Here’s a truncated alternate version of a set I performed on Tuesday night at Lost Treasures of the Black Heart.

My unsung hero of the month is the 4 foot 4 inch tall actor Deep Roy. Some of you might already know Deep Roy because he gained minor cult stardom a couple of years ago when he played all of the Oompah-Loompah’s in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake. However my own initial exposure to Deep Roy happened much, much earlier. You see despite being virtually unknown Deep Roy has an incredibly impressive filmography, and I know that an impressive filmography does not a hero make, as anyone who’s ever looked up Dexter Fletcher on IMDB can attest to. Deep Roy starred in amongst others Return of the Jedi, and Greystoke, and The Dark Crystal, and Return to Oz, and The Pink Panther Strikes Again. He played Princess Aura’s Pet, Fellini in Flash Gordon and Teeny-Weeny; the Snail Rider in Never Ending Story, although he did not appear in either Time Bandits or Willow, even though every other dwarf actor on Equity’s books did. In short he appeared in just about every movie I grew up with, every movie that I watched and re-watched countless times. He can’t possibly know, or even care, how much I associate him with so many happy, nostalgic childhood memories. His roles were always very minor, bit-parts even. They were often non-speaking, or sometimes even under so much heavy make-up, that you’d be forgiven not noticing him, but there was something about him that really stood out to me, so much so that as an adult, I assumed he was some kind of cult figure. I imagined that he spent his weekends at sci-fi conventions being adored by countless fans. I imagined that when I Googled him he’d have dozens of fan sites devoted to him, but when I did there was nothing, nothing, but an incomplete IMDB page. I knew he was in a bunch of films they didn’t even list, because I remembered them. I guess he played such small roles that often he wasn’t even credited for them. I mentioned this to my friend Beezer, (who had his own website) and he suggested that we just make a Deep Roy web page. I collected whatever little information I could find out about and put it up, and I was working at picture library at the time that specialised in movie stills, and I would scan in any photo of Deep Roy I could find and Beezer would put it on the website.

It was around the time of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Movie and by then lot’s of other Deep Roy websites had popped up. Many of them had a slightly “piss-takey” vibe to them which I didn’t really warm to, and they pretty much all ripped off the photos that I’d scanned in anyway. Deep Roy even launched his own official website, in which he too used the photos that I’d scanned in, but I forgave him. Either way with all this going on there was no real need for our little website to exist at all. So we decided not to renew it and let it drift into “web-livion”, and I haven’t thought much about Deep Roy since. However as a nice little coda I thought it’d be cool to check up on him and see what he’s been up. Turns out that Deep Roy ended up earning a million dollars for his role in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Although he did technically play 165 parts, so that does even out at only $6,060 per Oompah-Loompah, which isn’t as impressive. His Facebook page has over 500 fans. Last year he appeared two of the highest grossing films of the year; Transformers 2 and Star Trek, and his appearance in Star Trek means that he is the only actor ever to have appeared in the Star Trek, Dr Who and Star Wars franchises. Best of all last October he went to the White House to and appeared Barack Obama’s Halloween party. Amazing!

His IMDB page is now fully comprehensive and even includes a personal quote from the man himself which reads:

“The most important thing is never to forget to always have love in your heart”.

What a guy!