10 December — today would have been the 82nd birthday of actor, writer, director, caperer, mischief maker, and “one of the strangest people in Britain”, Ken Campbell.
Here he is sporting spectacular eyebrows (his own), teeth (not his own) and a sink plunger (ownership undetermined). I think this is reason enough on its own to celebrate his life, but there is more…
He was known for being Alf Garnett’s neighbour in In Sickness and in Health, and ‘Roger’ in Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Anniversary’, but was also “one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in the British theatre”.
He put on a 9-hour sci-fi trilogy Illuminatus! and a 22-hour play cycle The Warp (the longest play in the world), as well as a version of Macbeth in pidgin English, but perhaps most importantly, created The Ken Campbell Roadshow.
Pioneers of improvised lunacy, they
enacted barroom tales of sexual and psychic mayhem while banging nails up their noses and stuffing ferrets down their trousers
(in the words of Michael Coveney).
They appeared at The Secret Policeman’s Ball in 1979, at which Sylvester McCoy (as was his habit) did, indeed, perform his trick of hammering a four-inch nail into his face.
There’s a 1971 documentary about them on YouTube (which now looks like it was filmed through soup)…
…in which Campbell explains part of his philosophy:
all plays and sketches take place in the past. A stunt, the escapology that we do, takes place in the present.
And:
The Roadshow was designed so that it could be performed anywhere… and then your privilege is that you meet such a cross-section of people in so many different places.
He’s not taking theatre to the great unwashed, who should be grateful, it’s his privilege. I like that
That documentary also features a shot of this headline, which I rather like (and can be filed under Questions To Which The Answer Is Yes)
According to Wikipedia, he staged his first performances in the bathroom of his childhood home:
I was three years old and helped by my invisible friend, Peter Jelp, I put on shows for the characters in the linoleum.
He almost became the seventh Doctor, but his interpretation was apparently “too dark” and he lost out to Sylvester McCoy. (Rather wonderfully, though, a fan has created some sci-fi adventures based on bits of Ken audio.)
He said the greatest living actor was Jackie Chan. Well… he said he’d asked a medium who was channelling Laurence Olivier who the greatest living actor was, and ‘Olivier’ said Jackie Chan, so he watched Chan’s films and decided he agreed.
In 1981, after the RSC had staged Nicholas Nickleby, he sent out letters, supposedly from RSC artistic director Trevor Nunn, saying they were changing their name to the Royal Dickens Company. Several people who should have known better fell for it.
He wasn’t a household name, but his influence on theatre was huge — he gave early breaks to Bill Nighy, Bob Hoskins and Jim Broadbent, and was a major inspiration for improvised musical The Showstoppers.
AND he encouraged Nina Conti to become a ventriloquist. If he’d only ever done that, he’d deserve a place in history.
I briefly met him once in the 1990s with my friend Ruth. We told him we loved his stuff, so he said he’d put us on his mailing list, wrote down our email addresses and stuck the bit of paper in the shopping basket he was wheeling around. We never heard from him… but then, his daughter, Daisy, once gave him the money to buy a computer, and the computer shop she suggested was next door to a pet shop. He went home with an African grey parrot called Doris instead — so maybe that was why.
I did get to see his trilogy of one-man shows at the National, though — Furtive Nudist, Pigspurt and Jamais Vu — and got to enter his strange world for a few hours. (He once said “I’m not mad; I’ve just read different books”.)
I can recommend reading that if you can find a copy. Alternatively, you could approach life by asking yourself this question when faced with a decision. I’m not sure I’d recommend it, exactly, but I don’t think you’d ever be bored.
I’ve barely scratched the surface, but if you’ve got this far, and are now what Ken would call a ‘seeker’, get yourself to YouTube and type in his name, for there are wonders to behold. You could start here:
