Rik Mayall the star of Believe
Nothing claims it “make The X-Files look
like Gardener’s World”. Rik plays the part of
Professor Adonis Cnut who becomes a member of the
Council for International Progress that secretly runs
the world. A murderous clone, TV game shows, GM crops,
Watergate, global warming, a serial cannibal and a
rogue meteorite are just some of the outlandish topics
woven into this comedy series, but that’s about as
close to The X-Files (or Gardener’s World)
as it gets.
Like most of his past roles (The Young Ones, The New Statesman and Bottom) Rik plays a self-important, devious, sexually frustrated character who will stop at nothing to promote his ego-fuelled dreams.
Here Rik inhabits his rooms at Queen Edward’s College, much like Bruce Wayne (Batman) in his mansion or Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street. This gives Believe Nothing a fictionally familiar setting - his rooms even have a laboratory hidden behind a bookcase, fortunately Mayall doesn’t don an outlandish comic hero outfit to give it a full comic book gloss.
To help him in his work, and
play, there is his faithful manservant (batman)
Albumen (Michael Maloney). There are a considerable
amount of double entendres traded between this pair.
Maloney has worked in many Royal Shakespeare Company
productions, appeared in countless radio dramas,
starred in the comedy TV adaptation of Scoop!,
and appears on our TV screens on a fairly regular
basis yet he has yet to become an household name. I
met him back in the 1980s at the University of
Warwick and he gave us a very funny and entertaining
interview. It's just a matter of time before he
becomes a star in his own series.
The final
regular character is is Dr Hannah Awkward (Emily
Bruni) Chair of Pedantics at Queen Edward’s College.
She sets Cnut’s passions ablaze but she is as her
surname says awkward and as eccentric as the two
men.
The show pokes fun at our accepted view of reality and twists and turns our notions to comic effect, but at its core are the dynamics between the three central characters. They do work well together but Rik Mayall doesn’t seem to have quite the spark of comic energy that he displayed in The New Statesman or more recently in Bottom.
The Believe Nothing scriptwriters Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran have produced funny and clever stories but somehow the first series of six half-hour shows don’t quite hit the mark. This is frustrating because the basic idea for the series is good and all the performers work hard to make it successful. Perhaps everyone was trying to hard and should have relaxed a bit more, as I found the out-takes on the DVD more funny than the show itself.
In many ways it reminds me of the first series of Black Adder which delivered a funny format but few outright laughs. Black Adder got funnier with the introduction of Ben Elton as a co-writer for the subsequent series, whether Believe Nothing will get the chance to prove itself is more doubtful.
The DVD of Believe
Nothing contains interviews with the main
actors and scriptwriters Laurence Marks and Maurice
Gran, plus out-takes that contain the f word in fair
abundance!
Web References
The Rik Mayall Webpage
An
unofficial site produced by Jennifer C. Huebl with
lots of information about Mayall's career.
Believe Nothing
This
is the official website for the series.
TV Tomes
Contains
episode guide to Believe Nothing and lots
more information related to the series.
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