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Main event: Peter Kay
By Marissa Burgess
citylife.co.uk[/align]
Back in December 2000, ahead of interviewing Peter Kay for a Manchester music magazine, I was given a preview copy of the first episode of Phoenix Nights to watch. It was immediately obvious that it was an idiosyncratically funny show; an uncannily accurate portrayal of a Bolton working men’s club and the bunch of offbeat but loveable characters that visited it.
Bolton-born, Kay knew how to send up the characters on the local club circuit better than most, although you couldn’t help but wonder whether Phoenix Night’s shtick – uniquely northern English and working class – would translate elsewhere. As it turned out, that first series became a gradual success as more and more people cottoned on to it, as Toby Hadoke, stand up, XSMalarkey comedy club promoter and bit part player in the series notes: “I think it was a word of mouth success, which I love about it.
“Television is chock-full of over-hyped things. If something is a creeping success that proves its quality, frankly.”
By the second BAFTA-winning series of Phoenix Nights, Kay and his characters were big stars. Two of them, Max and Paddy, even scored their own ‘vehicle’ – Road To Nowhere, a Channel 4 spin-off and live show performed in arenas across the country as part of his last outing, the Mum Wants A Bungalow Tour.
Kay, meanwhile, was increasingly mingling outside comedy circles. He played Roger DeBris in The Producers at Manchester’s Palace Theatre, scored bit parts on the big screen (including 24 Hour Party People) and even voiced a police officer in a Wallace & Gromit movie.
If that wasn’t enough, he’s had chart success too, masterminding the video for the £2m-grossing Comic Relief single (Is This The Way To) Amarillo with Tony Christie – long used by Kay as his live intro music – and repeated that success twice over with a Children In Need single last year, Proclaimers’ track (I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles, fronted by Kay’s Phoenix Nights character Brian Potter. None of those, of course, trumps the moment he returned to our TV screens – with frock, wig and rouge – in 2008 with Britain’s Got The Pop Factor and another top ten hit, The Winner’s Song.
He’s the face of John Smith’s bitter, he hosted the Royal Variety Performance last year and the Brit Awards in February (most memorable for the war of four-letter words between him and Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher that began live on air) and popped up in Coronation Street, Dr Who and kids’ TV show Roary The Racing Car (as the voice of Big Chris).
Under his own steam, he’s written two autobiographies – The Sound Of Laughter and Saturday Night Peter – the first of which remains Britain’s biggest selling autobiography. It’s just another record broken; he still holds the record for the biggest selling British stand-up DVD for his Bungalow gigs.
Now 36, Kay sets out on his first tour in seven years on Tuesday, beginning with an incredible 20-date run at the M.EN Arena – the venue where he used to work as a yellow-coated usher. The Tour That Doesn’t Tour Tour was intended to be a way of avoiding a national trek and months away from his family. It hasn’t worked – another 50 dates have been added around the country before The Tour That Doesn’t Tour Tour... Now On Tour returns to Manchester for another 15 shows.
It’s an astonishing rags to riches story, and for those of us who have witnessed Kay’s rise it has been simultaneously extraordinary yet unsurprising that he has become such a massive star. Kay hit the local comedy scene in 1996. Having performed one gig during his stand-up course at Salford University, he ventured out on the circuit. He headed to the legendary Frog & Bucket’s Raw Night – a regular social spot for other local comedians, including Caroline Aherne.
“It was his first gig out of college,” recalls Frog & Bucket owner Dave Perkin. “He actually put it on the last video that he brought out, it was filmed by two students who did a two camera shoot at the old club.”
Kay then tried the equally legendary club The Buzz by calling the promoter, Agraman. “He’d actually rung me up to see if he could get an open mic spot,” he says. “There was such a long waiting list for that I said it would be quicker if he entered the competition at CityLife.”
The CityLife Comedian of the Year had run since 1990 and boasted the likes of Aherne and Kay’s co-writer Dave Spikey as its winners. Agraman requested an audio tape of Kay’s material but was less than impressed when he received it.
“There was quite a lot of effing and blinding so when I spoke to him I warned him, ‘Look, it’s probably not the sort of competition to do because of your act’. He said, ‘Oh no, that’s not my act.’ He’d never really performed before so he just put a tape recorder down whilst he and some mates were chatting in a pub.”
But it wasn’t to be the only hurdle Kay stumbled at. “He got drawn in the very first heat and was drawn first on the night, so he had that bad news, and he also had the trauma of the landlady telling him that she wasn’t very happy with him bringing his own food and drink in,” he recollects fondly. “He’d got some Rola Cola, or whatever his mother had given him, and some sandwiches or something and she didn’t like him bringing his own food into the pub.”
Meanwhile the then-relative newcomer Hadoke was gearing up for the same heat. “I first saw him in my heat of the City Life Comedian Of The Year – where he beat me,” laughs Hadoke. “He was brilliant, he was a natural and, when he ultimately won it, it was like when your football team loses and you want the team that beat your team to win the final.
“So when Peter won I thought, ‘ah well, at least I got knocked out by the winner’. He came from nowhere, he hadn’t been on the circuit. Some comics are journeymen who acquire the skill from years of bitter experience, but he had it from the minute he went on stage.”
Then Kay made life difficult for himself in the final when, as Agraman remembers, ‘he thought he had to write new material, so wrote a complete new fifteen minutes for the final’. But despite that, he romped home over the slightly more experienced favourite, Johnny Vegas – another household name these days. “Of course it was very, very close and all bets had closed that Johnny Vegas was going to win it that year,” recounts Agraman. “But he just pipped Johnny.”
With Kay’s natural talent highlighted by his competition win, he began to gather gigs. The Frog & Bucket’s Dave Perkin takes up the story: “The minute he walked in the building, the minute he went on stage, he just shone. I remember a well-known comedian, I won’t mention the name, actually complained to me that Peter Kay was too funny to compere the Frog & Bucket and it wasn’t fair on the other acts. That’s an actual quote! I’ve had many complaints about comedians over the years but never that they’re too funny,” chortles Perkin.
Hadoke recalls those days too. “I love the Frog but I think there was a time when the Raw Night was compered alternately by Peter Kay and Johnny Vegas so you’d feel sorry for any poor sod that had to go on because clearly the punters were waiting for the compere to come back,” he chuckles.
Between The Frog and The Buzz, Kay gained more work and it was a rapid ascendancy from there to headlining gigs and getting his own show. As Janice Connolly, Phoenix Nights’ Holy Mary, notes: “He was wonderful, he made a steady rise and did brilliantly. Good business brain, good all rounder. I think he’s a brilliant actor too.”
Soon Kay began to draw the crowds in himself as Hadoke found when he booked him for his club. “We have a membership scheme and that was launched as a result of Peter. I don’t know if he’d done much telly by then either. Word had spread, I think, of how good he was. I think the charge was 50p at the time and the bill was Peter Kay, Kevin Gildea and Dom Carroll.
“There was this massive queue and I realised that a lot of regulars weren’t going to get in because loads of people had come from far afield because they’d seen Peter advertised, and I thought then that I needed to somehow prioritise and reward the people that come week in, week out.”
It wasn’t long before Kay got his first TV work, making early appearances on BBC North-produced The Sunday Show. He teamed up with co-writers Dave Spikey and Neil Fitzmaurice, displaying that quirkily parochial writing style that was to prove such a success later for the team in Phoenix Nights.
For the first full series of That Peter Kay Thing, Kay began to gather talent from the local scene asking the likes of Connolly on board, who had entered the City Life competition as her alter ego Barbara Nice.
“I got to the final and Peter was in the audience because he’d won it the year before,” says Connolly. “I came second and he rang me up about three days later and he said, ‘I saw you and thought you were smashing, do you want to be in my television programme?’.”
The stand-up Archie Kelly, who plays Kenny in Phoenix Nights, was also talent spotted by Kay. “I was doing that character Jackie ‘Mr Goodtime’ Valencio at the Frog & Bucket,” he recalls. Peter compered it and hadn’t seen me do anything before and he came up after I’d been on and said, ‘That’s the funniest thing I’ve seen for ages’. He told me he was doing this six part series, which turned out to be That Peter Kay Thing.” One episode of which was entitled The Club, which went on to the become Phoenix Nights…
And the rest? Well that, as they say, is history.
Peter Kay - MEN Arena, from April 27, 2010 - SOLD OUT.
