Stewart Lee and Michael Cumming developing a film about Kevin Eldon
- Stewart Lee and Brass Eye director Michael Cumming are trying to raise the funds to make a film about the actor Kevin Eldon and the singer Val Doonican
- The semi-factual documentary would focus on Eldon and all the artists, including Doonican, who've lived in his North London house before him
- Eldon is "a Zelig-like figure that passes through 30 years of British entertainment" Lee told fellow comic James Gill on his Always Be Comedy podcast
Stewart Lee and Brass Eye director Michael Cumming are developing their next film, a semi-factual documentary about their friend and regular collaborator Kevin Eldon and the Irish singer Val Doonican.
Lee and Cumming previously made the 2020 "anti-rockumentary" King Rocker about Robert Lloyd, frontman for cult Birmingham bands The Prefects and The Nightingales, which also featured Eldon, as well as Frank Skinner, Bridget Christie, Nish Kumar, Seann Walsh, Andrew O'Neill and Paul Putner.
Now Lee and Cumming are trying to raise the money for a film about Eldon and the various artists who've lived in his North London house since the early 1900s when it "was occupied by a famous Scottish folklore writer" Lee told fellow comic James Gill on his Always Be Comedy podcast.
"In 1951, it was occupied by Val Doonican, the Irish light entertainer" Lee said. "In the eighties, by a succession of Australian punk and indie bands. And then in the noughties by Kevin Eldon.
"The idea is that everyone in this house was influenced in some way by Val Doonican, both in the past and the future."
From Singalong Saturday in 1964 onward, Doonican's various light entertainment shows for the BBC attracted huge audiences, with up to 20 million for The Val Doonican Show at its height. Alongside easy listening and country music tunes, Doonican would often sing Irish comedy songs. He gave Dave Allen important early exposure and Bernard Cribbins was a regular guest.
Eldon and Lee became friends on the comedy circuit in the early 1990s. Eldon joined the cast of Lee and Richard Herring's Fist Of Fun on Radio 1 in 1993, as well as its subsequent BBC Two television incarnation and successor, This Morning With Richard Not Judy, famously portraying "King of Hobbies" Simon Quinlank and "Rod Hull". More recently, he appeared in the sketch inserts of the Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle series.
Cumming directed Eldon's Channel 4 Comedy Lab pilot Shadows Of Reflection in 1999 and the television version of the sitcom World Of Pub on BBC Two in 2001, written by Tony Roche and also starring Phil Cornwell and Peter Serafinowicz. Eldon also appeared in Brass Eye, just a few of his myriad screen appearances, as Lee marvelled to Gill.
"Really, what would be so amazing, any succession of clips of the things Kevin Eldon's been in and all the people he's been next to, he's like a Zelig-like figure that passes through 30 years of British light entertainment" he said.
Unfortunately for the proposed new documentary, "the clips are impossibly expensive. That's the problem with trying to raise money to do this one. With Kevin, you'd need clips from Hollywood films, you'd need clips from sitcoms made by all different companies ... it's becoming insane how he zips up in all these things, you'd want to pepper them through it. It would really be a film about him but it's kind of becalmed in looking for funding at the moment."
Despite fronting unsigned, post-punk bands Virginia Doesn't and The Time prior to his acting career, Lee suggested that Eldon doesn't like being on stage.
"He likes a quiet life as well and it stresses him out performing live" he said. "Which is a shame because he's absolutely great at it. I think that's partly why a lot of the characters he does are very precise or they speak very quickly, he's trying to get through it and get off.
"He's a great musician too of course. He did two John Peel Sessions in the seventies ... He's even done that. It's so weird."
When Gill asked whether Eldon is happy talking about his "old stuff", Lee reflected: "Yeah, I think so. But he's a Buddhist, he's zen isn't he?"
Cumming, whose other directing credits include Toast Of London and The Omid Djalili Show, alluded to the prospective film in an interview with this writer for the Chortle website last year, saying that "this one would be part-documentary, part-fake. Part-fact and part-fiction."
Meanwhile, Lee has been visiting the graves of forgotten music hall comedians to make a film for a new online series.
Music Hall Comic Grave Spotting is part of a new arts project Eggs TV, created by alternative psych punk duo The Lovely Eggs and artist Casey Raymond.
In the show, Lee visits the graves of bygone stars near his home in North-East London, including George Leybourne, who performed as Champagne Charlie; the celebrated pantomime star Herbert Campbell, who was in a double act with Dan Leno; and Nellie Power, whose trademark song was The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery, before the better-known Marie Lloyd started singing it.
Speaking to Craig Charles on his 6Music show, Lee explained how The Lovely Eggs, AKA married couple Holly Ross and David Blackwell, asked him if there was anything he would like to make for them.
"All through lockdown, I became very fat and sad," he recalled. "But I wandered around a lot. I had an idea about making a some kind of film about the area I lived in.
"One of the things I got interested in was all the music hall comedians from the 19th century that lived there, and are buried there. So we went round houses of different 19th century comedians, and then looked at their graves afterwards, which sounds a bit morbid."
Lee's film features in the second episode of Eggs TV, to be released on Tuesday.
The comic will also be in conversation about art and ideas with the writer Neil Jackson at Newcastle's Live Theatre on April 15th, ahead of his evening show at the city's Theatre Royal. Jackson published their conversation, Where Are The Thinkers?, in 2018 as part of his Post-Nearly Press series of dialogues with writers and artists.