Vic Reeves to be killed off after big screen "swansong"
- Jim Moir will cease to perform as Vic Reeves after making comedy film The Glove with double act partner Bob Mortimer
- However, filming on the movie has been pushed back till at least 2023
- Moir is now increasingly focused on his painting
Vic Reeves is being killed off by his creator, Jim Moir.
The comedian claims that The Glove, his long-gestating film with double act partner Bob Mortimer about Michael Jackson's training glove, is likely to be his alter ego's "swansong".
The film was scheduled to shoot last year. But Moir told BBC Radio Cornwall that it had now been pushed back till at least 2023.
"Vic Reeves was a character I invented when I was at art school actually, I put him on stage. And I haven't done him for a while," he told presenter David White.
"Bob and me wrote a film, about 12 years ago, which we keep threatening to do and we've been asked to do, so we might do that next year. And that will probably be the final appearance of Vic Reeves."
Moir created Reeves, "The North-East's Top Light Entertainer", performing his Big Night Out evening in South London in the mid-1980s. The name derives from two of his favourite 1950s singers, Vic Damone and Jim Reeves.
Mortimer, a solicitor at the time, routinely watched the show when it was at The Goldsmiths Tavern in New Cross and went from being Reeves's drinking buddy to his comedy partner.
Having suffered from crippling shyness while a law student at Sussex University, Mortimer recalled how seeing Reeves for the first time at the Tavern helped to bring him out of his shell.
"He was in a tiny room upstairs, with six or seven of his friends as the audience, and he was wearing a Bryan Ferry mask, tap dancing and making a high-pitched wailing" Mortimer told Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 2019. "I started going every week."
Reeves's television debut arrived in 1986 on Channel 4's The Tube in a game show segment called 'Square Celebrities', where he was suspended on a wire, asking celebrities questions. Jonathan Ross was an early champion and he appeared on the latter's chat show, One Hour With Jonathan Ross, again in a game show scenario, before Channel 4 handed him his own show, Big Night Out, in 1990.
He and Mortimer would cement their popularity in spoof light entertainment shows like The Smell Of Reeves And Mortimer and Shooting Stars, though they also made the black sitcom Catterick and the Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) reboot, with Moir also going on to host several documentaries as Reeves.
He is also one of the few living comedians to have a number one record in the UK singles chart, releasing a cover of Tommy Roe's Dizzy with alternative rock band The Wonder Stuff in 1991.
Officially, Moir last appeared as Reeves in 2020 on BBC Two's lockdown show Comedians: Home Alone. But he will shortly be seen in the film A Brush With Comedy, directed by his son Louis Moir, one of several comics talking about the overlap between their comedy and art.
Moir was speaking to BBC Radio Cornwall to promote his exhibition at the Cornwall Contemporary Gallery. He is currently presenting Sky Arts series The Prince's Master Crafters, in which skilled amateur craftspeople try their hand at a range of traditional crafting challenges such as blacksmithing, wood and stone carving, stained glass and weaving.