Less than two months later, Rik drops dead at his home in Barnes. I’m in Devon at the time. I live on the edge of Dartmoor and the phone signal is very weak. I’m working in the garden and I’m passing the sweet spot between the pond and the apple tree where the mobile signal is sometimes as much as one bar strong, when the audiobook I’m listening to is interrupted by a phone call.
‘I’m so sorry, it must be awful for you, I know there isn’t but if there’s anything I can do to help,’ says my friend Nick.
‘What about?’ I ask.
‘Oh my God – you don’t know, do you?’
Apparently it’s some time since Rik’s death was flashed across the airwaves. Almost everyone in Britain knows except me. People have been trying to reach me but the signal is so weak they haven’t got through.
Bizarrely, between the pond and the apple tree is exactly the same spot where I stood in 1998 when Rik’s brother Ant rang me to say that he’d had a serious accident on his quad bike.
But this time it’s more serious. The people’s poet is dead.
I feel sorry for you, you zeros, you nobodies. What’s going to live on after you die? Nothing, that’s what. This house will become a shrine, and punks and skins and rastas will all gather round and hold their hands in sorrow for their fallen leader. And all the grown-ups will say: ‘But why are the kids crying?’ And the kids will say: ‘Haven’t you heard? Rick is dead! The People’s Poet is dead!’
Rik’s character Rick in The Young Ones
in 1981 after eating too many laxatives
In the same way that Rik is only different to Rick by one letter, the character of Rick was not too far removed from his own. The above speech was pretty much Rik’s own idea of the kind of youth icon he thought he actually was. He’s making fun of the idea in the speech, but he’s simultaneously enjoying it. He was vain, but saw the comedy in it. He would have been over the moon to be on the front page of every newspaper, to make all the major news bulletins, and to be the subject of a segment on Newsnight as Jeremy Paxman questioned Caitlin Moran about his cultural importance.
His death is a dreadful shock to the world, and to me.
My head fills with a kind of white noise. It’s difficult to comprehend that he’s dead. We drive back to London and go round to his house to see Barbara and the kids.
The house is full. Family and friends have gathered round. Bottles have been opened and . . . it’s like a party, but it’s the oddest party I ever go to. The alcohol serves both to anaesthetize the pain and to release inhibitions. I find myself talking to people and suddenly the howler monkey in me will appear and I’ll be wailing in their faces, then he’ll subside, only to return a few minutes later. Rik’s posthumous son-in-law Red, with whom Rik shared a lot of laughs, seems similarly stricken, and we find ourselves howling at each other, not commenting on it, recovering, and carrying on.
Whereas death brings closure to my difficult relationship with Dad, Rik’s death leaves an open wound. I’m sad that he never understood why I wanted to stop doing Bottom and do other stuff. I don’t miss having to repeat it every time we meet, but I wish he could have settled it in his own mind. I wish we could have got back to simply enjoying each other’s company and laughing at stuff. To be the way we were when we first met. The Hooligan’s Island business ended on such a sour note – a mixture of incomprehension and bad blood – and our friendship suffered as a result in those final two years. I wish it hadn’t.
I write a letter to his mum, Gillian, and she replies and says the sweetest thing. She says she has an abiding memory of standing in her kitchen listening to us as we sat in two deckchairs in her garden just laughing and laughing and laughing. She says it was hard to understand how anything could be so funny.
It’s not a hard and fast rule, but in the writing room I wrote more of his character Richie than he did, and similarly he wrote more of my character Eddie than I did. Our characters are grossly exaggerated versions of ourselves, and we were in love with each other’s characters. When he dies I feel that I’ve lost my champion.
At least I get to read a bit of Waiting for Godot out in the church at his funeral, his favourite line:
‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’
He would have enjoyed that.