©BBC

The print editions of the quality papers had tidied up and fleshed out the obituaries of Rik Mayall, and the online versions had been edited. It’s good that you can go back and change items once published online of course, but why didn’t they just take their time in the first place? Yesterday’s blog took substantially more individual hits than usual which was gratifying as I had put a lot of time into it. I watched the first episode of Filthy Rich & Catflap today, a sitcom I have only seen sporadically on the rare occasion that it is repeated. As it’s been ages since I last saw it and had very little recollection of it I treated it like a first time viewing. Rik and Ade were joined by Nigel Planer but it was hard to work out from the first episode whether the show was intended as a vehicle for the double act with Planer as a stooge, or a comedy trio. Given that all three names are in the title it is all the more confusing.

As I said yesterday, there is a line of similarity running through the characters created by Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson that starts with The Dangerous Brothers and finally stops at Bottom. Rich and Catflap are part of that line. In this series their characters are called Richie and Eddie, just like in Bottom. The characters of Richie Rich and Eddie Catflap are in fact almost identical to Richard Richard and Eddie Hitler, which is why this series should have been a far stronger showcase for the double act (not that they were an official double act of course, each pursuing roles in their own right) than The Young Ones. Mayall and Edmondson might have had some good exchanges in The Young Ones but with Neil as the punch bag and Mike as the supposed cool one, the dynamic was spread out and perhaps the partnership wasn’t allowed to flourish.  The character of Rick was already established on stage without Edmondson’s backup of course, so The Young Ones was never meant to be The Rik and Ade Show.

Maybe it’s just unlucky that Filthy Rich & Catflap didn’t take off in the same way, ‘difficult second album’ seems to be the only possible explanation. Bottom was a huge success so either it was just the two of them the public wanted, or they just needed a break from violent slapstick and knob gags. Another answer could be that although they are playing their trademark characters, it wasn’t from their pen. Filthy Rich & Catflap was written by Ben Elton. At the time he was at the top of his game; after writing The Young Ones and Filthy Rich & Catflap he saved Blackadder and was the host of Saturday Live. In 1986 a sitcom starring three quarters of The Young Ones and written by Ben Elton (before he turned shit and forgot The Wright Way to write a sitcom – see what I did there?) should have been sitcom gold. Sadly these days it isn’t even a sitcom on GOLD.

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