Harry Enfield on the puerile charms of Kevin & Perry Go Large: ‘My son preferred The Inbetweeners'

Telegraph

23-04-2025

Twenty five years ago, the biggest film in the UK was a puerile comedy about two spotty teenage losers who jet off to Ibiza to become famous DJs and lose their virginities. Kevin & Perry Go Large made two million pounds at the box-office over Easter weekend in 2000; its theme song Big Girl (All I Wanna Do Is Do It!) reached Number 16 in the UK Top 40. But how exactly did a film as filthy, and as unapologetically low-class, win over the tightly-buttoned British public?
The year in which it was released had a lot to do with it: the new millennium represented a fresh dawn for Britain where everyone was richer, fitter and more fun; alcohol was cheap and nights out were plentiful, and you could still light up a cigarette indoors without being slapped with a hefty fine. Homegrown TV and film was jam-packed of original, outrageous comedy from talented young writers. Harry Enfield, who first created the characters of Kevin and Perry (played by Kathy Burke) for his Nineties sketch show Harry Enfield & Chums, took inspiration from his own messy, angst-ridden, music-obsessed adolescence to shape them.
'It was slightly autobiographical – about every little boy, really,' Enfield tells me. 'I got the idea originally – about six years before Kevin & Perry – while I was in a relationship with Lily Allen's mum [Alison Owen]. Her eldest daughter Sarah, Lily's elder sister, was quite a difficult teenager, and so I wrote the characters to make her laugh. They behaved like she and her friends did.'
Kevin & Perry Go Large took a month to film on a shoestring budget, with the entire cast and crew dispatched to the quieter, north corner of Ibiza to keep them away from the hard-partying centre of San Antonio. The plan was only fitfully successful.
'There was quite a bit of partying,' says Enfield, now 63. 'And we ran out of money very quickly.' Money intended for props and equipment – already limited – was allegedly blown on drugs and alcohol, eventually leading to one pivotal joke taking a very different turn.
If you've seen Kevin & Perry, chances are your abiding memory will be of the giant, stinking poo, ominously floating in the Mediterranean Sea towards Kevin's gormless open mouth. Dreamed up by Enfield's co-writer Dave Cummings (Ed Bye directed the movie), the scene was meant to take place on a boat, with our unlucky-in-love protagonist finally granted the opportunity to get laid after saving Gemma's (Tabitha Wady) life when she falls overboard.
But fate – well, the measly budget, and the drugs – intervened. Enfield jokes that some money set aside to hire the boat was spent on heroin by other crew members. 'So we had to get a bit of lighting board polystyrene, paint it brown, pop it on a piece of line and make it into a poo. It was a bit cheaper than hiring the boat,' he says. They even resorted to picking up actors off the street to pad out the cast for free – one day, Burke was wandering around Ibiza when she bumped into EastEnders' Steve McFadden (who plays Phil Mitchell) and asked if he'd like to make a cameo. One small problem: they couldn't pay him, but would he be up for it in exchange for a single bacon roll? Of course he would. He then turned up in the film as a brawly club bouncer.
It's not just Kevin and Perry themselves who make the film hilarious. Every parent can empathise with Kevin's long-suffering mum and dad (played by a perpetually furious James Fleet and Louisa Rix). Kevin bans them from listening to Wonderwall ('You're not supposed to know Oasis even exist!'), throws a tantrum when they cough up the cash to take him and Perry to the White Isle on a free holiday, and almost vomits when he catches them having sex. But for all Kevin's shouting and moaning, he never comes across as a mean character: he's simply the every-teenager, the misery at the dinner table who wholeheartedly believes no one has ever had a harder life than him.
The film, too – for all its focus on house music, drugs and sex – is at its core a platonic love story, a portrait of an ordinary teenage friendship. When the two boys fall out, and Kevin shouts 'You are not my friend and you are not my fellow DJ!' (still the most quotable clapback in film, in my humble opinion) at Perry's sad, shell-shocked face, you almost feel choked up. Because however silly the film is, we've all shared some of its experiences.
Based partly on his own teenage years, Enfield says Kevin's difficult, abrasive personality was meant to represent the 'terrible time of about two years for boys when you just think you're going to be a virgin for the rest of your life. It takes over your life. It takes over your brain, which is half girls, half music.'
Without Kevin & Perry, we arguably wouldn't have The Inbetweeners, Channel 4's hit sitcom about four unpopular Surrey schoolboys, starring Simon Bird and Joe Thomas, which ran from 2008-10. After taking his son to the premiere of the show's spin-off film in 2011 – set, like Kevin & Perry Go Large, on a lads-on-tour holiday – Enfield asked how it compared to Kevin & Perry. 'And he said,' Enfield chuckles, 'Well, to be honest Dad, Kevin & Perry didn't make me laugh at all, and this is one of the funniest films I've ever seen.'
Like The Inbetweeners, which was unsuccessfully rebooted for US audiences in 2012, Kevin & Perry failed to find success across the Pond. It became quickly apparent after Icon, the film's production company, sold it to US distributors that Kevin & Perry was never going to be a hit in the States – 'They did a test screening, and I think they burnt the cinema down, they hated it so much.'
Why? Firstly, they didn't know the characters like Enfield's existing UK fanbase did; secondly, the US had their own (shinier) version in American Pie, released a year prior, which centred on a geeky protagonist (in Jason Biggs's Jim Levenstein, forever remembered as the movie character who makes love to a cherry pie) but also starred some of the Nineties' most attractive young stars: Seann William Scott, Tara Reid, Shannon Elizabeth. In comparison, gangly, ginger Kevin and squat, docile Perry (a boy played by a girl, no less) were simply too unattractive for Americans to get behind.
'They were ugly compared to American teen characters, where everyone's gorgeous,' Enfield explains. 'One of the boys was played by a girl, and the other one was played by a 34-year-old. Then, both of the girls [Candice and Gemma, played by Laura Fraser and Tabitha Wady] had lots of spots.' For British films to make money in America, he suggests, directors need to make a 'nice Richard Curtis film where everyone's beautiful'.
Much of the film centres around Kevin and Perry's efforts to impress superstar DJ Eye Ball Paul, so memorably portrayed by Rhys Ifans. If you put every negative stereotype about international party-boys in a blender – sex-obsessed, nasty, sly, selfish – you wouldn't even come close to emulating Eye Ball Paul's villainy. He's as famous for pouring vodka in his eyeballs as he is for playing dreadful techno at Amnesia; but Kevin and Perry don't care.
To Kevin's parents' chagrin, they spend their entire holiday carrying around his bags and cleaning his gross holiday home, dreaming – in vain – that he'll give them their big break. Instead, he just broadcasts Kevin's parents' homemade porn film on the club's big screen. But, Enfield laughs, teenagers never care about the moral failings of their heroes. 'With my generation, it was punk. We'd go to gigs and meet people like Eye Ball Paul; we'd hang around backstage and sometimes they were lovely, sometimes they were horrible. But even when they were horrible, we thought they were great.'
A quarter of a century on, Enfield is delighted to learn of a revitalised appreciation for the film – for the 25th anniversary, fans can enjoy screening events and special themed club nights, hosted by lookalikes who make a living out of playing the Noughties' favourite losers. Despite straight-edged Gen Z's apparent disdain for boozing and bonking, there are more than 60 million videos dedicated to Kevin & Perry's ridiculous exploits on TikTok.
With the renewed interest, would Enfield ever bring Kevin and Perry back? 'No, no, I'm too old now. A few years after [the film] I thought about doing a Harry Potter version, where Kevin goes to wizard school. But it never happened, and that was the end of that.'
What would Kevin & Perry Go to Hogwarts have looked like? Spotty Kevin in his wizarding robes, having swapped the decks for a broomstick and ecstasy for Polyjuice Potion – it certainly sounds more fun than Daniel Radcliffe moping about for 20 hours.
Instead, fans will have to make do with the 2000 film, a silly slice of uniquely British humour that, for all its dirty jokes and ridiculous plotting, made the whole country laugh.