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.

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.

Hunted (BBC1) | iPlayer

Monroe (ITV1) | ITV Player

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."

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.

Last month, we brought you our 10 best Kate Bush moments. Here, we present your thoughts on the ones that should have made the list

This Woman’s Work

As recommended by: Dianne van Dulken, Salamandertome

Spinal Tap meets The Only Way Is Transylvania in this Kiwi vampire spoof. Flight of the Conchords star Jemaine tells us what’s at stake…

• What We Do in the Shadows: watch the first six minutes – video

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.

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.

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

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).

Answering Guardian readers’ questions, the singer discusses his epic railway modelling, his admiration of the Sex Pistols and the secrets of his hair regime

Did you have any heroes in the beginning of your career that you wanted to move or look like?JoeHill

I didn’t look at singers and think: “That’s how I want to move,” but I sorta wanted to sound like ’em. I started off with Eddie Cochran – that rough-edged voice – and moved on to Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack and David Ruffin. I went from being a beatnik to a mod with long hair.