The Kilroy-Silk shaft
Hectored by the mahogany man
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Hello, and welcome back. This week’s quick rec is “Golden Time of Day” (1978), the second LP by Bay Area R&B band Maze, whose vocalist Frankie Beverly—still performing today—is one of the greatest soul singers of all time. There’s not a weak track on the record, and I also love the band’s logo, that ornate, literal maze-embossed, seven-fingered, double-palmed hand, with each digit representing a member of the group. Proper graphic design!
This week, I want to share one of my favorite videos on the internet, simply because it popped into my head. A bit of context first. Now 80 years old and out of the public eye, Robert Kilroy-Silk was once a ubiquitous presence on British television: a silver haired, mahogany skinned TV personality and chat show host with a louche, roving, highly idiosyncratic presenting style (shouting over all of his guests, barging audience members out of the way with his arse), and an interesting/bizarre history of political involvement.
Kilroy-Silk’s show Kilroy ran from 1986 to 2004, and here he is in 1989, in his imperial period, browbeating future Labour party leader Keir Starmer (then a representative of the National Council for Civil Liberties organization) in a topical episode tackling the acid house/illegal rave culture war crisis. “Barbara, darling, let him finish!”, admonishes Kilroy, literally seconds before repeatedly interrupting Starmer himself in a tone not entirely unlike the one deployed by Laurence Olivier’s Nazi dentist in Marathon Man.
I will be forever grateful to YouTuber jgm1138 for uploading a supercut of Kilroy-Silk introductions that gets right to the heart of the man’s dubious essence, and remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. You can watch it right here, and I really can’t recommend it enough. From that little camera move to Kilroy-Silk’s persecutorial Birmingham burr, this is a five-minute masterpiece of bleak, cumulative comedy.
“You subscribe to this newsletter for pop culture insights… AND NOW YOU’RE READING ABOUT ROBERT KILROY-SILK????”
There’s actually a good story behind this video, posted by jgm1138 in the comments:
A very good friend of mine would wait for the the Kilroy intro before leaving for work so that he would be there on time. So this was mentioned to another friend who recorded them over a period of time and gifted as a birthday present to my other friend. It became a legend, and was stuck in a loft/attic for many years until he moved his stuff out of his parents. Tape was found, converted by me and uploaded for all to see.
If you made it to the end of the video, you’ll have detected a distinct rightward slant in Kilroy-Silk’s ostentatiously patronizing rhetoric, and it won’t be a huge surprise to learn that he wound up joining the Eurosceptic, right-wing populist UKIP party, which later inspired, in the form of DJ Mike Read’s “UKIP Calypso”, officially the very worst song ever recorded by a human being—if you die of cringe listening to it, it cannot be said that you were not warned. When UKIP failed to match Kilroy-Silk’s own ambitions in 2005, he launched his own political party, Veritas, from which he resigned as leader within seven months.
As it happens, the extremely popular Kilroy had been canceled in 2004 after a repulsive Kilroy-Silk op-ed, charmingly entitled “We owe Arabs nothing”, was published in the notoriously racist tabloid the Sunday Express and picked up on by the wider media, causing a firestorm of controversy. Hilariously—and tellingly about the state of British culture—a slightly toned-down version of the same piece had already been published in the paper a year before, but nobody noticed; Kilroy-Silk’s secretary, Hilary Hunter, accidentally submitted it a second time, but this time nobody edited it. Fortunately, a spokesperson for Kilroy-Silk cleared up any doubts one may have had about her client’s character with the following statement: “Robert is very fair-minded; and on his show he just lets everybody have their say. He is not a racist at all—he employs a black driver.”
While queasily moseying down this particular stretch of memory lane, I remembered another Kilroy-themed tidbit: his (extremely) short-lived ITV quiz show Shafted, which ran from November 2001 to… November 2001. Look, there’s Kilroy-Silk above, mid-shaft. Its tone and premise was in part inspired by the cruelty of BBC’s The Weakest Link, but it failed to launch, perhaps because it didn’t go far enough in debasing its contestants. A couple years ago, the journalist Jason Okundaye wrote an excellent piece on the shocking venality of British TV in the Blair years. Here’s a brief excerpt:
The Weakest Link holds a warm place within public nostalgia for 2000s television, but last year old footage of the show resurfaced on social media which threw that into question. In one of her ‘spiky’ exchanges, Robinson notes that her contestant is a single mother to three boys, before subsequently asking “how many ASBOs?”, “how many of your three boys have got tags on their ankles?”, “are you on benefits?”, and “you didn’t go gay did you?” after forcing the contestant to reveal details of her broken down marriages. It beggars belief how conduct like this was treated as a palatable feature of daytime television less than two decades ago.
It’s sobering to recall just how commonplace—and how popular—that degree of unpleasantness was on TV at the time. I can’t pretend like I was totally above it all, either. I would happily sit and watch The Weakest Link as a teenager, and I don’t recall thinking it was especially out of step with accepted mainstream standards of conduct. The same goes for shows like the appalling Your Face or Mine, although I eventually reached a breaking point with the depraved baiting of vulnerable contestants on reality TV music shows like The X-Factor.
All that said, retrospectively trying to parse one’s long history of pop cultural consumption armed with the gift of hindsight is 🎵a complicated thing, and no-one understands it but…🎵 Well, let’s just stay no-one understands it, and let’s get the hell out of here for today.
Until next week!
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Wow...seeing that Golden Time of Day is from '78 just threw me for a loop, I have to share that I went on a fully chaotic and galaxy-brained journey through a bunch of random years of music last year initially prompted by your rec of All the Woo in the World (also '78). Listened to a ton of albums from '78, which unexpectedly gave me much much-belated love for some artists that I had been ambivalent to but who have ruled my life in the year since...Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto/YMO, Kraftwerk...which itself got me reading about the history of electronic music, finally got me fully on board with some other, later favorites like Aphex Twin, Daft Punk, Autechre...didn't consider just how connected all these dives were to that initial Bernie Worrell rec but...have to say, the butterfly effect of that post from last year is much much appreciated (also All the Woo in the World is, itself, a total masterpiece)! Can only hope that hopping right into Golden Time of Day upon opening this will have 10% as much impact haha