Comedian Vic Reeves doubles as an artist. He tells Laura Davis about his bonkers new book
IT IS only in the nonsensical world of Vic Reeves’s imagination that a race of berry people invented the letter I and barn owls feed on loose macaroons.
In this bizarre universe, houseflies converse with the devil, Henry VIII ate his wives’ heads and the Eiffel Tower was intended as a giant robot that would rule Paris.
It’s a fascinating, if slightly scary, place to inhabit, and can only be negotiated by the comedian’s Vast Book of World Knowledge.
Reeves, who claims on the dust jacket to be the only man ever to have met King Kong, will be giving what he calls “one of my lectures” on the book at The Bluecoat later this month, to coincide with its publication.
“I got a call from my literary agent who asked if I wanted to do a kids’ book and I said ‘not really but I wouldn’t mind doing an encyclopedia’,” explains the creative force behind cult BBC quiz show Shooting Stars.
“It’s not something I had in the back of my mind. I thought about it then, when she asked me.”
This impulsiveness seems to be the way Reeves operates. His A to Z of the world is made up of a series of illustrations with accompanying text that reads like a stream of consciousness.
Nonplussed by having volunteered to create an encyclopedia on a whim, he threw himself into the project, creating 260 drawings, paintings and collages in just three months.
“They’re fairly random because I was doing 10 for each letter,” says Reeves, who is married to former lingerie model Nancy Sorrell.
“Some of them were way off the board. They are just really whatever took my fancy that day.”
He is most pleased with the loose macaroon-eating barn owl, which makes its nest in milk bottles; the Jurassic Period, in which all the dinosaurs seem to have three legs; and denim, invented by Bertrand the ape.
It’s a coffee-table book but, even so, many of the pictures are far smaller than their originals, which Reeves created in a studio at the end of his back garden.
“I call it a grand shed,” says the 50-year-old father-of-four.
“It’s like a chalet and it’s got a lot of shelves with lots of things on that I’ve collected from book fayres and boot sales as well as all my art equipment, three easels, a work table and lots of bits of collage stuff cut from magazines and books.
“If I’m doing something big, I’ll paint outside. Some of the pictures for the Vast Book of World Knowledge were 6ft square.”
He plans to sell the original art works but seems resigned to the fact that he is too prolific for the market – he already has around 3,000 of his creations in storage.
