Kevin Turvey

Kevin Turvey was a British television comedy character, created by actor and comedian Rik Mayall, who featured in the BBC sketch show A Kick Up the Eighties in 1981. ^[1]

A Kick Up the Eighties

Turvey, an awkward and socially inept character who spoke with a broad West Midlands accent, was a self-styled "investigative journalist" who still lived with his mother, wore a shapeless blue anorak, fancied a local girl called Theresa Kelly (who was never depicted), and rarely ventured outside his home town of Redditch, north Worcestershire. ^[2] Each week, his 'investigations' amounted to little more than an over-excited, rambling, uninformed monologue delivered straight to camera, ^[3] providing absolutely no insight into the subject-matter whatsoever.

The Kevin Turvey segments used as theme music the third movement alla marcia from the Karelia Suite by Sibelius; the first movement, Intermezzo, was the theme of ITV's This Week current affairs programme.

Mayall went uncredited for these appearances, with "Also Featuring: Kevin Turvey" in the end credits rather than his real name. Mayall's then-girlfriend, Lise Mayer, also wrote for these television appearances uncredited. ^{[4] [5]}

The Man Behind the Green Door

In 1982 a one-off mockumentary, Kevin Turvey the Man Behind the Green Door was broadcast. In this, a BBC 'fly-on-the-wall' camera crew followed Kevin for a week as he went about his "investigations". Robbie Coltrane played Mick the lodger (who is a deserter from the Army), Ade Edmondson played Kevin's friend Keith Marshall, and Gwyneth Guthrie played Kevin's mum. Roger Sloman appeared as a psychotic park-keeper. Making guest appearances, as part of Kevin's band "20th Century Coyote", were Simon Brint and Rowland Rivron, known as Raw Sex.

Influences

Mayall described Turvey as "an accent and a mood from the West Midlands" where he (Mayall) had grown up (in Droitwich). J. F. Roberts has suggested that Turvey bore some strong similarities to Peter Cook's dullard, know-it-all character E. L. Wisty. ^[2]

Mayall had previously performed a similar, though slightly differently named, character called 'Kevin Turby', on stage at London's the Comic Strip. Critic Ian Hamilton described Turby's routine:

Kevin's tour de force is a long, intricately plodding monologue about His Average Day. He gets up very late and goes down to Tesco, where he buys some cornflakes, which he then takes home and puts into a plate before sitting down at a table with the flakes in front of him ... etc. 'I was just sitting there eating my cornflakes. I don’t know how many I had had. Fifteen, sixteen, maybe. I wasn’t counting.' ^[6]

References

1. Taylor, Steve (January 1982). "Talking Turvey with Rik Mayall". The Face .
2. Roberts, JF (2012). The True History of the Black Adder. pp. 76–77. ISBN   9781848093461.
3. Pickering, Andrew (May 1992). Science as Practice and Culture. p. 319. ISBN   9780226668017.
4. Banks, Morwenna; Swift, Amanda (1987). The Joke's on Us: Women in Comedy from Music Hall to the Present Day. London: Pandora. p. 206. ISBN   0863581196.
5. Sayle, Alexei (2016). Thatcher Stole My Trousers. Bloomsbury Circus. p. 289. ISBN   9781408864531.
6. Hamilton, Ian (3 September 1981). "The Comic Strip". London Review of Books. 3 (16).