Elvis Costello: unsung hero of... comedy?
Grumpy? Humourless? Not at all. As his screen credits prove, no good sitcom is complete without a cameo from Declan MacManus. Here are some highlights:
One of the singer’s earliest comic cameos came in the mid-1980s, when he played a deaf A&R man in the Adrian Edmondson/Jennifer Saunders/Dawn French sketch show The Comic Strip Presents.
In a 2003 episode of Frasier, Costello made an appearance as Ben, a cheery but tuneless folk singer whose renditions of The Wild Rover and Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport ruin the atmosphere at Frasier and Niles’s favourite coffee house.
Costello paid a visit to US sitcom Two and a Half Men in 2005, playing himself as a member of an elite men’s group whose other members include Sean Penn, Harry Dean Stanton and the show’s regular star, Charlie Sheen.
In season 3 of The Larry Sanders Show, Costello plays 13 Steps Lead Down before trashing his dressing room. In season 5, he sells Larry’s sidekick, Hank, a lemon of a car. 'I should have learned my lesson when I bought that moped from Sting,’ laments Hank.
In 2005 he appeared on The Kumars at No 42, joining in a rendition of I’m A Secret Lemonade Drinker, the jingle written for the R. Whites ad by his father, Ross MacManus.
Costello closed the last in the series of nineties comedy 3rd Rock from the Sun with a version of Fly Me To The Moon.
In The Simpsons episode How I Spent My Strummer Vacation, Homer responds to Costello’s suggestion that he take up the bass guitar by breaking his trademark spectacles.
The season finale of Tina Fey’s 30 Rock saw Jack (Alec Baldwin) persuade Costello to join an all-star choir to sing a song Just Give a Kidney for his father. 'Elvis, haven’t you said that if a song reaches just one person, you’ve done your job?’ pleads Jack. 'No, I’ve never said that,’ replies Elvis.