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Sex And The Single Teens
Sex And The Single Teens
How they brought TV’s Kevin and Perry to the big screen
Ihate youooo!” would echo the famous cry as Kevin, TV’s favourite comic teenager with that trademark unruly mop of red hair crammed in under a reversed baseball cap, laid into his middle-class, well-meaning but endlessly embarrassing parents. The perils of Kevin and his best pal Perry - played by the distinctly thirtysomething Harry Enfield and cross-dressed Kathy Burke - helped turn an inspired series of small- screen sketches into an enduring family favourite.
However, according to the creator/co-writer, the characters were lucky even to survive to the third series of the BBC show featuring Harry Enfield And His Humorous Chums. Enfield explains [in the book of the series]: “I had a brainwave. I suddenly remem- bered how, during my own years as a teenager, the most abiding factor in my life was my hatred of my parents. It happened overnight. I went to my first party, snogged a girl and entered a new world. Before the party, my parents had smiled and said, ‘Have a good time,’ and I’d replied, ‘Thanks!’
“A few hours later, when I returned home, they asked, ‘How was the party?’ ‘Cuh! OK!’ I replied. As if they’d understand! These sad people with no idea about what life was really about... I hated them. For Kevin’s ‘birth’ as a teenager we had him go straight from hyperactive little brother to par- ent-hater in the time it took for the clock to strike twelve on his thirteenth birthday. Straight away the audience got what I was up to...”
So put out the flags, roll up the carpet and lock the drinks cabinet because the monstrous lad and his ingratiating sidekick, played once again by the oldest teenagers this side of Wayne’s World are back in Kevin And Perry... The Movie.
They’ve now reached “that” age and the film, written by Enfield and Dave Cumming, charts their quest finally to establish proper relations with the
opposite sex. And what better place to do it than the sunny shores of Ibiza where they have been told “it” is guaranteed. Charged with translating some supreme- ly funny comic moments on TV into a coherent feature film is director Ed Bye, veteran of Bottom and Red Dwarf, making his own full-length debut who admitted to having “three principal worries” at the outset.
“Within the TV show, this lasts four or five min- utes. Could I see the characters working for 90 min- utes? There’s the conceit that one of them is a man playing a boy and the other a woman playing a boy.
Photo above: Ed Bye (left) director of Kevin And Per r y with cinematographer Alan Almond BSC .
EXPOSURE • 14 & 15