Kevin Turvey: The Man Behind the Green Door

There's a 40 minute version of this (the version available to buy) and a 30 minute version for TV. The shorter one is much, much funnier.

Kevin Turvey is an investigative reporter who works mainly in the Reditch area, Midlands, UK. He investigates the park, the canal, the library, the supermarket...

Kevin is my favourite Rik Mayall character. He's not the instigator of violence like so many of the others, but is sometimes on the receiving end. He's an innocent, carefree, poking his nose journalistically into the mundane things around him.

It's his calm, logical approach that is so funny and his determination to discover the truth about such things as what happens to frogs after people have eaten their legs.

Sadly this character never had his own series. He did have a regular five minute section in the middle of a sketch show called A Kick Up the Eighties. Personally I would have much rather had more Kevin Turvey and less Bottom.

(Having said that, can anyone ever really have enough Bottom?)

Other commentators are right in that the 40-minute version contains extra material that is weaker than the tighter 30-minute edit, but having been familiar with the 30-minute version for some years, it was still great to see the extra material.

1981 saw the first TV appearances of Kevin Turvey, investigative reporter in a show called A Kick Up The Eighties, which was otherwise rather bland. Turvey's reports were pure genius: wild, unpredictable and much funnier takes on the Ronnie Corbett-style monologues.

Comedy on British TV was changing, and the people, including Mayall, who participated in the Comic Strip, The Young Ones and Blackadder went on to dominate comedy in the Eighties.

After The Young Ones, I consider Mayall's offerings to have gone downhill rapidly: the New Statesman with its cliché-ridden script and coarse acting, and Bottom (as they aged, Mayall, Elton, et al seemed to find farting more and more hilarious, possibly because they increasingly tried to write for a younger generation they were no longer a part of, whereas in the early 80s they were writing intelligent dialogue for their own generation). And less said about Mayall's film work, the better.

But Kevin Turvey remains whimsical genius in this "week in the life of a freelance investigative reporter" reporting on biting local issues, such as "who is keeping on the grass?", the significance of "the Battle of Redditch" and whether the Japanese are able to make wheelchairs small enough for frogs when half of them's been eaten. Mayall is brilliant, as is the support cast, especially Robbie Coltrane as Mick the Lodger ("these hands are killers. If I had a gun in either of these hands, you'd be a dead man").

Mayall demonstrates a genius for character comedy that he failed to pursue. This is a shame, because those who were the natural successors to the Turvey style (notably Steve Cougan with Alan Partridge) produced much funnier comedy than any of Mayall's over-the-top later performances.

The Man Behind The Green Door script remains more quotable than anything written since the Pythons ("Aha! I can see that you're reading a review. Tell me, mate, is that your computer?").