Bigger than Hitler, Better than Christ

by Rik Mayall

In this electrifying autobiography, Rik stands naked in front of his vast legions of fans and disciples and invites them to take communion with the blood he has spilled for them during his thirty year war on show business. He invented alternative comedy with The Young Ones, he brought down the Thatcher administration with The New Statesman and he changed the face of global culture with his masterpiece Bottom. Not only was his number one single ‘Living Doll’ the saviour of rock 'n' roll but he also rescued the British film industry with the vast revenues created by his legendary movie Drop Dead Fred. In 1998, he survived an assassination attempt and spent five days in a coma before he literally came back from the dead.

Having completed countless phenomenal feature films, TV series, live extravaganzas and radio voice-overs since then, Rik Mayall is now poised on the brink of a whole new epoch-shattering revolution. For the first time ever, Rik reveals in print the deep inner truth behind his gargantuan ascent to the pinnacle of international light entertainment – the mental hospitals he has broken out of, the television executives he has assaulted, the drugs he has definitely not taken, the charities he has bankrupted, the countless pregnancies he has engendered, and so much more.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Humor, Autobiography, Comedy, Biography Memoir, Comedian

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Richard Michael "Rik" Mayall was an English comedian, writer and actor. Mayall was best known for his comedy partnership with Adrian Edmondson, his over-the-top, energetic portrayal of characters, and as a pioneer of alternative comedy in the early 1980s. He appeared in numerous sitcoms including The Young Ones, Blackadder, The New Statesman and Bottom and even onto the big screen in comedy films Drop Dead Fred and Guest House Paradiso.

Reviews

[[ J o ]]

If you're wanting to know about Rik's early life, his family and career, I suppose you could say you're in the wrong place. If, however, you are looking for more of his pure humour and genius then welcome, friend, please take a seat.

Now that Rik's gone, there's just a massive hole left in the world and nothing will ever fill it.

[Redfox5]

Dear Rik, I have been a fan since I was small child and my parents felt it was appropriate for me to stay up with them and watch Bottom and the Young Ones. None of my primary school chums had heard of your shows and I felt cool becuase I got to watch them. I was hugely excited (ooo err) about reading your book and as I turned the pages at the start, I was laughing quiet often at your amazing godlike wit. Then something strange happened....I got bored. I know that your book has been written as a joke version of your life and I get that. But it got a bit repetitve after a while, the gags were coming thick and fast (ooo err) but they were just all the same. I wish that after the first chapter or so, you had dropped the jokes and just told your life story. I think you could have sold books with a serious life story and the fans would have been happy. All this book has made me want to do was finish it quickly and watch Bottom. Stick to the day job. Don't write anymore books.

Your fan
Laura.

[Steve Mitchell]

I'm sure that if Rik Mayall had written an ordinary autobiography without all the fictionalised digressions here he still would have been able to produce a really funny book. This is neither one thing or the other. The chapter about his recovery from the five-day coma following the quad bike accident shows just what he could have achieved if he had stuck to the task of an autobiography. Many of his attempts at humour just fall flat. The joke that he will not allow his manuscript to be proof read or edited becomes tedious after a while; I became sick of the spelling errors, poor grammar and confused homophones about thirty pages in. The less said about the footnotes the better. I am a big fan of Rik but this was a huge disappointment: if he had stuck to the truth and saved the jokes for a genuine work of fiction I could have had two books that I would probably have added to a list of favourites.

[Jimbo]

I grew up obsessed with Bottom (Ooer.) Really. I watched all three series on a loop from 12 years old until…well, I still do. To a lesser extent I love Filthy Rich and Catflap and the Young Ones. And to an extent lesser than that I enjoyed the Comic Strip. I also loved Blackadder and Lord Flashheart was always my favourite character.

I felt it important to preface with this as I wanted to make clear that I am a huge Rik Mayall fan. Outside of Axl Rose, he was my hero growing up. When the great man died I felt a part of me died with him. Ade was good, but Rik was always the best. For some strange reason I always related to his character Richard Richard. Don’t know what that says about me.

Although I had read many reviews of this book before taking it on, I overlooked them all. I knew that as such a lover of Rik that I would find anything he does hilarious. How wrong could I be.

It is with a heavy heart that I surmise that this is the worst book I have ever had the misfortune of reading. I was yearning for stories about the creation of the Young Ones and Bottom. I wanted back stage stories, funny script writing quips, back stage drunkenness. I got none of this. What I got instead was the insane ramblings of somebody, whom had I not spent a lifetime worshipping, I would have thought was…well…a bit of a clip.

The Rik Mayall (the character) is just not that funny. In fact, he’s not funny in the slightest. He’s actually boring. Wow, I never thought I would use that word to describe the great man. But I have. Because he is.

If you, like me, grew up playing ‘put a piece of sellotape on the fridge’ then my greatest advice would be not to tarnish your memories by reading this piece of dribble. My biggest regret is that Rik never got to write a proper biography before he departed this mortal coil. As he never did, you are better off just rewatching your old dvds rather than put yourself through this unreadable trash.

[Chris Leib]

Learned absolutely NOTHING about Rik Mayall's perosnla life, but what a great read! His humour is the best!

[J.T. Wilson]

You know Rik Mayall, the iconic sex god of light entertainment who burst onto the scene like a nuclear warhead exploding all over the faces of 1980s telly, and I’m not talking about his nob readers! It’s Rik Mayall, beloved actor of stage and screen, who all the girls want to shag (and probably all the other genders too, although don’t expect to get very far unless you’re a jugged up bird). I don’t know how literature has recovered from the massive kick in the bollocks it received when Mayall released his memoirs, which should have won every prize going but those UTTER BASTARDS had to give the nod to some normie shit like Harry Potter. So how is ‘Bigger Than Hitler, Better Than Christ’, so named because of his longevity as telly comedy supremo and his quad bike coma starting before Easter and ending after it, meaning he was technically dead longer than Jesus, and probably also a dig at that hippy bullshitter Lennon (unless you’re reading in which case, love your work John). Where was I? Oh bollocks to it, new paragraph.

You see the thing is, right, that while talking like Rik Mayall is obviously GREAT during a rambling monologue on ‘Bottom’ or in sudden, dramatic bursts during ‘Blackadder’ cameos, the aggressive everything-on-full style is better in short doses. A 329-page book is not, of course, a short dose. The comic vignettes are written as sprints, ostensibly a chapter of Mayall’s life but of course almost completely fabricated, and interspersed with letters, supposedly lost scripts and novel fragments, and pictures from his great telly shows and light entertainment career.

I read this because I loved Mayall’s work and of course there are some good jokes here. When Mayall and Adrian Edmondson supposedly meet the head of the BBC to pitch ‘Bottom’, it’s in a strip bar. But Edmondson insists he wasn’t there, so he “must have been projecting his voice from a charitable institution he was making a donation to.” When he meets his nefarious agent, he’s advised to secretly record his conversation, but it’s the 1970s, so he has to smuggle in a giant tape recorder under a baggy jumper. It’s these flashes of brilliance, and the serious interludes revolving around his quad bike accident and recovery, that lift this above ‘Bachelor Boys’, the odds-and-sods Young Ones book. (‘Bachelor Boys’ was, like the show, co-written by Mayall’s then-girlfriend Lise Mayer, who is not mentioned at all anywhere in this book. Given their acrimonious split, which was Mayall’s fault, perhaps for the best.) And, five years after Rik’s death, it’s a pleasure to remember the frantic, mouth-foaming energy that he brought to everything he did.

[Desperados]

First of all I would like to say that I am a huge fan of Rik Mayall and love literally all his work I have encountered so far, I have been a fan for many years and watch his shows over and over again to this very day. When I started his autobiography I did not know what to expect, so I hoped I would be positively surprised. The first chapter I was; Rik started of very funny, he had an interaction with the reader in his book that I had never seen before and liked very much, it even managed to make me laugh out loud, which hardly ever happens when I read a book. But just as other people already described things only went downhill from that point. His jokes became very repetitive, I already knew it wasn't an autobiography to take serious; but he jumped from joke to joke so fast that I could not notice any structure in his story, this made the book more boring and disappointing by the chapter, there simply wasn't any factor in the story that wanted me to read on. This book clearly proves that Rik mayall better belongs on the screen, where his spontaneous and indefinite amount of joking are the main ingredient of all the masterpieces, in my opinion, he created.
Another thing that really bothered me was that he did not allow for his book to be proof read and checked for grammar mistakes, although I partially agree with his point that reading the book exactly as it came from his typewriter adds to the originality and interaction, that small point hardly compensates for the mess it created. It wasn't even the spelling mistakes that really bothered me, his very long and unstructured sentences however did. It's not uncommon, actually I encountered it almost every page, in this book to find a sentence that has been interrupted by hyphens only to find an endless 5 line-sentence between it that does not seem to end, only to find out that after you read that huge 'sentence' you couldn't even remember anymore what the sentence was about before it was interrupted. Rik should have owned up to the fact that he could use some help from experts in literature.
If you are a big Rik Mayall fan like me you should give it a try of course, but do not expect to be blown of your chair. I never managed to finish the entire book.

[Heather Carter]

Although I've always found Adrian Edmondson funnier, I'm still a fan of Rik Mayall so I was looking forward to reading his autobiography. I was expecting to read about his life in his usual surreal/wacky/over the top way.

What I didn't expect was to read such illiterate and nonsensical drivel. Firstly, he tried too hard to be funny, which ended up having the opposite effect. His constant off-topic ramblings made the book very hard to read and I almost gave up on several occasions. And I'm sorry but if I was the boss of HarperCollins, I would have flat-out refused to allow such badly written work to be published. He reminds the reader several times that he insisted his book was published exactly how he wrote it, without even a proof read. Poor grammar, spelling and punctuation makes a book very hard to like.

Also, the footnotes are a pain, especially on the eBook version. Not only do they make you lose track of where you are, half of them boot you out of the book when you try closing them.

The one semi-good chapter in this book was where he described his quad-bike accident. If only he'd written the rest of the book like this it could have been so much better...

[Dean]

I was initially disappointed after reading the first 30 pages or so of this book and realising it was going to be a complete spoof autobiography. However, he does tell the truth, it's just in his own fantasy-like way. For example, there's a couple of pages about Ade Edmondson beating him up on tours and leaving him in hospital, which I believe is Rik just being affectionate to Ade and mentioning him in his own way (and the way Ade would expect to be mentioned).

As the book goes on, you take it for what it is and any bits of 'reality' are a big bonus. For example, his 'childhood dream' and the quad bike accident are much more personal and reflective.

A lot of his jokes (lots of footnotes) can be repetitive, but I never got tired of them. I can imagine Rik never got tired of writing them either, and that's testament to his sense of humour (and anyone who enjoys this book).

Anyone who has followed Rik's career over the years should not expect anything less than complete randomness and an inability to be serious for less than a few seconds. I wouldn't have it any other way.

[Chris Lee-Francis]

I love Rik. The Young Ones and Bottom were formative experiences in my life. I can quote most episodes of Bottom in full, from memory. The day he died was a huge loss for British comedy.

But this book...

It's just 300 pages of rambling surrealist nonsense. Which is a fine thing for a book to be, but not when it's billed as an autobiography. This was more like an endless filibuster speech.

Some people have a face for radio. I think Rik Mayall has a delivery style for TV and stage, but definitely not for a book.

[Alex Sarll]

"I think everyone knows me well enough now to realise that I am a white hot triple-barrelled hell-trousered dirty-bottomed anarchist riding bareback on one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse’s horses which I personally nicked, jumping over the gates of dawn like Shergar at the Grand National (before he died obviously) and everyone knows that I don’t tell lies." There's a reason the extended dramatic monologue was never really Rik Mayall's form, and read in sittings of any length this would be exhausting, but dipped into, it's every bit as fun as you'd expect. Wisely, he did the whole thing in character, so however many times he insists 'And this is true, right', it's pretty much impossible to disentangle fact, hyperbole, braggadocio and sheer silliness. The persona is the hyperactive mix of obnoxious confidence and craven snivelling which you'd expect from most of his characters (so that for instance, Mayall is vastly more talented than all of those other showbiz losers – except for Adrian Edmondson, who is far cleverer and wrote all the funny bits and definitely isn't a violent alcoholic who nicks all Rik's credit and money). Part of the conceit is that Mayall and his threatening agent have insisted his genius be given to the world unedited, so it's a riot of dubious chronology and deliberate (or at least one hopes so) mis-spellings, right down to Rik's claims about what a brilliant 'acter' he is. Oh, and as you'd expect if you read that hilarious character comedy piece* where a millennial watched Bottom, by contemporary standards it's all deeply, deeply problematic, and I don't just mean the descriptions of having it off (of which my favourite has to be "A thundering clusterbomb of shagging (both bottoms, front and back"). The most interesting bits, though, are when without quite letting the mask slip, you get hints of the things which sincerely exercise Mayall – yes, even more than the world's failure to recognise his towering brilliance. The abolition of grammar schools, for instance, with the damage to social mobility that brought in its wake. Once or twice it's not even that, and the bravado drops altogether as he talks briefly about a recurring dream that's haunted him, prefiguring the quad bike accident, where the mask again slips, if only briefly, before the comedy bullshitting resumes even in an account of his near death experience. For the most part, though...well, as he says, "You only get one life to wank yourself off in an autobiography." At its best, as when someone watching Mayall in Present Laughter shouts "Where's Eddie?", the spirals of outrageous whoppers into which he ties himself are every bit as hilarious as you'd hope (though dear heavens, I got a shiver when, among other people who've played Garry Essendine, he mentioned "the late great Peter Wingarde" – when despite Wyngarde being born at least 30 years before Mayall, in the end he would also outlast him by the best part of half a decade).

Also, the bit where one of the fake letters to potential collaborators, in one line, anticipates both QAnon and Cliff Richard's spot of legal bother...who would have thought when this came out that such deliberately absurd schoolboy rudery might end up forecasting things people would genuinely believe? It puts a nervous edge on the chuckles at the bits where Mayall presents this as a new (and improved, obviously) holy scripture to realise that people vehemently believing in this book would be just as dangerous as devotees of any of the others.

*And if it wasn't character comedy, it's even funnier.

[Reza Amiri Praramadhan]

I came to know the late, great, The Rik Mayall, the Titan of Light Entertainment industry, the conqueror of infomercial voice-overs, and the bane of the birds (ooer), and his works first through his appearances as Mad Gerald, then Lord Flasheart on Blackadder series, which brought me to arguably his famous work, as Rick the socialist wannabe in Young Ones, establishing the alternative comedy genre in Britain, distinguishing themselves from the Oxbridge comedians such as Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson, for example. However, it is the New Statesman that captivated me the most, for his appearance as Alan B’stard, the caricature of Nouveau Riche Thatcherite Conservative MP satirized Thatcher’s government, and Mayall’s claim that it brought Thatcher government must be put into serious consideration.

In this self-aggrandizing (not that I disapprove of it, though), ADHD, highly zany, if-you-call-this-biography, Mayall obviously wrote in his manic persona. Bunch of typos, useless footnotes, and his attempts at explaining what a slang word means are the staples of this book. The closest attempt at him telling us his life story was when he wrote of his early life at school, and the rest feels surrealistic. I rather disappointed that his some greatest works such as Young Ones and the New Statesman were only mentioned in passing, while film like Drop Dead Fred got whole chapter. However, It is a wholly fun experience reading this book, and explains quite well on why Rik Mayall is one of British comedic giants and we will never see one like him anymore these days.

[Chrissie]

I decided to read this book as I was deeply saddened when Rik died. I've been a massive fan for about ten years and this book was always on my reading list but I just never got around to reading it, mostly due to educational commitments.

This book is for a bit of a niche audience. It isn't really an autobiography someone can just pick up and say 'Oh that Rik Mayall guy, I want to read about his life." This book is for fans of Rik who already sort of know his story.

Rik does briefly mention aspects of his life and career but it's filled with lies and jokey spelling mistakes. But who would expect anything serious from this man? The brief moment in which he is serious is when he writes about his quad bike accident but that's very brief and I think if he was to write a more sensible autobiography (obviously no longer possible) it would have been better received than this.

I think this is sort of a spoof as Rik always seemed to be quite a private man. He never really mentions his family and home life in the book and he never really spoke a lot about them in interviews, which is fair enough.

If you're a Rik fan you'll probably like this book. There's lots of laughs and it literally just feels like Rik sitting at a typewriter writing down his thoughts. The footnotes are hilarious and on one occasion had me laughing so hard, Coke (the drink) came out my nose on a train!

Personally, I wish I'd read this when he was alive as I probably wouldn't have cried to much at the final paragraph which is just kinda sad to read now. "My work here is done. The rest is silence. All that remains is dust."

RIP Rik - A true hero and inspiration to me.

[Mike Jennings]

Had this on the shelf for a while so I'm going to read it now: and don't say I'm not because I just am, right. So stick that in your pipe Goebbels breath! It's going to be anarchic, right, cos that's what Wrik was all about, so strap in kids it might be a bumpy ride.

Well ... here's a shocker kids, I've packed it in after a few chapters. 'Why?' I imagine you asking, well it was indeed anarchic and silly and crude and in-yer-face ... everything you'd expect from Wrik, and then you realise just why the real Rik Mayall needed Adrian Edmondson. He's just too much.

20 pages of 'Hey, look at the size of my cock (and I don't mean chickens, kids) and listen well cos I'm a wide eyed anarchist at the gates of dawn ...' and you desperately need Ade to come in and take over the story for a bit. And now I remember - when I'm watching Blackadder or Bottom or The Young Ones, I love Rik Mayall's performances ... for about 5 minutes and then the laughter changes to slight irritation. He's like the child at the park shouting 'hey look at me' whilst he does something genuinely funny. And then he says it again, and then he says it again and then you want him to go and amuse someone else (in the nicest way possible).

This should have been Rick and Ade writing a joint autobiography. Rick's chapters could be as mad as he was and Ade's bits would hold it together and actually tell you something instead of just shouting 'Ooohhh lahdy-dardy-dahhh' at you. I think Rick Mayall's was a wild talent that needed reining in, like Spike Milligan's - if allowed to run wild 75% was lost in translation.

Bigger than Hitler, better than Christ, not as good as it should have been.

[Ross Maclean]

Look, I love Rik Mayall. Loved his whole vibe, his style of delivery, his mannerisms, his distinct speech. But I’m not sure that translates to the page in the way this tries to directly replicate. I mean, it *does*, it sounds like Rik Mayall, but 300-odd pages of it is hard to stomach and it gets too bogged down in the persona to remember to be interesting and entertaining at times. It’s more an extended bit than something that’s in any way illuminating about his life, his work, or his thoughts. I completely understand it’s his intention with the book, but it’s frustratingly unrevealing about most aspects of the man behind the persona. The scabrous ribaldry of the language is admittedly funny in a beautifully puerile way but it’s easily — and unsurprisingly — at its strongest in its most earnest passages. I just wish there were more of those, rather than all the fake letters and material better suited to an old cash-in comedy tie-in book. As fake comedy autobiographies go, Norm Macdonald did this a lot better.

[Rob Osment]

Really disappointing read, this book doesnt know whether it wants to be an autobiography or comedy book as it achieves neither. Too many gags (many of which repetitive) spoil any sort of truth that Rik may be telling about his life here. The real life bits are too fleeting and sparse to get an idea of how his life and career were shaped and formed.

Such a shame as could have been such a great story about his life with some humour and now he is sadly gone we will never get a chance to see what he could have written.

[Corey Edwards]

As a long-time Young Ones fan, I so wanted to enjoy this more than I did. I suspect an audio version would be fantastic but, as it sits on the page, written in The Rik Mayall character voice, it's a bit of a slog, to say the least. Every story is so couched in Rikdiculosity that it can be hard to tell what the hell he's on about. It's all comedy asides, exaggerations, backpedaling, faux errors, and almost no real detail or info. Pretty hilarious and apropos on its face but at 325 pages ... eeesh. The tone became unreadably grating for me. For serious fans of Rik-humor only.

[Sharon]

I am so disappointed in this book. I really wanted to enjoy it. Maybe if Rik had written a proper autobiography this would be a different review.
Instead I got a book written by Rik from the young ones, the character not the person. As much as I liked the show, I am not interested in the character enough to read a book written by him.
Pity, I really wanted to read a good book.

[Benito]

this is the sort of autobiography I really like - all funny bollocks! If you like Rik's style on stage and tube then you'll find this hilarious. It satires the celebrity biography while being one at the same time.

[Jacqueline Williams]

I’ve been a fan of Rik’s since Drop Dead Fred, although I couldn’t fully relate to Bottom or The Young Ones, I loved the New Statesman. This book is absolutely written by Lord Flasheart; hard to spot anything serious and totally arrogant! Wooh Wooh
I miss you Rik x

[Lanny Vogel]

Very disappointing. I am a huge fan of Rik's comedy but this is awful. Unfunny stream of consciousness drivel. Avoid.

[Sheila Lofthouse]

Unfortunately more of a comedic book than an autobiography, which is a shame as I would rather have heard the true voice of the late comedian.

[Toni Vincett]

Brilliant

I know I am bit late reading this but I have been a huge fan of rik and I just loved this book.

[Lucy]

So disappointed.

For the first time I got bored of Rik!
Completely devoured the first 100 or so pages and then I started finding myself counting down to the books end.

[Rachel]

Essential reading for fans of alternative comedy.

[Fart Stevens]

Unfortunately a very disappointing read. I’m a big fan of Mayall’s but I do think that books aren’t quite in his forte. He wasn’t exactly known for vast, sweeping monologues or engaging prose, and it shows here. An at times confusing, and at even-more times very - - and I hate to say this - - bland read.

Now first of all I should state the obvious, this is a spoof autobiography that is as spoof-y as they come. This is almost entirely fictionalised and not at all reflective of Rik’s true life story except for certain chapters (which were the highlights). At first this has a funny charm to it: for the first 50 pages. 100 pages in and I was checking the page numbers religiously. It becomes a whole lot of repeated jokes, neverending, absurd anecdotes, and occasionally some pretty poor-taste jokes and stereotypes. Of course these were designed to be satirical but it just doesn’t quite land with everything surrounding it. I think it can struggle to get across its point at times.

That speaks to the main issue here really. With Rik Mayall’s television and performance work generally, it was always very entertaining because of what he was playing and what it represented. Usually either A. caricatures of himself (see: The Young Ones), or B. caricatures of people and things that he despised (see: The New Statesman). In this there was a running gag of him playing deplorable, annoying, repulsive, and craven characters, who for the most part were oddly endearing in spite of these qualities. Usually because they got their comeuppance in the form of a bollock-kicking and/or bonking on the head with some form of blunt object. But in the world of novels, there are no bollocks to be kicked, nor heads to be bashed, nor electricity cables to have shoved in ears, etc etc. Part of the sharp wit of Mayall’s work was owed to the slapstick comedy that contrasted it: that was the cornerstone of Alternative Comedy as a genre, really. So here you lose a big part of the entertainment value that comes from his usual work, and it clouds it all a bit. Some 300+ pages of long-winded self-parody really don’t hold their weight without something special to back it up: which this book unfortunately lacks. In short: Rik’s comedy really doesn’t translate to written prose, and it ultimately feels a bit purposeless, as if it represents nothing, beyond a somewhat loose parody of celebrity biographies as a whole.

The anti-conservative, lighthearted left-wing politics were also a thing I always loved about Rik’s work, and here he attempts to play a sort of opposite to that, satirising himself in a way that really didn’t work for me. Of course, as a fan, I know what he stood for and what he was against, but he makes it very hard to keep sight of that here. It comes across quite mean-spirited at times: not that his comedy was ever intended to be nice, keep in mind, but it’s just especially rough around the edges here. Some of the political jokes are just… quite bad, in all honesty. I never thought I’d find something this guy made anything BUT funny, but here we are. It’s a bit haphazard, in nice terms. The book dances a thin line between offensive and subversive: it often tumbles over that line in quite dramatic fashion and makes a fool of itself. Definitely not something I’d recommend to either a fan of Mayall or a prospective new fan. It serves nothing for either; I’d be unsurprised if it put someone off him entirely.

At the end of the day, I’m still a fan of most of Rik Mayall’s work. I must be honest, it breaks my heart a bit to be so negative here, but this book is just a bit rough in my opinion. There’s a couple of good chapters (such as the one where he details his near-death ATV accident, which feels like the entire book was written around it) but for the most part it’s quite a letdown, one which I’d say isn’t reflective of his much better comedy outside of it. In my eyes, the guy is still a legend of comedy, and I do respect his legacy massively. I’m just going to try to forget that I read this book, and choose instead to remember his fantastic career outside of it.

[Emily Hughes]

The first line in this book is pretty much the funniest opener to an autobiography I've ever read. The book gives us Rik the character, chapter after chapter of the book reels off one liners and totally inflated or made up tales of his life and rise to fame. I wouldn't of expected Rik to open up about his real personal life in this book and in honesty I didn't want him too...we do get a slight glimpse of the 'real' Rik when he talks briefly about his bike accident but this is very brief but certainly very interesting into the mind of the man himself. Anyway I loved this book because I loved Rik. What a guy. RIP you utter utter ******* ;)

[James]

Utterly ridiculous, occasionally wearing, but generally very funny.

[AJRXII]

10% in. It's fucking awful. One of my only heroes in life and it's about as funny as cancer. So disappointed. DNF obviously.

[Ian Wood]

‘Bigger than Hitler, Better than Christ’ is Rik Mayall’s provocatively titled autobiography. In it Rik takes us from his childhood of blackmailing teachers, to his student years, through inventing alternative comedy with Kevin Turvey and the Dangerous Brothers, to revolutionising television with ‘The Young Ones’, to revolutionising film as part of ‘The Comic Strip’, bringing down the Tory Government with his satire the ‘New Statesman’ before his legendary portrayal as the voice of the Andrex puppy and the Toilet Duck. Rik lets us in to his life of debauchery and infidelity before telling us of his Quad bike accident which left his in a coma for five days and reveals that God spoke to him during this time and told him of his plan for Rik to be the new messiah.

And so we see that although Rik’s life is very much the framework for this book it is, of course, somewhat fictionalised to give us the full gambit of his TV persona which he has carefully honed over the years, possibly on the main the voice of Richy Rich the light entertainment genius of ‘Filthy, Rich and Catflap’ Mayall’s comedy walks the high wire between laugh out load and cringe with embarrassment.

On the main the book is a success although as an autobiography it leaves you more curious than before with all the facts obscured by a massive, although fictional, ego.
Not bigger than Hitler; certainly not better than Christ; more entertaining than an actor’s biography; as illuminating as a spent candle.