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.
Terry Wogan's musings on his own start as a DJ in a recent Radio Times interview tend to confirm this dispiriting view. He sent in a tape he had forgotten to rewind to the quaintly named BBC head of gramophone programmes, who went to the trouble of spooling back the tape, listening and giving the King of Blarney a shot at announcing some records. These days, Wogan reckons, nobody would bother even picking up such a tape, let alone rewinding it.
But Wogan's gentle whimsy might have found a way on to the national airwaves in any era. Everett is a different proposition. He played with the medium, marrying vaudeville-style jokes with sound effects and home-made jingles he had put together on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He sounded nothing like the disc jockeys of the time - either dinner-jacketed David Jacobs types or mid-Atlantic Pete Murrays - pitching his act somewhere between the Goons and Tommy Handley.
Despite this oddness, and the fact no one knew who he was, he got his chance. When he made a tape of his doodlings, the BBC Light Programme (a forerunner of Radio 1 and 2) was interested enough to offer Everett, then barely into his 20s, a trial. Instead, the DJ opted for the pirate ship Radio London.
If your only knowledge of Everett is through his TV shows, I would urge you to have a listen to some of his radio work on the internet. The bloggers who describe him as a radio genius are not far wide of the mark.
Will there ever be another Everett? Almost certainly not. The chances of a national station taking a punt on an unknown these days are remote. Listening to Radio 2 on bank holiday Monday, I noted that Ken Bruce's stand-in was TV's Rob Brydon, while Steve Wright in the Afternoon was replaced for the day by Liza Tarbuck. When I was at Radio 2, between 1985 and 1996, I stood in quite regularly for Sarah Kennedy, Ken Bruce, and the late John Dunn, despite being a relative unknown without my own TV show or sell-out stand-up comedy tour. I could not see it happening now.
Producers these days, it seems, would rather hire a name they know that seems to fit in with the brand and may even get them a bit of press, than listen to a bunch of tapes or MP3s from hopefuls. Even a relatively low-profile set-up such as BBC London has chosen "celebrities" including Gary Kemp, Amy Winehouse's dad Mitch, and Toyah Willcox as summer replacements for Danny Baker.
It may be the disc jockey format of the 60s and 70s has run its course. Some of the BBC's most successful programmes, such as Chris Moyles and Russell Brand, are more or less speech shows, owing more to Americans such as Howard Stern than any British tradition. The camp, goonish Everett's influences, by contrast, were almost entirely homegrown.
Not that I expect many of you to take to the barricades in support of the British DJ. His or her demise is a small earthquake with few casualties, apart, I suppose, from aspiring presenters on campus or hospital radio. My advice to them: have a back-up plan.