Dave Spikey: Why I fell out with Peter Kay

Phoenix Nights row revealed

Dave Spikey has spoken for the first time about his bust-up with Peter Kay after Phoenix Nights.

He says he was annoyed that Kay took all the credit for creating the show, and at the number of scenes the Bolton comic wrote with the apparent aim of humiliating him.

Spikey said he was wary of sounding like he had ‘sour grapes’, and said he would even consider working with Kay again – but hinted that the star was too much of a control freak to want collaborators.

In an interview with the Manchester Evening News to promote his new autobiography, Under The Microscope, Spikey says the flashpoint came when Kay rang him and Neil Fitzmaurice, the other writers on Phoenix Nights, to tell the show had 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,’ Spikey says. ‘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.

‘But we submitted lots of dialogue and we had brain-storming sessions. I did lots of research for it on my own. I think credit where credit’s due really. We were the writers of it.

‘I chose not to comment at the time. But now I think that if it’s part of your life, you’ve got to comment on it.’

Spikey also revealed that he refused to appear in scenes when Kay embarrassed his character Jerry St Clair. He refused to be hosed down naked by firefighters following an anthrax scare, as Kay had written, and was annoyed when the Phoenix Nights follow-up Max And Paddy’s Road To Nowhere showed a banner hailing ‘Jerry’s 60th birthday’ when Spikey was only 53 at the time.

Spikey said: ‘I’d love the three of us to work together [again], but Peter seems to want to organise and control his own projects at the moment, which is fair enough.’