I've been sad and a tiny bit ill at the news of British comic Rik Mayall's death today, at only 56. A huge star in the UK, if Americans know him at all it is usually as the anarchist-hypocrite Rick from "The Young Ones," which MTV picked up in 1985 despite, at the time, being an actual music channel. Fans of "Blackadder" can never forget his two insane appearances as Lord Flashheart/Flasheart, an utterly manic character which probably captures Mayall's particular genius better than anything else he did.
Rather than revisiting favorite Mayall performances, I've been looking at YouTube episodes of a series I had only heard of but never seen, "The New Statesman" from 1987-1992. I dare say it's right up the DK alley, so to speak. Mayall plays the brilliantly named Alan Beresford B'Stard, a young, good looking, 100% amoral Conservative backbencher, a "new money Thatcherite" and an absolute...well, bastard. This show, written by a couple of britcom veterans, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, is just brutal, a gang of literate lefties beating the living shit out of their least favorite people on earth at the time.
Here's the pilot, in which B'Stard is driving a bill to arm the (historically gun-free) UK police through the Commons...so he can sell them counterfeit revolvers at a huge profit. Along the way he has to deal with blackmail by a Chief Constable who turns out to be both a religious fanatic and a delusional schizophrenic who takes direction from Jesus, personally. Yeah, it's our kind of show.