Kevin Turvey
{{Short description|British television character}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=July 2021}}
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.{{cite journal|last=Taylor|first=Steve|title=Talking Turvey with Rik Mayall|journal=The Face|date=January 1982}}
''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.{{cite book|last=Roberts|first=JF|title=The True History of the Black Adder|year=2012 |pages=76–77|isbn=9781848093461 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_ft0EWWSRdEC&pg=PA76}} Each week, his 'investigations' amounted to little more than an over-excited, rambling, uninformed monologue delivered straight to camera,{{cite book|last=Pickering|first=Andrew|title=Science as Practice and Culture|date=May 1992 |pages=319|isbn=9780226668017 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=U_mL2pPGY7YC&pg=PA319}} 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.{{cite book |last1=Banks |first1=Morwenna |last2=Swift |first2=Amanda |title=The Joke's on Us: Women in Comedy from Music Hall to the Present Day |date=1987 |publisher=Pandora |location=London |isbn=0863581196 |page=206}}{{cite book |last1=Sayle |first1=Alexei |title=Thatcher Stole My Trousers |date=2016 |publisher=Bloomsbury Circus |isbn=9781408864531 |page=289}}
''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.
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:
{{blockquote|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{{nbsp}}... 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.'{{cite journal|last=Hamilton|first=Ian|title=The Comic Strip|journal=London Review of Books|date=3 September 1981|volume=3|issue=16|url=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v03/n16/ian-hamilton/the-comic-strip}}}}
References
{{Reflist}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Turvey, Kevin}}
Category:Comedy television characters