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.