Kevin Eldon

Kevin Eldon is a British Actor, Comedian and Songwriter. He featured in the major British TV comedies of the 1990s including Fist of Fun, Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, Big Train, Brass Eye and Jam. In 2013, Eldon appeared in his own BBC sketch series It’s Kevin. He has also appeared in minor speaking roles in the HBO series Game of Thrones. Eldon was born in Chatham, Kent. He has been a practising Buddhist since 1990. He has two children with his wife Holly, who he met in late 2005 on the set of Hyperdrive, where she was the art director.

Eldon occupies half a page in Oliver Gray’s book called Volume – A Cautionary Tale of Rock and Roll Obsession; this includes coverage of punk-era Hampshire where, in late 1978, with two schoolmates from Bay House School, Gosport, Eldon started a band named Virginia Doesn’t. Virginia Doesn’t’s career peaked with a session broadcast on Radio One’s John Peel Show on 18 October 1979. In early 1980, Virginia Doesn’t morphed into The Time, in which Eldon was again the front man. The Time recorded and performed from April 1980 until August 1982, during which time the band gigged extensively and played support slots with The Jam, Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive and Bad Manners. The Time had songs included on several self-released tape compilations, although they never secured a recording contract. In August 1982, The Time became Gerry Hackett & The Fringes, a spoof Sixties revival band. On 6 November 1983 Gerry Hackett & The Fringes appeared on BBC South’s ‘The Cellar Show’ presented by John Sessions. Eldon started on the stand-up circuit in the early 1990s performing an act in-character as the political poet Paul Hamilton, but has also, on occasion, done stand-up as himself.

On the circuit, Eldon formed a friendship with stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, which would later lead to an invitation to work with him on the radio series Lee & Herring’s Fist of Fun with Lee’s comedy partner Richard Herring. Lee and Herring would usually refer to him as “the actor Kevin Eldon”, in reference to his claim to being an actor rather than a comedian. Eldon’s work sat well with that of Lee and Herring, and he continued to work with them on many of their projects, including The Lee & Herring Radio Show, Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy. He played recurring characters Simon Quinlank (the self-styled “King of Hobbies”) and ‘Rod Hull’, a nonsensical version of Rod Hull with a prosthetic limb and an obsession with jelly, especially the ‘green’ variety. In 1994 and 1997, he appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part the comedy troupe Cluub Zarathustra; other comedians in the troupe including Roger Mann, Johnny Vegas, Simon Munnery, and later Stewart Lee. They were given a Channel 4 pilot, which led to the television series Attention Scum! The book You Are Nothing by Robert Wringham praises the performers’ talent. From March 2009, Eldon appeared in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle in a number of the show’s sketches most often with Paul Putner.