“HIYA, pals!” Gerard Kelly’s catchphrase, exuberantly delivered as he batted sweeties into panto audiences with a tennis racquet, heralded the arrival on stage of a true star who loved his work, lived a quiet life, and died way too early.
Perhaps he was Buttons. Perhaps he was Wishee Washee. For sure, these roles stood in comically marked contrast to his most famous telly one, as bank teller Willie Melvin in much-loved sitcom City Lights (recently repeated on BBC Scotland).
Then there were the many years of serious work: Felix Ungar in a Glaswegian version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple; associate artistic director of 7:84 theatre company; director of dramas about sectarianism (Hector McMillan’s The Sash); and nuclear attack (Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows).
Somewhere in between, he starred in Iain Heggie’s lewdly comical Wholly Healthy Glasgow, set in a massage parlour, and in the same writer’s The King Of Scotland, loosely based on Gogol’s Diary Of A Madman. Versatile. Professional. Yep, all that. But, more importantly in real life, a lovely man by all accounts.
His real life began on May 27, 1959, when he was born Paul Kelly in Glasgow, growing up in the east end’s Cranhill district. His father had a chip shop, his mother was a hotel waitress.
At St Gregory’s secondary school, a drama teacher spotted the 12-year-old’s early potential and introduced him to a director, Lauren Henson, who put him in an advert and encouraged him to get an agent, which he did – Winifred “Freddie” Young, who found him more work in commercials and in TV adventure The Camerons (1974) for the Children’s Film Foundation.
After that, recalled Kelly, “it just seemed to be the natural thing to keep going”. In 1978, the going got good when he played a teenager with learning difficulties in James Duthie’s Donal And Sally for BBC One’s Play for Today.
In the same esteemed drama series, he was cast as designer Spanky Farrell in an adaptation of The Slab Boys, a role he returned to at Edinburgh’s Traverse in 1982.
Scotch missed
Meanwhile, Kelly was also gaining valuable exposure in that great vehicle for talent Scotch And Wry, where, in a famous football sketch, he played an outstanding player signed by Rangers manager (Rikki Fulton) on the advice of a new scout (Gregor Fisher).
Too late, the manager discovers the young prospect is a Catholic, and so tries to rescind the contract and prevent the boy from playing.
Later, in 2006, Kelly teamed up with Tony Roper in Rikki And Me, a stage tribute to Fulton.
Kelly had a small part in the critically acclaimed film Comic Strip Presents ... Mr Jolly Lives Next Door (1987) and, in 1983, featured in Killer, the pilot episode for a new crime series called Taggart. One year later, the seven-year tenure of City Lights began.
Written for BBC Scotland by Bob Black, it featured Kelly as a teller at the fictional Strathclyde Savings Bank, who dreams of becoming a famous novelist, beginning with his autobiographical My Childhood Up A Close.
While his efforts in that direction come to naught, the rest of his life is also marred by ill-advised involvement in the get-rich-quick schemes and dodgy dealings of best friend Chancer (Andy Gray).
City Lights ran for six series, ending in 1991, a year during which The Herald reported Kelly, then aged 32, answering the door of his flat in a Govan dockland development at 12.40am, only be assaulted with a broken bottle wielded by a complete stranger.
The actor needed 35 stitches to face and hand wounds but, undaunted, continued appearing in Aladdin at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh.
Years later, in 2007 at the King’s, Glasgow, he amazed colleagues by carrying on during a prolonged and painful bout of sciatica. Real trouper, as they say.
Les miserable
EXPERIENCE of being glassed in the face perhaps helped Kelly play violent Jimmy in EastEnders (1994), not to mention villainous Callum in Brookside (1997-2000). But Lord alone knows where he drew the inspiration for Ian “Bunny” Bunton, the camp and controlling pantomime director in Ricky Gervais’s Extras (2005), starring with a depressed Les Dennis.
His brilliant performance was repeated in cameos during the Sir Ian McKellen episode and the Christmas Special where, cruising for sex on Hampstead Heath, his character claims to have known George Michael carnally.
But Gerard Kelly was known as much for real panto as for fictional panto directors.
Anointed King of Panto, he reigned supreme at the King’s theatres in Glasgow and Edinburgh for 20 years, turning in a dozen performances a week, often as not in wonky wig and trademark Doc Martens.
With cheeky grin and generous spirit, he appealed to children and pensioners alike.
In the 2009/10 season, he starred in Aladdin, his last pantomime.
He played the Narrator in The Rocky Horror Show in Edinburgh and Aberdeen from June 21 to July 3, 2010, and was due to revive this performance for one week at the Glasgow King’s from November 8-13, 2010.
Alas, it was not to be.
After collapsing in his London home with a brain aneurysm, he died in intensive care at West Middlesex University Hospital at 9.35pm on October 28, 2010, surrounded by friends and family. He was 51.
Kelly never married or had children and left his entire estate to a friend of 18 years, the English actor Terry Kiely. Fellow panto star and friend Elaine C Smith praised his warmth, humour and political outlook, recalling: “One of my fondest memories is of me dressed as a fairy and Gerard as Wishee Washee as we stood discussing the situation in Palestine.”
Labour of love
THOUGH a determinedly private individual who avoided the celebrity circuit, Kelly was politically engaged, appearing in Labour election broadcasts. As well as working with David Hayman in 7:84 for three years in the late 1980s, in 1991 he directed an anti-poll tax farce, Revolting Peasants, for the radical theatre company.
At his funeral in Glasgow, the back of the order of service featured a picture of the much-loved star in panto costume with the words: “Bye Bye Pals … See you later!”
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