Best Possible Taste: The Kenny Everett Story

Kenny Everett was a contradiction. A lower middle class Catholic upbringing in Liverpool. He was married but gay. He was risqué, controversial, outlandish but also a Tory at a time when they were anti-Liverpool, homophobic and lacking in a sense of humour. I cannot imagine Mrs Thatcher sitting down to watch his shows.

I only know Everett from his television show and not his career in radio. It always amuses me that he managed to get away with his show on ITV in the early evening which featured rather too much female flesh and Hot Gossip.

When he switched over to the BBC my older brother constantly moaned as to why the BBC hired him. However with more money, more writers and more polished performance his Kenny Everett Television Show was a huge hit.

This bio-pic is delivered in a disjointed style with his comic characters appearing as the chorus. In a sense you get to see his varied creations which he was famous for and his complicated life which started with making radio jingles at home before he got into pirate radio, getting fired by the BBC multiple times, his dilemma with his sexuality, friendship with celebrities such as Freddie Mercury, his deteriorating marriage. It was well known in the early 1980s that he was having a platonic relationship with his wife who was also living with her lover, an actor who actually appears in this film as a journalist.

What actually makes this film are the performances from Kathleen Kelley and Oliver Lansley who is exceptional as Everett. You actually believe him as Everett and he also spot on as the various guises such as Cupid Stunt, Marcel Wave and Sid Snot.

Disjointed & confused attempting stylised flashiness for a flashback format to a 24 year old in shorts playing an overgrown schoolboy, it was neither stylish or flashy and came over as very amateur, even with the budget. The Main performance was unbalanced, zipping from confident campiness to painfully acted shy introversion at each scene change. There was no depth, no structure and confusion producing only boredom while watching. The trouble was there was no inspiration only a mechanical faux stylised telling, which fell flat on its silly face. The woman was OK, the saving grace the actor playing Richard Attenborough. As for the Freddie scenes they were unreal and quite devoid of anything worth commenting on, APART FROM THE ACCENT WHICH SOUNDED LIKE A SACHA BARON COHEN IMPERSONATION. (ED. Complete with a beer belly no less!! how awful!! how terrible!) They attempted a Deniss Potter style but it ended up Harry Potter and no sight of a convincing Rotter.

Kenny Everett was quite simply one of those talents that could never be pigeonholed anywhere. A brilliant radio performer who carved out a successful career in pirate radio before joining Radio One on its creation in 1967, he later transferred to ITV and the BBC with a television style that could only be described as idiosyncratic. Never happy with a script, Everett was a superb improviser who created worlds of his own through mimicry and a collective appeal to past television and radio traditions.

Born Maurice Cole in Liverpool, Everett had an ordinary lower middle-class background; but could not admit to himself his true sexuality. In James Strong's production, it was this handicap that was to prove the bugbear of his subsequent life. As portrayed by Oliver Lansley (in a remarkable impersonation), he came across as someone who used lunacy to cover up his sexual inadequacies. Heavily reliant on his wife Dee (Katherine Kelly) for moral as well as physical support, he led something of a sexual double life until the late Eighties when he finally came out.

Stylistically speaking, this production followed the style of Everett's television series in combining psychedelic color, inserts from some of Everett's most memorable characters as well as re- enactments of some of the major episodes of his life. The only element missing was Hot Gossip; but there were enough "naughty bits" to remind us of his unique style. Unable to accept the dictates of authority, he was regularly sacked from the BBC, from pirate radio and from Capital Radio for speaking out of turn, yet achieved sufficient reputation to receive a Sony Lifetime Achievement for Radio in 1994, a year before his death from AIDS.

Aside from the two main performances, the production contained some cameos, some of which were good, others execrable. Simon Callow made a good Richard Attenborough, even down to the regular use of the term of endearment "Darling!". On the other hand Andrew Greenough's Michael Winner was perfectly appalling - a combination of Mel Smith and Albert Steptoe.

Nonetheless BEST POSSIBLE TASTE remained an entertaining piece, especially for those who remember this unique talent in his prime.

If you lived through the transmissions of Kenny Everett, and I only did the telly stuff, you may well recognise his truly individual style and delivery.

A quite remarkable man who, like Tommy Cooper, Dave Allen and a few other greats of his years, really does have a unique stage persona. This is captured to brilliant effect by Oliver and by an excellent script.

Often, capturing the mood perfectly is more of an insight than dry, documentary accuracy and this seems to recognise that value. Well worth the sit-down time but be ready to be spun around.