Rosario Monachino
Peter Kay and David Spikey, who played Jerry St Clair on Phoenix Nights, endured a 10 year-feud due to the latter feeling his career stalled after the show finished, according to reports.
The sitcom, which aired in 2002 and ran for two series, was about a working men’s club in Bolton that had an owner with high ambitions.
Kay played the role of Brian Potter and the show landed a spin-off called Max and Paddy which was also a huge success.
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He garnered huge praise, not just for his comedic acting but also for being credited as the writer along with Spikey and Neil Fitzmaurice.
However, while Kay went on to become one of the country’s most popular comics, his co-star drifted out of the spotlight.
In an interview with Manchester Evening News back in 2010, Spikey explained the moment when the feud began.
He said: “He rang me and Neil Fitzmaurice, the other writer on Phoenix Nights, and said we’d been nominated for a Writers Guild Of Great Britain award.
“We thought it was fantastic, only for it to go away and for us to discover that actually we hadn’t been nominated, it was only Peter. And you think, ‘Well, he’s probably not going to accept that because of all the work we did’.
“There were three writers. If you’re talking about the person who sat down at the end and collated everything and wrote it, then that was Peter. If that’s how you qualify, by putting the words on the paper, then so be it.
“I think credit where credit’s due really. We were the writers of it.”
Spikey went on to add that he was heavily involved with the research for the show and would often take Kay to working men’s clubs to help with the material.
Thankfully, the pair buried the hatchet in 2015 when they did a Phoenix Nights reunion for Comic Relief and have remained on amicable terms ever since.
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