Media
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Beautiful things: Kathy Burke and Jonathan Harvey
The Independent It’s official. Kathy Burke is a national treasure. Stephen Fry confirmed as much in his appearance last week on BBC2’s Room 101. Wishing to condemn Room 101 to Room 101, he proposed an alternative repository for everything fluffy in life: Room Lovely. The very first thing he suggested placing in Room Lovely was Kathy Burke. “She’s just great,” Fry rhapsodised. “She’s got everything that’s great about being great. She’s incredibly clever and charming – she writes brilliant plays as well as being a wonderful actress and extremely amusing. If she appears on television or in a film, we immediately think ‘oh great’. And she’s gutsy. If I was a woman, she’d be…
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Patron saint of underdogs
The Telegraph Kathy Burke is on her way to becoming an institution. As she puts it: “I’ve got one of those ‘national treasure’ labels.” The 36-year-old actress is often met with smiles from passers-by and a cheery “All right, Kaff?”. Burke has been cherished for some time. Appearing on TV with Harry Enfield throughout the 1990s made her a household name, her gallery of unlovelies inspiring widespread feelings of revulsion and adulation. Most memorably, she gave us Waynetta Slob, fag-in-mouth wife of Enfield’s foul, beer-bellied Wayne; Perry, mumbling sidekick to the acned adolescent monster Kevin; and Lulu, the dribbling baby sister of Enfield’s vindictive toddler Harry. It wasn’t until 1997,…
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Kathy goes a stage beyond
The Evening Standard If I had been around 100 years ago, I would have been a male impersonator in the music halls, says Kathy Burke. Instead, the 21st century’s answer to Vesta Tilley has strutted her trousered stuff as the smaller, but stroppier, half of that wonderfully dopey duo Kevin and Perry for the delectation of the telly-watching nation. “It’s a great liberation for a woman to play a man’s role: I’ve been asked to play a couple of blokes on telly since Perry, and I was quite flattered, really. I said no because physically it’s quite painful, know what I mean?” she adds, miming an excruciating clamp-down in the…
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Carlton preview of Kevin & Perry Go Large
Carlton Preview Preview: Welcome to Preview Kathy, can you tell us about the film? Kathy Burke: It’s basically about Kevin and Perry wanting to go to Ibiza, where the DJs are and where everyone “gives it large”. They want to be DJs so they think Ibiza is the place for them. It’s also got lots of girls? Lots of girls for them to ogle at! Is it difficult making a film length version as opposed to the series? Well the only thing I was concerned about was, would it work? It’s okay doing a five-ten minute sketch, would it last and work over an hour. I was just worried that…
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‘I find brains sexy. What I’d really like is a plumber who can read’
The Times Written off as “thick” at school, she was a virgin until the age of 22, then indulged in a spell of promiscuity during eight years of heavy drinking. Her roles as slobs and victims have won her international acclaim, yet the actress Kathy Burke loves fine art and is firmly in control of her life – although the right man with whom to share it still eludes her. Kathy Burke’s lament echoes the cri de coeur of her character, Linda, the lovelorn nympho in the ginger fright wig, shiny Eighties tights, heinous miniskirt and mouth like the Blackwall Tunnel from the surreal BBC2 comedy Gimme Gimme Gimme. “I…
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Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke bring everyone’s favourite angst-ridden teenagers to the big screen
Heat Harry Enfield has been fitted with an electronic penis for his role as Kevin the teenager in Kevin And Perry – The Movie, currently shooting in London and Ibiza. Enfield has described the film variously as an “English Wayne’s World” or “A rites-of-passage story, in an international setting.” It sees Enfield and co-star Kathy Burke as the alienated, virginal teenage 16-year-olds flying to the Balearic dance capital to get laid and become “top mixmaster DJs”. Rhys Ifans. Spike from Notting Hill, plays the pair’s DJ hero, the rabidly egotistical Eyeball Paul. A key prop in the movie is the electronic device which simulates the erections that constantly pop up…
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Burke’s peerage
The Times The perfect connections: Gary Oldman, Harry Enfield, Meryl Streep. The perfect credentials: best actress gong, Time Out award, adoring public. Yet Kathy Burke is a lady unafraid to act unladylike. Two weeks ago, Kathy Burke was shopping in Waitrose on London’s Holloway Road. As she nudged her trolley along the aisles of fresh fruit, pet food and microwave dinners, she was stopped by a series of strangers. Some told the 34-year-old actress how much they laughed at her sex starved, wig-wearing harridan in Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, the sitcom which has just finished its successful run on BBC2; others, including one slightly stiff middle-aged man, congratulated Burke on her recent portrayal of…
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Marey, who cleans airports and sings with a band
Preview Online Marey is the only one of the seven characters to have been born and bred in Camden: a working-class Londoner with a dead-end job cleaning Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Four, but whose main source of pleasure is singing with a band in a pub. Marey meets Danny when he turns up at Terminal Four with a spare ticket to Jamaica (his former other half’s honeymoon treat) and offers it to her. But he’s too drunk to be allowed on the plane, so they end up drinking some more and going to bed together. It doesn’t last. Nor does Marey’s fling with Cameron or her liaison with Liam. But she…
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Kathy comes home
The Irish Post London-Irish actress Kathy Burke has popped up again on our TV screens, this time in the form of an orange-bewigged flatmate nightmare hunting for a man. Joe Crilly reports. Gimme Gimme Gimme is an odd couple scenario scripted by acclaimed playwright Jonathan Harvey. Kathy Burke plays down-at-heel Linda, who is hungry for love and passion. She shares a flat with her gay friend, Tom, played by James Dreyfus, who also hankers after the ideal mate, like the lyrics of the Abba song, ‘Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight’. In last week’s first episode Linda, discovering a strange man in their flat after a night on the town,…
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The gay, the sad and the ugly
Kathy Burke says she knows her place when it comes to casting. And it’s not among the beautiful people. The Independent If you thought that Waynetta was a slob, Linda, the character Kathy Burke plays in a new BBC2 sitcom, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, is even more gross than the shell-suited, chain-smoking wife of Wayne she inhabits for Harry Enfield and Chums. Life for Linda and her gay flatmate Tom (James Dreyfus from The Thin Blue Line) is one long sex, drugs and rock’n’roll perma-bender. Done up in a ginger fright-wig and white-rimmed clown glasses, Linda gets so out of it her only way of knowing whether she ended the blinder…
