A Kick Up the Eighties A Kick Up the Eighties A Kick Up the Eighties was a 1981-1984 BBC 2 sketch show starring Robbie Coltrane, Tracey Ullman, Richard Stilgoe, Miriam Margolyes, Rik Mayall, Ron Bain and Roger Sloman. The series was created by Tom Gutteridge (producer/director) and Sean Hardie (executive producer). Colin Gilbert was script editor. The show was the first break into television for Rik Mayall, who played the anorak-wearing investigative reporter Kevin Turvey; it was also the start of Tracey Ullman's television comedy career. Peter Capaldi, a trained graphic artist from Scotland, contributed to designing the show's opening sequence prior to launching his
Kevin Turvey appearances, as part of Kevin's band "20th Century Coyote", were Simon Brint and Rowland Rivron, known as Raw Sex. Mayall described Turvey as "an accent and a mood from the West Midlands" where he (Mayall) had grown up (in Droitwich). J. F. Roberts has suggested that Turvey bore some similarities to Peter Cook's boring know-it-all character E. L. Wisty. Mayall had performed a similar character Kevin Turby on stage at London's the Comic Strip. Critic Ian Hamilton described Turby's routine:Kevin’s tour de force is a long, intricately plodding monologue about His Average Day. He gets up very late and goes