Biopic to chart rise of maverick comedian who became famous for characters such as Sid Snot and Cupid Stunt
He was one of broadcasting's most-loved entertainers – a maverick comedian who delighted radio and television audiences with his comic characters and a quick, sometimes controversial wit that more than once saw him lose his job.
Now Kenny Everett is to be celebrated on BBC4, with a 90-minute biopic that focuses on his relationship with his wife, singer Lee Middleton – they married in 1966 and separated in 1979 – and charts his rise from rebellious young DJ to rebellious household name.
The Best Possible Taste takes its name from the catchphrase of Everett's American chatshow host, Cupid Stunt, one of the performer's most famous comic creations alongside Sid Snot. Both characters feature in BBC4's film about Everett, who died in 1995 of an Aids-related illness.
Everett is played by newcomer Oliver Lansley, while former Coronation Street actor Katherine Kelly plays Middleton. The script is by Tim Whitnall, best known for writing the stage play Morecambe, about comedian Eric.
"Kenny Everett was a genuine original: wild and unfocused maybe, but also deliciously anarchic and always entertaining," said Richard Klein, the controller of BBC4.
"In many ways Kenny was a very modern celebrity, wearing his heart on his sleeve while coping with a complex life. Re-evaluating this talented and exuberant personality, enabling audiences to reconsider Kenny's undoubted impact and legacy, makes this a very BBC4 drama."
Everett's infamous appearance at a 1983 Young Conservatives' conference, where he shouted "Let's bomb Russia" and "Let's kick Michael Foot's stick away", will feature alongside tales from his radio career on pirate, commercial and BBC stations. The comedian also had hugely popular television shows on first ITV and then BBC.
There was more to Kenny Everett than his sexuality, but we didn't see it
Throughout his radio and TV career, Kenny Everett always gave the impression he was acting the part of Kenny Everett. The feature length, 90-minute biopic, Best Possible Taste – The Kenny Everett Story (BBC4), suggested he was also giving a performance in his private life, as he struggled to accept what to everyone who knew him – not least his wife, Lee – was blindingly obvious; that he was gay.
Only his close friends will know just how true this was. Tim Whitnall's script certainly never felt awkward, but viewing Everett's entire life and career almost exclusively through the prism of his sexuality began to feel limiting after an hour, as I felt that other interesting aspects of his character had gone awol. Everett was clearly a troubled, self-destructive personality regardless of his sexuality. Plenty of other entertainers remained firmly in the closet during the 60s and 70s without repeatedly torpedoing their own careers by getting sacked for breaking the rules.
Likewise, to attribute his excessive drug consumption to the pain of trying to maintain the pretence of being heterosexual – as this film implied by cosily ending at the point at which he came out – is to ignore the possibility that he was also a bit of an addict. And what were his politics? Was he the rightwinger who appeared at a Tory party youth conference and said, "Let's bomb Russia", or was he the leftie who got the sack for telling a dirty joke about Margaret Thatcher on Radio 2? Or was he just an attention-seeker who would say anything for a laugh? These were the questions that were being asked about Everett in the 80s and this film failed to answer them.
What got lost in all this was any real sense of what made him the star he unquestionably was. There are plenty of entertainers around now who have adopted Everett's more outrageous and eccentric schticks, but at the time he was a genuine one-off – someone who would frequently say the unsayable, wear the unwearable and who polarised opinion absolutely. For all its shortcomings, Best Possible Taste did have a good period feel, an even better soundtrack and in Oliver Lansley (Everett) and Katherine Kelly (Lee) two actors who were seldom less than mesmerising in the lead roles. Lansley's Sid Snot could have passed off as the Everett original and he threw himself into his character wholeheartedly, but it was surely unintentional that Kelly's portrayal of Lee's journey from 60s hippy chick to 80s suburban housewife was equally as involving as Everett's from inside to outside the closet.
Two years ago, the BBC picked up a Bafta for Welcome to Lagos, a documentary series made by those scratching a living on the margins of the Nigerian city, and Welcome to India (BBC2) follows pretty much the same successful format – the only difference being that this first episode followed the lives of two groups of slumdogs from two cities, Mumbai and Kolkata. I'm not sure the groups are quite representative of India as a whole, but there is something immensely liberating about a documentary that comes without the mediation of a hand-wringing, bleeding-heart western reporter and instead allows its characters to observe themselves entirely unapologetically and subjectively.
So here was Kaale sweeping the streets and dredging the drains in his daily search for particles of gold that have got lost among the filth, along with Rajesh and Savita dodging the police and the bulldozers in their illegal shabeen on the beach. Their resourcefulness and optimism were humbling, but even so I couldn't help wondering just how neutral a presence the camera had been. I know the film is meant to be counterintuitively feelgood but for Kaale and the rest of the crew always to have a smile on their faces and never to moan – not even once – about the hardship and inequality of their daily lives seemed extraordinary.
If this is indeed the prevailing ethos of the Indian urban underclass, then one can only admire the spirit that makes them truly believe they might one day, against all the odds, end up as millionaires with their children growing up to become doctors. And if so, then almost everything liberals such as me think we know about India is in urgent need of a rethink.
Hunted fails to follow in Homeland's footsteps, James Nesbitt returns as wisecracking surgeon Monroe, and uncomfortable truths surface about pop's past
The new BBC drama series Hunted is a kind of private-sector version of Spooks (they're made by the same production company). It's as if the secret services had undergone free-market reform. Instead of people being deceived and killed for the good of the state, we see them being deceived and killed for the good of business.
Like Spooks, Hunted sticks firmly to a "one facial expression per character" rule. In the case of the lead character, Sam Hunter (the toothsome Melissa George), who works as a homicidal honey trap for a shadowy corporate espionage outfit, her single expression is a fabulous bee-stung pout that makes Angelina Jolie's seem a bloodless study in chastity.
The possibility can't be ruled out that the pout is not in fact a pout but a look of total bafflement, for the plot moved with enough speed and jackknife turns to leave most actors, let alone viewers, biting their cheeks with the effort to keep up. But who cares what unknown forces shaped her mouth into its magnificent moue? Let's just rejoice that it has been put to such generous use.
She pouted with her lover, a Tunisian terrorist she set up in a sting, and pouted with her real lover, a colleague who may have set her up to be murdered, and pouted when she fought, when she killed and when she was nearly killed herself. Having survived a bullet to the stomach, and played dead for a year, she returned to work out of the blue, pouting.
By writ of generic convention the shadowy outfit was located on an upper floor of an anonymous office block, all the better for Hunter's boss to stand staring out of a full-storey window while saying things like: "Every second I open my eyes each morning I consider the infinite variables of chaos that can occur during a working day, as I like to be one step ahead."
At least the boss – played by the excellent Stephen Dillane – was filmed standing with his back to the camera when he uttered that line, presumably to avoid the cruelty of maintaining a straight face.
Self-awareness remains the implacable enemy of dramas like this. It's rare to see a smile, and laughter is strictly the preserve of megalomaniacs. The only human interaction that isn't plot exposition is a kind of insouciant banter, in which everyone reaffirms his or her indifference to death and danger.
That's the major difference between Hunted and, say, Homeland. Both have high production values, both are capable of creating fiendishly clever plots, but whereas Homeland seeks to foreground character, Hunted relies on shorthand caricature. Thus the three villains on display last week were a macho Arab, an inscrutable psychopath and a cockney gangster-turned-businessman, holding their faces in such ways as to convey, respectively, machismo, psychopathy, and tasty geezerness.
But at least they boasted one expression. Hunter's estranged lover, whom she suspects of soliciting her murder, had to do without any expression, or indeed personality. Unmemorably handsome, he spoke in a kind of robotic home counties accent reminiscent of Tim Henman explaining a third-round defeat against an unheard-of underdog.
How George managed to keep her lips so perfectly puckered while listening to his lifeless drone must go down as one of the great feats of acting, or facial contortion, this year on television. All I can say is that, as far as the pout goes, I'm glued.
The second series of Monroe already looks like a distinct improvement on the first, which was essentially a six-part celebration of James Nesbitt's wisecracking charisma. I bow to no man in my admiration of the Irishman's talents and charm, but a neurosurgeon's operating theatre didn't seem the appropriate venue for his full-blown shtick.
That was the point, of course, the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy, levity and brain surgery, jolly life and bloody death. But the point, once made, became repetitive and annoying, until you just longed for extended sequences of endovascular surgery – anything to escape the torrent of clever one-liners.
The solution was more backup, and it's arrived with Neil Pearson playing the new head of clinical services. Like Sarah Parish before him, he's meant to be the pragmatist to Nesbitt's maverick, except as his character said: "I don't want to play the straight man so you can shine all the brighter." If Monroe can avoid falling back into that trap, and not rely on the weekly false suspense of whether his patients are going to live or die, then it might just mature into good-quality cerebral entertainment.
When it was first shown, the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film must have seemed as if it was the product of some wayward brain operation. And in a way it was, in so far as it was inspired by LSD. That would have been fine if the film had been screened at some groovy 60s happening, but as Arena: Magical Mystery Tour Revisited reminded us, it was premiered on BBC television on Boxing Day 1967.
There was no real script, let alone a plot, just slightly hallucinatory scenes of the Fab Four with punters, avant-gardists and wrestling midgets. As Paul McCartney recalled, for many viewers it was if "they'd been cheated out of their Christmas Special". Poor them, you might think, but these audiences ought to have developed a keen appreciation of the surreal. After all, they'd been watching The Black and White Minstrel Show for years.
Briefly heard interviewing John Lennon in the Arena film, Kenny Everett was the subject of Best Possible Taste: The Kenny Everett Story, the latest in a long line of BBC4 biopics about oddball characters from British showbusiness. The DJ came across as spoilt, insecure, manic, closeted and attention-seeking. But despite Oliver Lansley's staunch efforts, whatever it was that made Everett a huge star in the 70s and 80s never made it into the film.
Leaving aside Everett's self-consciously "zany" style, which never did much for me, it now seems strange that radio DJs ever occupied such dominant positions in the culture. Yet as was evident in Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, they were so big they could get away with the most dispiriting of crimes.
The first BBC executive to employ Everett was Wilfred De'Ath. In Exposure, De'Ath recalled meeting Savile with a 12-year-old girl, whom, he said, Savile then took to bed. De'Ath said that he didn't want to talk to the girl because he didn't want to "demean" himself – although he had no problem talking to Savile.
According to several victims, Savile went on to sexually abuse girls in care, all the while being feted as a great charity worker. The BBC insists that it had no evidence of Savile's behaviour, but the shots of him grabbing and pawing 14-year-old Coleen Nolan on Top of the Pops back in the 1970s were enough to tell you that this was not a guy you'd leave alone with your teenage daughter. No one in power did anything because it was always someone else's teenage daughter.
'I sleep with sunglasses and lipstick by my bed in case of a fire and, if I put on weight, I just don't eat for a couple of days'
I see red hair, lipstick and lashes. I do my hair as if it is being blown in a convertible winging its way around Monte Carlo, and every day I dress as if it's the first day of my holiday.
My mother is English and my father was Greek. I am most like my mother, who never leaves the house without makeup and is always groomed. I sleep with sunglasses and lipstick by my bed in case of a fire. On two occasions when I have been filming, the hotel caught fire. I was able to put on my lipstick and sunglasses and bellow out the window: "Fireman, make an effort for those who've made an effort."
I'm not somebody who goes to the gym or sweats – too unpleasant – but I do seven minutes of exercise as many times a week as I can. I do 50 to 100 sit-ups, leg lifts and clenching exercises to keep things compact. I've never been a terribly slim person – I'm a UK size 10 or 12, depending on the top. So that's where I aim to keep myself and, if I put on weight, I just don't eat for a couple of days.
I'd never entertain Botox or fillers, because I know so many people who, in a certain light, look like a badly paved road. And Homer Simpson lips don't look good – they look dumb. But I'd entertain light surgery if the time was right. I wouldn't mind little darts around the face.
I am a happy person and I think laughter's the best way to keep young. You never see somebody laughing and think, "Oh, they look old."
The real Kenny Everett remains obscured in this cliched, sanitised life story
When I was a teenager, The Kenny Everett Television Show was required viewing. It wasn't remotely funny – or at least, not to me – but, if you missed it, you were in trouble; everyone watched it, and everyone talked about it the next day at school. Gizzard Puke, the unfeasibly stupid punk; Cupid Stunt, the American actress with the unfeasibly large breasts; Reg Prescott, the unfeasibly short-sighted handyman: Everett played them all, and with weirdly urgent gusto. Like the child who, having unexpectedly made his parents laugh, repeats the same joke every day for the next month, he seemed never to tire of their catchphrases. (The series, which had begun its life on Thames Television, ran for seven long years on BBC1.) You could practically set your watch by Cupid showing you her knickers.
Still, his edge of desperation – he seemed always to be trying so hard – had, I suppose, a certain kind of horrible fascination. Last year, BBC4 made an Everett biopic (starring Oliver Lansley) that captured it perfectly: the Fotherington-Thomas walk, the craven smile, the fear in his eyes. Everett, poor thing, was an impostor in his own life. Even once he'd come out – he famously introduced his "two husbands" to the press in 1985 – he still appeared ill at ease. Hardly surprising, then, to discover courtesy of his biographers that he was both obsessed with cleaning, and a hoarder; such compulsions are often linked to anxiety and depression. However, I should point out that this is my interpretation, not theirs. Hello, Darlings! is about as deep as one of its subject's briefer skits; its authors prefer to see Everett's strange habits as yet more evidence of his lovable eccentricity than as symptoms of mental illness.
Everett was born Maurice Cole in Seaforth, Liverpool, in 1944, the son of a tugboat captain. In adulthood, he made much of his impoverished roots, but this was mostly embellishment: contrary to what he claimed, the family certainly had a bathroom. Nor were his Catholic parents half as devout as he said – and when he enrolled at a seminary, it was his idea, not theirs. (He left under a cloud, having made free with the communion wine.) Obsessed with radio from an early age, it was a tape of the "station" he ran in his boyhood bedroom that won him his first gig on the pirate station, Radio London, which broadcast from a ship off the Essex coast. Everett was madly seasick at first, but pirate radio suited him: it meant access to studio equipment 24 hours a day (DJs did three weeks on, and a week off), and all the time in the world to invent loopy characters (as the first zoo DJ, Everett was the father of Steve Wright and all the rest). By the time the government finally shut down the pirate ships in 1967, then, he was something of a star – not to mention a friend of the Beatles – and jobs at both the BBC and Capital followed. In the 70s, he moved into television, and after a few false starts, his shows began to draw audiences some 15 million strong.
His characters, on radio and on television, were clearly a refuge: being someone else was easier than being Kenny Everett. For a long time, he longed to "fix" his sexuality. Early on, there was a boyfriend, Peter Brown – Jonathan King introduced them – but after they split up, he interested himself in women, relying on LSD to help him find them attractive (Everett was also addicted to the sedative Mandrax, and a heavy user of cocaine). He fell for Lee Middleton, Billy Fury's girlfriend, and eventually they married; 10 years later, when it was over, it was Lee who pulled for him John Pitt, an Australian waiter (he and Pitt lived together for a while). In the 80s, having fully thrown off his guilt about his sexuality, he took up nightclubbing with a vengeance, and it was on one such evening out that he met Nikolai Grishanovich, the lover from whom he would eventually contract HIV. Grishanovich was one of the two husbands he eventually unveiled to the press (the other was a Spanish waiter, Pepe Flores), and he died of an Aids-related illness in 1991, the same year as Everett's close friend Freddie Mercury. Everett died in 1995.
There is, I think, a serious and searching book to be written about light entertainment in the 70s and 80s: all those things we couldn't, or wouldn't, see. But this, alas, is not it, nor even a marker on the way. It's not only that it's so badly written, so clunky and so cliched (people are "real characters", events are "almost surreal", and the Coleherne pub in Earl's Court is the "thriving hub" of the Aids epidemic). Rather, it's that it singularly fails to look beneath the surface of things. I understand that the authors intended it to be affectionate, and that writing an authorised biography is a tightrope walk of diplomacy. But kindness comes in many forms. Flaws tend to make a person more, not less, human, while context, however uncomfortable or awkward, is the key to understanding how such kinks and creases mark a life. Smooth these things out, and you risk reducing even the biggest of personalities to pop culture footnotes, their stories curled and yellowing, like old copies of the Radio Times.
Jemaine Clement is being Jemaine Clement. When I find him at 10am, he’s leaping over the fountains of London’s Somerset House courtyard, grinning like a buffoon for his mate’s phone camera. Inside, a few minutes later, remembering the first thing he did at his university’s drama club, he’s robot-dancing around the room. The dancing is reliably shonky. He hasn’t done it since that first time, he says (for good reason). I should have videoed it. “No, it’s probably best you didn’t,” he says sitting back down, with a dryness we’ve come to expect from the more sardonic half of Flight of the Conchords.
This is what Jemaine does. The world first met him via the Conchords, the show of the group he formed with Bret McKenzie at university in Wellington in the late 1990s. Concerning a hapless band attempting to find success with both music and women, it was Perrier-nominated at Edinburgh, found a home on Radio 2, then crossed the Atlantic to settle very nicely on HBO. Since the last episode of the Conchords’ two seasons aired in 2009, they’ve performed a few live shows but have been non-committal about a full-blown reunion, instead pursuing separate film careers. McKenzie has opted for the musical side of things, writing the songs for two Muppet movies, while Clement has become the arch lord of deadpan, appearing as delusional despots in films such as Gentlemen Broncos and Men In Black 3 and contributing his unmistakable tones to animations Despicable Me and Rio.
The comedian claims he spent much of the 90s snorting coke with the late Queen singer Freddie Mercury and funnyman Kenny Everett. Anyone buy his implausible bohemian rhapsody?
Come, readers, and venture back in time with Lost in Showbiz: peel away the years and journey to London past. There, we can cast our eyes over an image that sums up a lost era, more outrageous and decadent than our own. Picture the scene: perhaps in the secret back room of a nightclub, reserved for VIPs, or perhaps in a humble lavatory cubicle, we find three legendary libertine pleasure-seekers, eyes wild, in the midst of a night of crazed, hang-the-consequences gratification, lines of cocaine chopped out before them. One is the late Freddie Mercury, frontman of Queen and notorious bon vivant. The second is his close friend and drug-buddy Kenny Everett, the broadcasting genius who concealed his ravenous appetites for hedonism from the public behind his “Cuddly Ken” persona. And the third? Need you ask? The third is, of course, Jim Davidson.
Such was the deeply unlikely scenario presented to readers of the Sun this week, in a piece headlined “I Took So Much Coke I Wanted Extra Nostrils Says Jim Davidson”, the comedian sharing his “cocaine hell” in order to “blast the campaign to legalise drugs”: I know, I know, thank God someone’s stepped in to put a stop to the imminent legalisation of cocaine. Let it be clear: LiS is not for a moment mocking the illness of addiction, nor Davidson’s doubtless sterling charity work in that area. It’s merely the details of his story that give it thoughtful pause. “When I sniffed a line, it gave me a huge buzz … but as soon as that started wearing off, I wanted more. I would be back in the toilets with Freddie and Kenny, taking line after line. Drugs were everywhere in showbiz in the Nineties. We would all congregate in nightclubs like Stringfellows … and just get on it.” Later he expands on the lunacy that would seize him while in the grip of the old pop’n’chop: “I’d get to midnight and I’d say, ‘Fuck it, let’s go to Guernsey’, then wake up and wonder why the hell I was there.”
Christmas Day audiences were faced with a choice between Del Boy and Arthur Daley – but what else do the festive schedules tell us about the era we lived in?
It’s Christmas 1985. Mrs Thatcher has been in power for just over six-and-a-half years and – appropriately enough – those zeitgeisty wheeler-dealers, Derek “Del Boy” Trotter and Arthur Daley, are on the covers of the Radio Times and the TV Times.
The television listing magazines of 30 years ago (there were just two of them back then), make for a fascinating read, and tell us much about the state of Britain in the middle of the 1980s. Although we can see evidence of cultural changes since 1978, the last Christmas before Thatcherism, we’re still five years away from the Broadcasting Act of 1990– and the television experience was still not as fragmented as today. Programmes aimed at all the family, including the elderly, just about held sway for peak viewing.
DJ, broadcaster and television presenter best known for his radio request show Junior Choice and the children’s TV series Crackerjack
Ed “Stewpot” Stewart, who has died aged 74 following a stroke, became a disc jockey in the days when hosting a BBC Radio 1 show virtually guaranteed both celebrity status and spin-off fame on television. He attracted as many as 17 million listeners with the weekend request programme Junior Choice – also broadcast on Radio 2 – during a 12-year run (1968-79). Stewart will be remembered for his bright and breezy style, ushered in by the jaunty theme tune Morningtown Ride.
He recorded interviews for the show with young patients in hospitals and recalled how his trademark jingle of a chuckling child was born out of such a trip: “This eight-year-old boy who had been pulling at my shirt all day piped up and, with an infectious laugh, said, ‘’Ello, darlin’!’ It was so spontaneous, and I’ve played it ever since because everyone asks to hear him.” Another defining element of Junior Choice during Stewart’s years on it were the novelty singles he championed, many for a new generation, including Max Bygraves’s You’re a Pink Toothbrush, Terry Scott’s My Brother, Clive Dunn’s Grandad, Mandy Miller’s Nellie the Elephant and Benny Hill’s Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West).
The show’s first guest was marooned three quarters of a century ago this month. Here are the moments that made Desert Island Discs a radio classic
1. The first castaway – marooned on 29 January 1942 – was Vic Oliver, a music-hall star in the 1930s. He was the perfect first interviewee for presenter Roy Plomley, the Wodehousian wannabe actor who devised the show. The first guest was supposed to be the philosopher CEM Joad, but he was indisposed. Who knows how broadcasting history would have turned out if Joad had made it to the recording.
2. The second castaway, on 5 February 1942, was the critic James Agate. Incestuously, one of his musical choices was Eric Coates’s By the Sleepy Lagoon, the programme’s theme music (which was inspired not by a tropical island, but by Bognor Regis). Agate was gay, but Plomley would never have dreamed of discussing such subjects – either in 1942 or 40 years later, when he was still presenting the show.
Western movies and the American civil war | Salty pesto | Boris Johnson | Classical music | Benjamin Whitrow on radio
Dr Robert Smith (Letters, 3 October) describes Clint Eastwood’s film The Outlaw Josey Wales as a “piece of nonsense”. Readers will make up their own minds about the quality of Eastwood’s film. That it is in some aspects (but by no means wholly) sympathetic to the Confederate cause in the American civil war is true. But, though I have not made a systematic survey, I would judge that the majority of westerns that touch on the civil war have southern sympathies. The reasons are complex, having to do not only with American history but also with movie history. They can’t simply be reduced to Trumpism. Edward Buscombe (Editor, The BFI Companion to the Western), London
• Good to hear that persuading our friends in the food industry to reduce salt has worked so well (Pesto sauces ‘saltier than seawater’ despite crackdown, 4 October). Absolutely no need to legislate then. Richard Stainer Bradfield St George, Suffolk
The new series of Urban Myths gets off to a glittering start with Diana, disguised as a man, partying with Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett. Here’s the best TV to tune in for
There were always rumours surrounding Diana, Princess of Wales, and her taste for a walk on the wild side. This amusing series, which dramatises apocryphal celebrity stories, returns for a third run, exploring a famous 80s legend. Did Diana enjoy a night out at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the gay cabaret bar? It is suggested that after a day on the bubbly with Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett, Di dressed as a man, donned a pair of shades and hit the town. Sophie Rundle plays the princess, David Avery and Mathew Baynton are her celeb chaperones. Phil Harrison
Versatile stage, screen and radio actor admired for her comic timing
Sheila Steafel, who has died aged 84, was a versatile and bewitching character actor with an outstanding gift for comic timing. As well as being the regular female cast member on the landmark satirical television show The Frost Report (1966-67) – alongside the emerging talents of John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett– she played opposite, “and sometimes against”, in her words, many of the leading TV comedians of the day, including Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (in Not Only … But Also, 1965), Roy Hudd, Tommy Cooper, Spike Milligan and Kenny Everett.
After the success of The Frost Report, a winner of the Golden Rose of Montreux, she was in demand for guest parts in comedy series. Regular roles included Ivy Watkins in the Granada sitcom How’s Your Father (1974-75), the White Lady in all three series of Richard Carpenter’s charming comedy The Ghosts of Motley Hall (1976-78), and the imperious literary agent supporting debut novelist Diane Keen as she starts to overshadow Tim Brooke-Taylor in the sitcom You Must Be the Husband (1987-88).
Kenny Everett's horror movie may not be Citizen Kane, but it deserves its rescue from the vaults. Phelim O'Neill on how thousands of British films could soon be lost for ever
The recent discovery in Argentina of the more complete version of Metropolis highlights how easily a film can become "lost". For almost all the 81 years since Fritz Lang's masterpiece was released, the longer version has been talked about and searched for before being discovered, almost by happenstance, in a forgotten corner of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. If a film as well known and feted as Metropolis can seemingly disappear from the face of the earth, then what chance do movies that came nowhere near changing the face of film have of surviving?
The 1983 horror-comedy Bloodbath at the House of Death, starring Kenny Everett, might not be anyone's idea of a classic - and I'm certainly not attempting to compare it with Metropolis - but it does have as much right to be seen. Bloodbath is a silly, often corny and quite impressively gory spoof of the horror genre, mixing toilet humour with potshots at Alien, The Entity, Poltergeist, The Legend of Hell House and assorted Hammer films. The ongoing Scary Movie franchise treads almost identical ground - which is not to say Bloodbath is pioneering, but rather indicative of what was to follow. It's also the last British film appearance of horror legend Vincent Price, while Everett, whose massively successful TV and radio crossover career is still unmatched, still has his fans, as the repeats of his shows on digital TV channels show. So why has it taken until this month Bloodbath to get a DVD release?
Having obtained a copy of the little-seen 1984 film Bloodbath At The House Of Death, the cinema debut (and simultaneous swansong) of Kenny Everett, I have to report that it does little to enhance the reputation of the late disc jockey.
Not that it needs a great deal of enhancement. While John Peel is revered by music fans, Kenny Everett remains the dead DJ of choice for radio geeks. Thirteen years after his death, it is astonishing how often his name crops up on radio message boards - the most recent mention asking how Everett might fare if he were starting out today. Not very well, was the unsurprising verdict.
Film will focus on unhappy childhood of DJ and comedy performer who died in 1995
He created a character called Cupid Stunt and told a filthy joke about Margaret Thatcher on Radio 2. But now the late Kenny Everett is in line for the latest in showbusiness establishment accolades – a BBC4 drama biopic.
The BBC is developing a 90-minute film called Number One in Heaven about Everett, who died of an Aids related illness in 1995 aged 50.
Programme to feature archive clips of DJ's jingles, 'fiddly bits' and comedy characters, and will be backed by documentary
BBC Radio 2 will attempt the impossible on Christmas Day with a "new" Kenny Everett show 15 years after his death.
Kenny Everett's Christmas Selection Box will feature archive clips of Everett's jingles, "fiddly bits" and comedy characters including Captain Kremmen, Chris P Bacon and Rock Salmon, interspersed with classic and current chart hits.
Carols on Christmas Eve, Adam and Joe on Christmas Day and a selection of Kenny Everett on Boxing Day
If the festive spirit is still proving elusive, tune into Merry Christmas Morris Minor! (Radio 4, 11am), one of the sweetest radio offerings over the holiday. The Guardian's Martin Wainwright celebrates the car's 50th birthday in this affectionate tribute, which includes a rendition of Jingle Bells played on a chorus of Morris Minor Horns. That moment really is enough to melt even Scrooge's heart.
This mix of snippets from the DJ's programmes was an exuberant reminder of one of radio's true iconoclasts
Kenny Everett's Christmas Selection Box (Radio 2, Saturday) was a smart idea: a new mix of the DJ's shows from Pirate Radio London and the BBC, glued together with his favourite music. It was an exuberant reminder that Everett – who would have been 66 on Christmas Day – was a true radio iconoclast.
One thing jarred, though: the decision to include what presenter Paul Gambaccini described as "examples of recent music we think he would have liked". You get the idea, updating Everett and making sure the whole thing didn't sound too antique. But Coldplay? Would he have liked Coldplay? We don't know, and it seemed odd to try to guess.
