Rowley Birkin

Rowley Birkin QC is a fictional character played by the comedian Paul Whitehouse in the popular BBC sketch show "The Fast Show".

Rowley Birkin was an elderly barrister (the post-nominal letters "QC" stand for "Queen's Counsel") with grey hair and a puffy red nose from drinking too much. His sketches consisted of him seated in an old-fashioned sitting room or gentlemen's club in front of the fireplace with a drink in his hand, regaling the person in the opposite chair (of whom only the legs could be seen) with stories about his past exploits. His speech was mumbled and slurred, making it almost entirely unintelligible, with just the occasional incongruous-sounding word or phrase audible. He sometimes illustrated his stories with strange noises and hand signals. It turned out that he had carried out his adventures whilst inebriated, as he ended every monologue with the phrase, "I'm afraid that I was very, "very" drunk," or a variant thereof. In the Christmas Special, we briefly saw his butler (Mark Williams), who is equally old and incomprehensible.

This inherent device was eventually used effectively to elicit pathos, in a sketch about apparently the only woman he truly loved who - it would seem - he lost due to his drinking. The catchphrase uttered at the end of the sketch, after a long and very pained pause, received a rapturous round of applause from the studio audience. On the one occasion that the character's monologue was actually intelligible, it was revealed that the events he was recounting had taken place while he was sober, suggesting that the incoherency of his speech was an affection due to his hazy memory. Once his reminiscings involved the consumption of alcohol, they immediately became incoherent once more.

The character also made a cameo appearance in the "Fast Show" spin-off film, "Ted and Ralph", and was also for a time used as part of an advertising campaign for British Gas- albeit without actually using his catchphrase (instead, it was "I was very, "very" pleasantly surprised").

The BBC webpage on Rowley Birkin tells of the character's origins, saying, "Rowley was based on a man, named Andrew Rollo, who Paul Whitehouse met on a fishing trip to Iceland."

In a BBC documentary about the Fast Show called "The Inside Leg of the Fast Show", actor, and fan of the show, Johnny Depp said that he thought the Rowley Birkin character was a creation of 'genius'.

External links

* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/fastshow/characters/rowley_birkin.shtml BBC webpage on Rowley Birkin]