Over the past two decades or so, Paul Kaye has carved a crafty niche playing somewhat offbeat characters. What for me elevates him to Treasure status is his ability to lift such – often supporting - roles into ones more memorable than the leads.
At first he played on his real-life brattish punk art student persona and his initial foray onto national television came about by accident. Apparently a boozy home video of late-night prank interviews got him noticed and a few years later the character evolved into Dennis Pennis for BBC2’s The Sunday Show. Resembling a red-haired Rik from The Young Ones but possessing a kind of mid-Atlantic whiny drawl, Pennis would hang around UK celebrity gatherings like award shows, thrust his microphone in front of the red carpet brigade and turn the expected dull interview into something more irreverent.
I forget how I came about watching the show but the Pennis sections were obviously the best things in it. Once he became recognised, the joke was killed stone dead so instead he was allowed to thrust that same mic into the unsuspecting faces of Hollywood A-listers like Schwarzenegger, Steve Martin, Hugh Grant and Demi Moore. The bigger the star, the more biting the ‘question’. What began as gentle ribbing turned into a lauded pricking of the celeb bubble and finally into rather tiresome smart-arsery. Kaye had to kill him off, his co-creator jumped ship to launch Ali G but Paul Kaye proved he was no one-trick pony.
While his face doesn’t exactly suggest romantic lead, Kaye came pretty close in 2000 Acres of Sky, a post-EastEnders vehicle for Michelle Collins. He played her scruffy friend who pretends to be her partner in order that they be paid to run a B&B in a remote Scottish fishing village. Of course he holds a secret torch for Collins and by the third series in 2005 it didn’t end well. However, he really impressed me and ever since I’ve kept an eye out for him in dramatic roles.
That doesn’t mean I’ve tuned in to every episode of Skins, Humans, Strutter or – heaven forbid – Game of Thrones, but it’s almost life-affirming to watch him turn up as unconventional doctors (e.g. in Waking the Dead) or prison chaplains (Cold Feet).
Not surprisingly he has often portrayed dodgy-looking husbands (Candy Cabs) or a weaselly reporter ripe for the taking in the always entertaining Hustle. In 2013 he toned down the theatricals to convince as a bushy-bearded cult leader in the watchable but frankly bizarre Ripper Street, part-dark Victorian crime thriller, part-Shakespearean tragedy. He was a crook in the modern-day action series The Interceptor and seedy strip club owner in ITV’s Dark Heart. In both he was far more credible than the respective main characters and he was also great in the Beeb’s multi-award-winning Three Girls, as the father of one victim of the Rochdale child sex ring.
For all this serious stuff, I also love him in lighter material. When I moved to Cardiff permanently I discovered that Sky One’s new Ruth Jones drama Stella was considered essential viewing. The actor-writer played the eponymous character struggling to hold her family together amidst an array of eccentrics populating her Valleys town. In the second series that eccentricity dial rose a few notches with the arrival of a Dutch New Age relationship counsellor. It was, of course, Paul Kaye. He probably appeared in only three or four episodes but his “Pass the feather” catchphrase still resonates in this household should any part of a bird’s coat flutter within range.
A few years later he was a village yokel caught up in an Inside No.9 seventeenth-century witch trial and also an alien undertaker who comes to haunt Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who. However, it was way back in the ‘90s that he was an obvious choice to lend his edgy ‘cool’ to Keith Allen’s oddball collective Fat Les. In particular, he spoofed Richard Ashcroft spoof in the ‘Vindaloo’ video and was in Pennis mode for the live Top of the Pops studio invasion.
Yet for all his lauded roles on screen and stage it pains me to make a confession: possibly his most memorable performances came in a series of 2013 TV commercials for gambling website BetVictor. Now I normally abhor anything that promotes behaviour which leads to addiction and I’d no more use an online betting app than join Donald Trump’s fanclub. However, Kaye’s quickfire portrayals of the excitable Maurice were a stunning tour-de-force. He’s now well into his fifties but I reckon he could still make a healthy living as much from young quirky oddballs as dodgy cops or fantasy warriors, and more power to his elbow.
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