Kevin the Teenager
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Kevin Patterson is a character created and played by the British comedian, Harry Enfield.
He first appeared in Harry Enfield's Television Programme as an annoyingly energetic little brother who constantly vexed his older brother with his irritating catchphrases and habit of bursting into his room when he was with a girl.
In the first episode of Harry Enfield and Chums (the new name for the show), Kevin, now sans his older brother, reached his thirteenth birthday. The sketch showed his parents watching in horror as Kevin lost his sense of dress, courtesy and posture, thus becoming Kevin the Teenager, one of the most memorable of Harry Enfield's comic creations.
Wearing a baseball cap the wrong way round and with his red hair flopping over his face, Kevin is incredibly rude to his despairing parents, frequently shouting "I hate you, I wish I'd never been born!" at them, and insisting that everything is "so unfair!". In one sketch, when his father asks him to wash his car, Kevin ends up taking the entire day to complete the task due to his inability to get out of bed before noon and an apparent allergy to work, and in another sketch, though wide awake, he made the most primitive of attempts at tidying his room when required to do so. The character is also heavily dictated by peer pressure, and was seen in various other sketches trying to sound like Ali G, or people in Oasis.
His best friend is another teenaged boy named Perry (played by the actress Kathy Burke). They starred in a 2000 feature film, Kevin & Perry Go Large.
One of the interesting points made in the sketches is the suggestion that teenage boys are always very polite to all parents except their own. Kevin and Perry heap immense amounts of abuse on their own respective parents (though Perry shouts at his down the phone rather than face to face) yet are incredibly polite to each other's parents. In one sketch, Kevin's plans to host a party go wrong and ends with the house being trashed. Despite his frequent declarations of hatred towards his parents, Kevin ends up crying whilst his long-suffering mother gives him a much needed hug.
Aside from playing video games, Kevin's one aim in life is to lose his virginity, or at least to prove that he has a girlfriend. From boasting about the (imagined) joys of sex to placing the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner to his neck to look as though he has received a love bite, he is determined to prove that he has "done it". He eventually does lose his virginity in one sketch during a drunken party. The following morning, he wakes up transformed into a nice, polite and helpful young man, but his mother later realises this side of the story was a dream. Unless Kevin's loss of his virginity was part of the dream too, the plot of Kevin & Perry Go Large would have been a massive continuity error, as one aspect of the film is for Kevin and Perry to lose their virginity.
Due to this and the other characters in Harry Enfield and Chums' getting positive feedback and statements of the truth behind the writers' observations, the term "Kevin the Teenager" has entered British vernacular to describe any adolescent who is bad-tempered or rebellious ("He's a right Kevin the Teenager!"). It can even be applied to female adolescents, although in the wake of the the more recent Little Britain or The Catherine Tate Show, an uncontrollable female adolescent is more likely to be referred to as "a Vicky Pollard" or "a Lauren Cooper". It is also interesting to note that in the channel 4 series Skins he plays father to a teenager that seems like a modern reflection of Kevin the Teenager.
Kevin's father has been played by three different actors. He was originally played by Duncan Preston but the most famous version is probably Stephen Moore. In Kevin & Perry Go Large, Kevin's father was played by James Fleet (who had previously appeared in a sketch as one of Kevin's teachers). Kevin's mother has been played by two actresses, the most common being Louisa Rix, who played his mother from Harry Enfield and Chums to Kevin & Perry Go Large. Caroline Quentin played his mother in Harry Enfield's Television Programme, before Kevin was a teenager.
[edit] Trivia
- On the 29 June 2007 episode of English television programme The Friday Night Project, Lily Allen told the audience that the character was based on her older sister, Sarah.
