‘I have been involved to some extent with all of His Lordship’s political activities since 1987,’ Durham told Yes! Weekly in late 2018. He looked on as Durham took back control and began leveraging this new-found fame.
This sudden notoriety prompted Todd Durham, writer-director of Gremloids (and much later a credited writer on Hotel Transylvania ), to claim copyright violation – a bit rich coming from a man whose entire career was based on a Star Wars knock-off and a cartoon based around Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and Quasimodo.įearing litigation from a Hollywood writer with deep pockets, Harvey stepped back. Soon, Lord Buckethead had accrued a hundred thousand Twitter followers and millions of YouTube views. Photograph: AP Photo/Alastair Gran Lord Buckethead stood against Theresa May in the 2017 general election ‘From Maidenhead to New York and Glastonbury – it was the maddest month of my life,’ recalls Harvey. He picked up 249 votes, smashing Buckethead’s previous record. With a handmade costume, a £500 deposit and ten qualifying signatures – which is all it takes to declare yourself a candidate for a UK election – Harvey was on his way to the hustings. He was quickly inspired to follow in the bootsteps of the Bucketheaded One.
A comedian and TV and radio producer, Harvey had been unaware of the character’s political past until a viewing of an old VHS copy of Gremloids led him to its IMDb trivia page.
Buckethead made a surprise appearance on John Oliver’s HBO show and even opened for the Sleaford Mods at Glastonbury.īut who was the man behind the mask, if not Robin Bloodworth, the actor who played the character in the original film, or Mike Lee, who was long since retired?Ī cursory examination of the Maidenhead election records would reveal it to be a man called Jon Harvey. With a manifesto that included nationalising Adele, bringing back Ceefax and ‘strong, not entirely stable leadership’, this new incarnation of Lord Buckethead captured the imagination of a jaded post-Brexit referendum, post-Trump electorate on both sides of the Atlantic.
Buckethead’s election manifesto included nationalising Adele and bringing back Ceefax But then the character reappeared to run against the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, in her ill-advised snap election in June 2017. The publicity was fantastic, but the political movement had stalled.Īnd that’s how it remained for 25 years, a stovepipe-hatted footnote in a tumultuous period in British politics. Lee won 107 votes, 24 fewer than when he’d run against Margaret Thatcher for the film’s UK release in 1987. In fact, the government pays for everyone in your constituency to receive a leaflet about your candidacy, and for £500 a pretty cheap way to advertise your business – with an annual bonus of £82,000 if you somehow get elected.) (Nothing in the electoral guidelines says you can’t use your candidacy as a marketing tool. In a typically madcap PR stunt, VIPCO boss Mike Lee dressed up as the film’s villain, Lord Buckethead, painted the film’s title on his helmet, and ran against the then-Prime Minister John Major in the general election as candidate for the hastily-formed ‘Gremloids Party’. I came across it eight years later while writing press releases for cult VHS distributor VIPCO. How did a film journalist come to run for office as Lord Buckethead? The story starts with a poundshop Star Wars spoof called Gremloids (aka ‘Hyperspace’), directed by American filmmaker Todd Durham and released in 1984. Photograph: Earl Owensby Studios Gremloids’ official poster So it was on election night 2019 when Lord Buckethead, the villain in a low-budget sci-fi from, stood against Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the west London constituency of Uxbridge. But even on a stage so routinely peopled by windbags, chancers and the kind of English eccentrics who willingly defer to ‘nanny’ in all key decisions, the electoral presence of a figure dressed in Darth Vader-like garb is going to cut a swathe on the hustings. Anyone with even a passing interest in British politics will know that it has always been a strange beast – especially recently.