It's another Kay thing

WHEN Peter Kay collected his gong at last month's British Comedy Awards, he was clearly delighted. So delighted, in fact, that lots of people thought he had already made free with the celebratory champagne. "Oooh, I know," he says in his broad Lancashire vowels. "Everybody said, 'You were off yer 'ead' but the thing is, I don't drink. I were just so shocked that I went up on stage and went, 'Blaaaaaaah.' But I remembered to thank me Mum."

The award was for last year's Channel 4 series, That Peter Kay Thing, half-a-dozen interconnected spoof documentaries in northern settings including a bingo hall and a social club. The last has formed the sole setting for his six-parter series, Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights, currently being shown on Channel 4.

It's set in the Phoenix Club, a northern social club that urgently needs to attract a new audience to old-style entertainment. "It's trying to survive in places that the generation coming up wouldn't be seen dead in," says Kay.

"But they don't see that, and their theme nights and special events all go desperately wrong. They're trying to keep a way of life going that's all but died." He describes it as "Ken Loach's Cheers".

His childhood ambition was "to be a binman", but in retrospect, he says, he can see it was to be an entertainer. "I took a long time to admit it to myself because telly and everything to do with it seemed a million miles away from where I lived. But when I saw some of the rubbish on TV, I thought maybe I could do something myself, so I started having a bit of a dabble."

After college - Kay has a qualification in stand-up, as part of a BTEC in media performance studies - he had a succession of dead-end jobs in supermarkets, a bingo hall, a video shop and a cash-and- carry. He was always sacked because he was busier entertaining his colleagues rather than doing the task at hand.

"I couldn't take it seriously, all the ridiculous management strategies for selling more cans of beans or something. At the end of the day you're a video shop or a supermarket and it's all crap when people take it so seriously. I think that's where the tragedy in my writing came in - that people actually think this stuff is important."

In 1996 he began doing stand-up. "I needed an outlet and it provided one for me. It all poured out of me because I had years of storing this stuff in my head, or writing notes of other people's conversations. I was nervous and I said to my mate before I went on, 'This is Kay, 27, grew up in a working-class household in Bolton, where his favourite pastime produced a staggering knowledge of popular culture, with even his parents' break-up being marked by a TV show. "Halfway through an episode of Mork and Mindy me Dad said, 'I'm going.'" my first time entertaining people,' and he said, 'No it's not because you've been doing stand-up for years in front of three or four people in canteens in your dinner break.' He was right - it came naturally to me and I loved it."

After just two years on the circuit, Kay was nominated for a prestigious Perrier award at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Like other northern writers such as Alan Bennett, Les Dawson and Victoria Wood (the last two are his heroes), Kay is a master of the non sequitur and of noticing the absurdities of everyday life. "I've learned that the laughs are in the details, that for some reason people will find a character funnier if I say he's wearing a Parka, or has popped down the shop to buy a packet of Daz." In Phoenix Nights, as is his custom, Kay takes more than one role. In his previous work he played several, not from a huge ego, but from a desire to have control over the final product. "When I started writing I didn't know many actors. I only knew other comics and so we used them. I was worried about whether they could act, so I took on a few roles myself.

Now I write for others more."

It was in his TV debut in The Services, a cod flyon-the-wall documentary for Channel 4 in 1998, that Kay played perhaps his best creation, the monster Pearl, a motorway services manager who enjoys every self-obsessed but wholly unself-knowing second of 15 minutes of fame. Having been brought up in a matriarchal immigrant Irish family - he still lives with his mum and will leave when he marries his girlfriend later this year - Kay is unusually adept at writing female roles.

"When I started writing Pearl I saw her in great detail, the clothes, the makeup, everything. Then, when I put on the dress, I had every confidence that I could do it."

He regrets that he couldn't write more women for Phoenix Nights. "I wanted to," he says, "but it's a man's world and there was no way of getting round that without making it ring hollow." His next project, he hopes, will be set in a female world, where he will again don false bosoms and heavy makeup, perhaps again as Pearl. "I'd love to do a six-part series about her. There are just so many possibilities for that character."

lPeter Kay's Phoenix Nights is on Channel 4 tonight at 11.30pm. The next episode is on Sunday at 9.30pm.

Copyright 2001
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