He is;

what Kenneth Williams would call a big cult - a playwright, an actor, a director, a seeker after truth, sensation and fun, but not necessarily in that order,
a bald man with big eyebrows and a nasal voice, but not necessarily in that order either,
a magnet for the bizarre and a supposer of the unsupportable,

He entertains wild thoughts without fear for how long they'll stay in his head and whether they'll rearrange the furniture while they're there. He is a teller of tall tales and a producer of prolonged plays.

He is someone who must have been told that hoops aren't slimming who still insists on dressing like he hopes to be cast as Magwitch, on stage.
He is usually out.
He was in Brookside.

Does any of that help?

Well, erm not a lot.

In days to come this site may well contain plural wondrous things.
Now all that sits here is a lot of my blather and a twenty minute real audio file of Ken in perfomance... So that's just one wondrous thing.
It's the tale of Ken's youthful entanglement in the twilight world of Transcendental Meditation (TM).
Listen to Ken and learn how just by meditation on a personal Mantra you can pull back your internal drawstring and really make an impression in that all important interview... It's funny.
Find out more about TM (TM) here.
This clip is taken from a private recording of Ken's show Theatre Stories given on the fourth of October 1997 at the Cyberia Internet cafe in Manchester, England (recorded with permission).

Click HERE seekers!

That'll take forever downloading I expect, so while you're waiting why not look at some pictures from the performance below... or even read the beginnings of my ramblings about Ken's TV work...

Ken's theatre show Jamais Vu, a delightful mix of real and imagined conspiracy theories, reveals a slightly ambiguous feeling about the medium of television, its addictive nature, its tendency to induce passivity, its impairment of attention spans and it's quite possible worrying health effects.

Most of this is true and most of it, in fact, comes from Gerry Mander's excellent book Four Arguments for the Abolition of Television, the only copy of which I've seen, fell apart on opening so poorly was it gummed, and consequently took quite some reading.

The conspiracy minded among you might wonder in who's interests it would be that a book denouncing television should be so shoddily manufactured as to be almost unreadable.

Disappointingly, Gerry Mander is the author's real name, not some faintly esoteric joke pseudonym.

Ken, equally however loves telly, has written for it, performed on it, and (I have compelling evidence) watched it for over thirty years.
Ken's first TV play was performed in the mid sixties in the British television series Armchair Theatre, produced by the now defunct British TV company ABC (I know lots of you foreign Johnnies have ABCs too, which are less defunct, but it is imperative you do not confuse these corporations).

The 1960s

The play, One Night I Danced with Mr Dalton, was set in a school and starred John Alderton, Donald Churchill and Pauline Collins.

Now, boringly, this was the first meeting of Collins and Alderton, who later married.

Slightly less boringly, they also claim (for reasons as yet un-accertained) to have first met later, working on Emergency Ward Ten, another legendary British series from the (as defunct as ABC) British TV company, ATV.

Edging on the cusp of boring and interesting is the fact that Alderton acknowledges using Churchill's performance as the incompetent teacher in the play as the basis for his character Bernard Hedges in the later TV series Please, Sir! for LWT (a more or less funct British television company now run by the fully funct Granada television (though for esoteric reasons LWT is in fact owned by the catering side of Granada's leisure empire, the bit with the service stations)), well I thought it was interesting.

You See The Thing Is... an adaptation for TV of one of Ken's stage plays was screened by LWT in 1969, as part of a double bill with a short Johnny Speight piece The Salesman, and when I write a bit more on this, Johnny Speight's name is one which shall come up more than once again...

The 1970s

Ken got chummy in the late 70s with Kenith Trodd (first name's spelling, his affectation) a really terrific TV producer best known for getting some of the very finest work out of the great but willful and patchy TV playwright Dennis Potter.

Kenith wanted to make one of Ken's films (directed by Ken) in the early 1980s for LWT with his and Potter's production company PFH films, oddly the money from LWT for this film and other PFH productions was withdrawn shortly after LWT won a renewal of its franchise.

I say "oddly" because exactly the same thing had happened to Trodd in the late 60s with the organistation Kestrel Films, a company set up by Trodd and Ken Loach inter alia, to essentially take the BBC's most successful exponents of The Wednesday Play into the terrifying worlds of commercial television (thanks to backing from the then newly funct LWT).

Sadly though this never quite happened as Kestrel was well and truly defuncted by some rather sneaky business practise when early in LWT's life it was taken over by people who tore up every part of it's franchise agreement apart from the bit that was a licence to print money...
Funny old world.

In the 1970s Trodd gave Ken the part of a slightly dodgy fixer in a play by Leon Griffiths Dinner at the Sporting Club.
Griffiths' went onto create Minder for Thames Television a just funct once great television production company now part of the Pearson Television group, and the world of the play is very much that of the later series, East-end chaps operating just at the edge of the law.

Trodd eventually directed Ken's TV play Unfair Exchanges in the early 80s, which was based around the preposterous idea of the telephone system evolving some kind of vast networked artificial intelligence!
Quite absurd eh, Netheads?
Mind to be fair this proto Internet idea had already been the basis of an Arthur C Clarke story and a Doctor Who adventure in the mid 60s, so Ken wasn't that prescient.

GF Newman's Law and Order in the mid 1970s was a piece of meaty drama looking at the corruption of the British legal system and gave Ken a rather nice part as a somewhat reptilian barrister.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, Ken, complete with revolting scrape across flap of hair, starred as Roger in The Anniversary episode of Fawlty Towers, a quite repulsively smug middle class acquaintance of the deranged hotel owner and his wife.

A close call this one, because if it hadn't been for BBC industrial action, Roger would have been played by Carry On actor Julian Holloway, whose Roger, I suspect, might have been less fabulously grotesque.

The 1980s

In the 1980s Ken regularly appeared in Johnny Speight's In Sickness and in Health as Fred Johnson, the exasperated neighbour of Warren Mitchell's Alf Garnett.
Warren and Ken have been friends for years, since Ken first understudied for Warren in the theatre.

The 80s also saw a sort of TV adaptation of Ken's play Pilk's Madhouse, which is astonishingly popular in Germany and nowhere else for reasons best known to the Germans and perhaps Ken's translator. The TV extrapolation, The Madness Museum, starred Ken, John Sessions and Simon Callow amongst others, and is a tour around a Victorian asylum revealing genuine and terrifying treatments of the day. I

t's a smashing piece of work, sees Ken's first use of enantiodroma in his plays and, like the stage play Furtive Nudist, it climaxes in a huge piece of plagiarism from Charles Fort.

The late 1980s saw Ken starring in the ITV kids' series Erasmus Microman playing a time travelloing eccentric who teaches children about history, a character that is in all but name Doctor Who in a series which was in all but name Doctor Who

.
He made a rather fine snivelling villain in the Granada Television adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes' story,The Blue Carbuncle, like many of the cast of this series I suspect he only got the part because he was the member of Equity most facially similar to an original Sidney Paget illustration.

He also played the human avatar of the springed box being known as Zebedee in a spoofcumentary about The Magic Roundabout which amongst other things seems to have widely popularised the belief that the programme was originally a thinly veiled satire on French politics.

Digression
If you're interested, this belief is thinly veiled codswallop, as pernicious and ridiculous as the claims of crude names in Captain Pugwash, which were first widely circulated in the media by Victor Lewis-Smith.
Victor has told me he was merely repeating a story he'd heard from a British Satellite Broadcasting employee (British Satellite Broadcasting is an allegedly not defunct British television company that merged with Sky television in much the same way that Czechoslovakia merged with Russia in 1969 and Monster Fun comic merged with Buster in the late 1970s).
Digression Ends


The late 80s also saw Ken audition for and fail to become the Seventh Doctor Who, the part going to his protege, Sylveste(r) McCoy. This was no doubt good news for Ken in the long run, because McCoy ended up being reigning Doctor for the longest period of inactivity in the show's history, getting all the problems of typecasting associated with a high profile TV role without the usual benefit of regular well paid work.

Ken's finest TV work of the 80s is, of course, widely regarded to be the role of Bloody Scary Devil in a rather good Kit Kat advert I bet they could only show when the tinies were safely tucked up for the night.

The 90s have seen Ken have a brief foray into Mersey Television's Brookside, playing dodgy geezer, Oscar Deane, the idea was the character was to be a semi-regular but Mersey seem to have tired of him somewhat quicker than was first intended.

Ken has also fronted two Channel 4 documentary series by Windfall Films- Reality On The Rocks an investigation of Quantum physics and Brainspotting an exploration of consciousness.

Ken also appeared in a play for kids shown as a pair of schools' programmes called The Eggman. Ken claims in live shows he played a loony old child molester in this, in fact he gives a very sensitive performance as a lonely old man, feared and vilified as such.
Nice work, but he'd rather not say so, I think.

He also seemed to have a spell of being lunatic Victorian of choice for TV and radio casting departments, and after playing the March Hare and Mad Hatter in Dennis Potter's 80s film Dreamchild he seemed to spend a large part of the 90s playing almost every character in Alice's Adventures  in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There that didn't require a pinafore dress.  

The 2000s

A new science series for Channel 4 (this time not a Windfall production) turned up in 2000. Six Experiments That Changed the World, and I suppose I should write something about it and about Ken's wall to wall TV  ads for Citroen cars at the mo.  I shall at some point.

His recent film roles in Saving Grace, and Art in the West End seem to have reassured the world that he will actually follow a script, despite 15 years of making up his own shows as he goes along.

He clearly still has 19th century nutter written all over his Equity card these days, leading to perhaps the most enjoyably psychotic Wackford Squeers ever in Radio 4's in Nicholas Nickelby. ..

Current obsessions centre on Pidgin English and ventriloquism. Perhaps the combination of the two may prove fruitful, limited mouth movement and vocabulary combined...?

 

If you want to see another bunch of sites with Ken content these are all quite good to nose around (or were when I last checked):

Dave Farmbrough's site, a far better primer on Ken than mine, the Fused site, which is nice if a little out of date and Jeff Merrifield's site, which has a great background piece on the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool and generally holds a few clues as to what the man is currently up to.

There used to be a section at www.tinkers.co.uk by and about Ken but it seems to have long since been decommissioned for reasons best speculated on fruitlessly.

Good news is Ken now has his own website run by his agent Colin Watkeys at www.tentringer.co.uk, the official site for the Prettyboy himself.

Ken's musical and Fortean collaborator James Nye has a site at  http://www.frogboy.freeuk.com which deals with many matters Kennish, and beyond our Ken.

If you want to get lost deep in the esoteric world of the Illuminati, I should tell you that Ken's destiny has been deeply interwoven with the plans of certain organisations I'm best not to name for several decades and that the Discordian collective known variously as The KLF, The JAMS, The Timelords and The K Foundation owes its existence in roughly equal part to Ken Campbell and an old Athena poster based on The Lord of the Rings.
If you really want to get into all that, click boldly here.

To find out about The Warp, the 24 hour theatre experience first mounted by Ken and now in the capable hands of his daughter, Daisy, tap gently here.

If you're feeling particularly warped and flushed, an 18 hour recording capturing Ken's 1979 I.C.A. production starring Russel Denton, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, Maria Moustaka, Stephan Williams, Pat Donovan and the Warp Band is now available on video for £105 including postage etc. from the author, Neil Oram, Goshem, Drumnadrochit, Inverness-shire, IV3 6XH (tel 045 62402).

Go back to the main page

8 of the images of Ken here aren't my copyright, I'll identify and credit the sources as soon as I can.