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.
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