This is your timely reminder that wor Kev was famous well before he entered the fray of the ‘Beans.

Kev’s career started early. While the rest of us were lying on our backs with bottles and dummies in out mouths, he was out in the street rounding up the local cats in the neighbourhood to organise a delivery service to rival the Royal Mail. Dem kitties were strapped with all kinds of packages and sent out into the world. Very little returned but it gave the lad a head for business.

When he started primary school he saw potential, not for education but for racketeering. It was only a matter of time before he was patrolling the playground shaking down wimps for change and bottles of milk, no no, a sip was not enough for him. His empire stretched all the way from the swings down to the football pitch and across to the gates by the main road.

He grew tired of this though, it was all too easy. Kev wanted a challenge and he found this in amateur dramatics. There wasn’t a part he couldn’t play: Julius Caesar, Moses, Othello, Rhett Butler, Gary Wilmott, Bruce Forsyth, the list was endless. Success was around the corner and he could smell it. A local talent scout saw his production of Pinter’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ and immediately cast him in a new children’s television programme about a boy who made a fortune.

‘Matt’s Millions’ was based on the book by Andrew Norriss about a boy who writes a successful video game on his home computer while ill and off school, and earns over one million pounds for his troubles. Kevin, of course, played the lead role of Matt, struggling to deal with the trials and tribulations of a pre-teen swimming in money. Does he go off the rails, knee-deep in clunge and blow? Of course not, he’s only eleven.

Though it only lasted for four episodes, Kev took his role very seriously and prepared for the part as only a professional would. He organised a meeting with Alan Sugar and shadowed him for a few days followed by a week with Donald Trump, wiping fake tan off his clothes every half an hour. He went deep into everything. When the series finished he had to take a few months off from the business because he was convinced he was a millionaire and expressed open disdain for his parent’s house only having three bedrooms and no pool.

These days you’re more likely to find him sticking abb dabs into cable wires and various other IT-based activities rather than on the telly or stage. Though the world mourns the loss of a world-class thug, entrepreneur and actor it celebrates his ability to cleanse the soul of a computer or whatever it is that IT people do.