another exciting opportunity lined up. But then, ever since he found fame at the age of 22 as spotty student Rick in the cult comedy The Young Ones, his life had been full of them.
Acclaim seemed to have followed Rik's every move... as Alan B'Stard in the political sitcom The New Statesman, as Richie in the anarchic comedy Bottom, as a serious actor in Rik Mayall Presents. And now he'd just won an award for his role in the film Bring Me The Head Of Mavis Davis.
Happily married for 12 years with three children - Rosie, 11, Sid, nine, and Bonnie, two - he was looking forward to their first family Easter at the Devon farmhouse they'd fallen in love with and bought the previous June.
It was 5pm on Maundy Thursday when he arrived home. Barbara was ironing and chatting to her younger sister Karen when Rik popped his head round the door.
Distractedly, she said: "Hi". As she was busy, Rik went outside to play with the children.
Scooping up Bonnie and his four-year-old niece Red, he said: "Let's have a go on the quad bike."
The four-wheeled motorbike had been a Christmas present to the whole family from Barbara. They all loved it. It was it fun, and, with its huge rubber tyres, it felt both safe and stable.
Rik placed Bonnie and Red in front of him, between his arms, and at one mile an hour drove the bike out of the garage.
Then something strange happened - almost a premonition of the disaster waiting to wreck his idyllic existence.
"It was a very blustery day and I thought I felt a couple of spots of rain, even though there wasn't any," says Rik.
"This feeling suddenly swept over me and I thought, 'Hang on this is dangerous'. It was as if someone had tapped me on the shoulder and said 'Get the kids off'.
"I wasn't being stupid. I wasn't planning on roaring off like a madman. I was just going to give them a little ride, very slowly. But something stopped me."
Rik lifted Red and Bonnie off the bike and asked his son Sid to play with them in the barn. Then he fired the engine and moved off alone at a leisurely pace.
No one knows what happened next. Rik remembers chugging off. He remembers he wasn't wearing a crash helmet. "I just don't know why I didn't," he says. "I suppose I thought I would be fine on the farm."
He remembers driving past the barns along a stretch of concrete road leading to their nine acres of fields. "It's not very steep, just a gentle slope."
He doesn't remember how he came to be lying where Barbara found him - lying unconscious, bike upturned, after falling head first on to the concrete.
"Before I reached the bike, I stopped in my tracks, stock still. It's as if you know something is wrong and so you stop to wait for it to correct itself," Barbara says.
"The wind was howling but that moment somehow seemed very still. I was just kept waiting for him to move... but he didn't.
"I told Rosie to run back to the house and tell Karen to phone for an ambulance.
"I went towards Rik and righted the bike. I don't know why. It wasn't on top of him. Perhaps I thought it was too close to him.
"Then I looked down at him. He was lying on his back with his face turned to the sky and there was a lot of very dark blood coming out of his nose and ears, and a pool of blood around his head.
"This horrible rasping noise was coming from his throat and I could see bubbles of blood coming from his mouth.
"I was desperately trying to think, saying to myself over and over again, 'What do you do? What do you do? What do you do?' I just didn't know.
"I saw Sid, who'd run down to help. I looked up at him and shouted: 'What's the recovery position? What's the recovery position?' "When the kids watch 999 on television they are all on the floor practising the recovery position. But all I could remember was Sid and Rosie playing, not what they were doing.
"Poor Sid was standing there desperately trying to remember. He gripped his head and went, 'Come on brain! Come on brain!'
Barbara gently rolled Rik on his side, worried he would choke. Then a new terror gripped her.
"No sooner was he in the recovery position than I thought, 'Have I done the right thing?'
"Maybe his back was broken and moving him was the worst thing I could have done? I just didn't know. I was gasping for breath, trying to keep calm. "I was talking to him all the time. I just kept saying, 'It's all right Rik, the ambulance is coming. You're going to be all right." All the things you hope you will never have to say."
It was 5.30pm when the emergency services took Karen's call.
The operator could hear kids screaming in the background and said to Karen "What's happened?"
As she'd not seen Rik, all Karen could say was: "I don't know, I've been told to call an ambulance, my brother-in-law is unconscious."
Sensing the panic, the little children started running down to the bike to find out what was going on.
"It was awful," Barbara says. "I just couldn't let the kids see him like that. I was desperate to get them away."
Worried that Rik had suffered a broken back and terrified she'd done the wrong thing by putting him in the recovery position, Barbara held her husband's head in her hands in a desperate effort to keep his spine straight.
"The back of his head was a mass of blood and I thought his brains were falling out," she says.
"In fact, there was no damage to the back of his head. But I couldn't tell because there was so much blood pouring out of his ears and mixing with his hair.
"I knew it was very serious but I wouldn't allow myself to think he might die. I was just desperate to get him the right help."
With the ambulance on the way, Karen rushed back to her sister with a blanket and napkins to stem the flow of blood.
"I held a napkin to the back of his head and wrapped the blanket around us as I held him," Barbara remembers.
"I could hear the ambulance siren from miles away across the fields. It was reassuring to know that it was coming ,but I kept thinking, 'When will it get here?'
"It felt like for ever, but it must only have been 15 minutes."
When the paramedics arrived, Barbara, in her shocked state, was gabbling: "I didn't see the accident, I don't know what happened... I found him on his back... Have I done the right thing moving him?"
"You watch Casualty and ER and everything happens like clockwork," Barbara says. "But this was real life and nothing like the television. They were very lovely men and very clued up. They realised how serious it was and radioed for the Devon Air Ambulance - but it was in Torquay and unavailable."
It would have taken 40 minutes to take Rik by road to the head trauma unit at Derriford Hospital, in Plymouth, so the paramedics phoned for the police helicopter.
The sound of the rotor blades could be heard for miles. As it came in to land, the farmer next door thought it was his famous neighbour arriving in style for Easter weekend.
He was not to know that Rik's life was in the balance and the helicopter was coming to take him away. It landed in a field, bringing a woman police officer to the scene.
Barbara says: "She was wonderful to me, calming me down and telling me that everything would be fine.
"There was no room in the helicopter for me to travel with Rik, and I just stood there as he flew off.
"I didn't know if I would ever see him alive again."
While Karen, 35, and her husband Chris stayed to look after the kids, Barbara was driven to the hospital by her friend Diana Cooper.
"As I left the house, the children asked me, 'Is Daddy going to die?' What can you say? I told them the truth. I said, 'I don't know, I don't think so, but I don't know'."
During the 30-minute drive, Barbara had time to reflect on her 12 happy years of marriage.
She realised that they had been extraordinarily fortunate. Her funny, versatile, talented husband had never been out of work.
But, more than that, he was the perfect partner and father.
Only a few weeks earlier, Barbara had thrown a big 40th birthday party for Rik at the Irish Club in Eaton Square, London.
She says: "That night we had looked at each other and said 'My God, we're lucky'. We had each other and three kids we adored."
"We'd just bought Pasture Farm and life couldn't have been any happier for us. "
Now it seemed as if their luck had deserted them in the cruellest way.
As Barbara dashed into the accident and emergency department, she had no idea if Rik was even alive.