As we crawled through the traffic along the Old Brompton Road, Rik, in response to some casual - anyway, it certainly wasn't probing - question of mine about his evident delight in acting, where did he think it came from? that sort of thing, went into an intense, introspective monologue. The burden of it was that he could get through life only by pretending to be other people. He ended with an abruptly fatalistic declaration that sometimes in private - even completely in private and on his own - he seemed to be pretending to be Rik Mayall. I couldn't help wondering who Rik Mayall was pretending to be when telling me about only pretending to be Rik Mayall. When I glanced at him from time to time during the rest of the journey - he always sat absolutely upright, a can of lager in his hand, on the fold-up seat across from me - he was staring straight ahead, smiling his famous Rik Mayall smile. Actually, there was something oddly bewildered about both the stare and the smile, as if for once he'd been ambushed by confusion and was meeting it with an automatic attempt at performance, without knowing quite what to perform. When we got to the bar at the Halcyon, he simply turned into a chap who was desperate for a pee.
Simon Gray, Fat Chance