Kenny Everett
- Category : Comedian
- Type : MGP
- Profile : 6/2 - Role Model / Hermit
- Definition : Single
- Incarnation Cross : LAX Prevention 2
Biography
Kenny Everett (born Maurice Cole in Seaforth, Lancashire; 25 December 1944, – 4 April 1995), was an English radio DJ and television entertainer.
He is best known for his career as a radio DJ, and for the Kenny Everett television shows.
Early life
Everett attended the local secondary modern school, St. Bede's Secondary Modern, which is now part of Sacred Heart Catholic College.
He attended a junior seminary at Stillington near York with an Italian Missionary Order, the Verona Fathers, but left under a cloud after, rumour has it, he broke into the sacristy and drank the communion wine.
After schooling, he worked in a bakery and in the advertising department of The Journal of Commerce and Shipping Telegraph.
However, having revealed a natural comic and broadcasting talent, he began a career in entertainment. He adopted his stage name from film-star Edward Everett Horton, a childhood hero.
Broadcasting career
Radio career
Everett's first break (as Maurice Cole) came when he sent a tape to the BBC in 1962. The BBC gave him an interview and offered him a job as a presenter on the Light Programme, the forerunner to BBC Radio 2. He declined, however, in favour of the less constrained world of pirate radio, where he began his career as a DJ for Radio London.
He teamed up with Dave Cash for the Kenny & Cash Show one of the most popular pirate radio programmes. His offbeat style and likable personality quickly gained him attention, but in 1965 he was fired after some outspoken remarks about religion on air. Like most of the pirate stations, Radio London carried sponsored American evangelical shows, and Everett's disparaging remarks about The World Tomorrow caused its producers to threaten to withdraw their lucrative contract with the station.
Everett returned six months later, however, before being given his own show by Radio Luxembourg in 1966. Within a year, he had joined the BBC's new pop music station Radio 1 after previewing The Beatles' new album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and interviewing the band. Everett had struck up a friendship with The Beatles and accompanied them on their 1966 tour of the United States, sending back daily reports for Radio London. He also produced their 1968 and 1969 Christmas records.
At Radio 1 Everett continued to develop his own unique presentation style, featuring zany voices, surreal characters, multi-tracked jingles and trailers, all of his own creation and compilation. It was ground-breaking radio material that has since been much copied.
Everett had a great love of sound recording equipment, in particular using reel-to-reel tape recorders, often adding sound-on-sound to his recordings and stereo/multi-track recordings of his pseudo-singing voice. These were broadcast on air regularly and he often created his own radio jingles. This skill was also transferred in some part to TV in his later career.
Everett is often cited as having coined the term 'Beeb' to refer to the BBC, although the corporation was occasionally referred to as the "Beeb Beeb Ceeb" in the seminal 1950s radio comedy series The Goon Show, and it is possible that Everett borrowed the expression from there. The term is still in popular use; the BBC have used 'the Beeb' themselves. The company previously used beeb.com), had a short lived 1980s children's magazine called Beeb, and named their digital channel for young children CBeebies.
His shows on Radio 1 included Midday Spin, and then in 1968 he took over a Saturday show from 10 a.m. to 12 noon.
In 1970, however, Everett again found himself fired, this time after suggesting on air that Mary Peyton, the British Transport Minister's wife, had bribed her driving test examiner. Following an interview on the BBC Radio Solent children's show Albert's Gang, Kenny submitted weekly shows to the station that he had pre-recorded at home. This afforded the BBC the opportunity to vet the shows before broadcast. Everett was then heard on various BBC local radio stations before being reinstated at Radio 1 in 1972. Here he recorded a weekly show from his home in Wales and it went out on a Sunday afternoon.
During this time, legislation had been passed allowing the licensing of commercial radio stations in the UK. One of the first, Capital Radio, began broadcasting to London and the Home Counties in 1973. Everett joined the station and was given his own show, where he further developed his distinctive ideas. From 1973 to 1974 he presented the station's breakfast show, initially alongside Dave Cash, a friend and colleague from Radio London days, and later as the sole presenter.
Subsequently in 1974, he moved to a less high-pressure timeslot at Capital (a transfer made on medical advice and which was associated with complications in his personal life). Here he further developed his unique style and his cult following at this time, and featured both what he thought the best in music (Queen, Chris Rainbow) and the worst, which lead to the popular Kenny Everett's Worst Wireless Show in the World programmes, later produced as an album with slightly different tracks. Several shows featured the "Bottom 30": compilations (from listeners' votes) of the world's worst records during this period, including some tracks by well-known personalities not known for their singing, notably William Shatner, Captain James T Kirk of "Star Trek" with his version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"..
In 1973, using reel-to-reel tape recorders and mixing equipment, Everett created many comedy characters on The Breakfast Show with Dave Cash on Capital, one of which was called 'Yasher the Smasher' referring to a character who smashed pianos. This was indicative of how many people went through a destructive period smashing traditional wooden pianos. The idea was first started with Pete Townshend from The Who encouraging the group to destroy their equipment on stage.
Recently, compilations of Everett's "bits between the records" from this period have been repeated on BBC 7.
Bohemian Rhapsody
In 1975, during his time at Capital Radio, Everett was given a copy of a new single from Queen by the group's lead singer, Freddie Mercury, a good friend, with the proviso that it was not to be played on the air.
As expected, Mercury's reverse psychology worked – Everett loved the song and began to play it several times a night on his show (once claiming that "his finger slipped"), helping the song — Bohemian Rhapsody — to go quickly to number one in the UK.
So greatly did Everett love this song he played it 14 times in one day when it was released. It went on to become a world-wide hit.
BBC Radio & back to Capital
In October 1981, Everett returned to BBC Radio, albeit this time on Radio 2, on Saturday lunchtime from 11am-1pm. This lasted until 1983, when he was once again dismissed after making a rude joke about Margaret Thatcher: "When England was a kingdom, we had a king. When we were an empire, we had an emperor. Now we're a country ... and we have Margaret Thatcher". This remark reportedly led to the non-renewal of his contract with BBC Radio 2.
He then returned to Capital Radio, presenting the same slot as he did on Radio 2. After Capital split its frequencies in 1988 he was heard on Capital Gold, with a line-up that included people like Tony Blackburn and David Hamilton. Everett presented the afternoon show and then moved to the mid-morning show. He left in 1994 when his health deteriorated to the point that he was unable to continue.
TV career
Early television work
Besides the radio programmes, his first screen appearance was in the 1965 film Dateline Diamonds the plot based around the pirate ship the MV Galaxy, he also appeared in several television series. The first, in 1968, was a production for Granada Television called Nice Time, co-presented by Germaine Greer and Jonathan Routh. In 1970 he made three series for London Weekend Television (LWT): The Kenny Everett Explosion, Making Whoopee and Ev; and he also took part (along with such talents as Willie Rushton and John Wells) in the 1972 BBC TV series Up Sunday.
In 1973, Everett provided the voice of the cat 'Charley' in the Charley Says animated series of public information films.
(It is not currently clear to which of these efforts Everett was referring when, years later, he spoke dismissively of some early TV work: "We just used to turn up at the studio and try to be wacky". However in interviews, co-presenter Greer spoke of him as "a televisual genius".)
Everett was the announcer on the original version of ATV's "big box game" Celebrity Squares which ran on ITV from 1975 to 1979.
The Kenny Everett Video Show and The Kenny Everett Video Cassette
In 1978, London's Thames Television offered him a new venture, which became the very successful and ground-breaking Kenny Everett Video Show. This was a vehicle for Everett's characters and sketches (his fellow writers were Ray Cameron, Barry Cryer and Dick Vosburgh), interspersed with the latest pop hits, either performed by the artists themselves, or as backing tracks to dance routines by Arlene Phillips' contemporaneously risque dance troupe Hot Gossip (which featured Sarah Brightman).
It was so successful that pop and TV stars queued up to make cameo appearances, including Rod Stewart, Billy Connolly, Kate Bush, Cliff Richard, Freddie Mercury, Terry Wogan and Suzi Quatro (see also "Friends" section below) and classical musicians such as Julian Lloyd Webber(clip).
These shows were also unusual in that there was no studio audience or laughter track. The only reaction sounds were those of the writers, staff and crew (given this small audience the shows were recorded at Thames Television House in small studios normally used for current affairs programmes, rather than at Thames's main site at Teddington, Middlesex.
Everett would often ad lib and deviate from the script; his bloopers were sometimes left in the final cut and on several occasions he pulled the camera around the studio revealing the crew not quite sure what was going to happen next. Quite often the crew were victims of his humour - on one occasion Everett encouraged the crew to sing "Happy Birthday" to a cameraman, presenting to him a cake which he duly pushed in the cameraman's face.
There were also the stories of Captain Kremmen, a science fiction hero voiced by Everett and originally developed for his Capital Radio shows, who travelled the galaxy battling fictional alien menaces, along with his assistant Dr Gitfinger and his voluptuous sidekick Carla. In the first three series these segments were animations created by the Cosgrove-Hall partnership (responsible for the successful children's cartoon series Dangermouse, among many others). In the fourth series (Video Cassette) Kremmen was featured as live action, with Anna Dawson playing Carla; the segments were comedy shorts, rather than the erstwhile stories.
Other characters included aging rock-and-roller Sid Snot, unsuccessfully flipping cigarettes into his mouth - at one point Everett managed to catch one in his mouth, to the amusement of the studio crew; Marcel Wave, a lecherous Frenchman played by Everett wearing an absurdly false latex chin; and Angry of Mayfair, a middle-class City gent complaining of the risqué content of the show, banging the camera with his umbrella, only then to be revealed as actually wearing women's underwear.
He also created the never-seen character of 'Lord Thames', supposedly the owner of Thames Television (the company was actually owned by two conglomerates). The character was often the butt of Everett's rants and was said to symbolise his contempt for senior management at the company, claiming they lived behind an ancient, cobweb-covered door marked as the "Office Of Saying 'No'. He was however never disciplined by Thames for these comments, unlike prior employers such as the BBC.
Everett's interest in (then primitive) video processing technology and electronic effects showed itself in such features as the appearances of a bobbing 'alien' entirely composed of a distorted video image of his own head ("Hello. I'm Spod, from Planet Thfnnnn. And this is all I do... Pathetic, isn't it?").
The series ran for four seasons on ITV, and was a big ratings hit, being required viewing for teenagers of the time. The last episode ended on a rather sour note (after Everett had locked horns with Thames management over his show and its scheduling) with Everett giving a rather restrained farewell speech as the set and scenery was being stripped down by the crew. The final shot before the closing credits was Everett himself being picked up and placed inside an oversized garbage can.
The Kenny Everett Television Show (BBC 1981-1988)
Everett fell out with Thames regarding the management of his show, including the scheduling against the BBC's top-rated Top of the Pops on Thursday evenings, effectively unbeatable in the days of three-channel television in the UK. The BBC offered him a live-audience sketch-format comedy programme, starting with a Christmas special in 1981, followed by five primetime series. The writing team was bolstered by the addition of Andrew Marshall, David Renwick and Neil Shand, and the production standards were raised by the heavier investment from the Corporation.
Thames Television claimed copyright on Everett's characters, and tried to prevent their use by the BBC. Whilst this action failed, it led to the creation of new characters such as Gizzard Puke (intended to replace Sid Snot), and the spooneristically named Cupid Stunt, a bearded American B-movie actress with pneumatic breasts, who told a cardboard cutout of Michael Parkinson lurid tales of life on set with Burt Reynolds and other male stars of the era. Originally to be named Mary Hinge, this was vetoed by the Corporation as too obvious, and announcers were encouraged to refer to her as Cupid to prevent mispronunciation. Inept TV handyman Reg Prescott became another firm viewers' favourite, as each week he managed graphically and bloodily to injure himself with tools whilst attempting to demonstrate DIY tips.
Brazilian-born Cleo Rocos co-starred in the BBC series, and became one of Everett's closest personal friends. She was often portrayed wearing little more than frilly underwear and high heels, and her figure was used to great comic effect as a focus for drooling, lascivious men.
Some fans feel that the move to the more traditional BBC watered down the anarchic spirit of his previous work. The Corporation assumed much tighter control over both content and production, and it is felt that this removed some of the spontaneity which had become a hallmark of the Thames series. However, the series performed equally well in the ratings, and the characters and their catchphrases endure 20 years later.
Quiz shows
Everett hosted two short lived quiz shows late in his career, Brainstorm, and Gibberish.
Friends and guests
Everett was very popular with his peers, and many major stars of television, radio, and pop music counted him as a friend. This led to many celebrity guest appearances across all his television work. Cliff Richard happily lampooned his clean image many times, as did Lionel Blair and many times Justin Hayward. Terry Wogan - a long-time colleague from the early days at Radio 1 - made numerous appearances on both Thames and the BBC shows, as did Billy Connolly and Lennie Bennett. Other stars who parodied themselves included Rod Stewart, ABBA, The Police and Freddie Mercury.
Quotations and catchphrases
"It's all done in the best PAH-SIBBLE taste!" -- regular punchline uttered by the character ' Cupid Stunt', accompanied by her swapping her crossed legs over in the most vigorous way possible.
"'Ello my leetle chickadees" (and variations, in heavy French accent) -- introductory remark uttered by character 'Marcel Wave'.
"Round 'em up, put 'em in a field, and BOMB THE BASTARDS!" -- all-purpose solution to any perceived social problem, declared by 'Marvin Bombthebastards', a handgun-waving US General with immense shoulders (equipped with retractable cannon) and chest to support many medals.
"Brother, Brother, Brother Lee Love!" -- gospel-style sung introduction to huge-handed US minister 'Brother Lee Love', whose frenetic sermons called for the 'congregation' to echo the last two syllables of some sentences, with amusing (and occasionally very rude) results.
"I hate pornography ... I haven't even got a pornograph!" -- 'Angry of Mayfair'.
'This morning, I spilled coffee all over my wife's dressing gown! Serves me right for wearing it! -- 'Angry of Mayfair'.
"Colonel Muriel Kleen here, of the Campaign for Nice Things on Television!' (A couple of bars of 'Hallelujah!' from the 'Hallelujah Chorus'.) 'We believe in goodness, truth and beauty! We believe that Julie Andrews should get her own series, and that Joan Collins should get her own breakfast! And remember: you don't have to watch this endless display of perversitude and fleshybollery! You've all got a knob there! SO USE IT!" -- 'Angry of Mayfair.'
(Electronic rendition of Bach's choral prelude Wachet Auf) - reminiscent of and perhaps the work of Wendy Carlos - musical accompaniment to all sketches featuring 'Maurice Minor', parody of French mime artist Marcel Marceau.
"Ello, I'm Gizzard Puke, mugger to the gentry, and anyone who says punk's dead, will be."
Ladies and gentlephones... pun based on "ladies and gentlemen"
Bloodbath at the House of Death
Everett made one foray into film with 1984's Bloodbath at the House of Death, a spoof of Hammer horror films penned by Everett's usual writing partners Barry Cryer and Ray Cameron (who also directed the film). Vincent Price featured as the villain, credited only as the "Sinister Man", and a number of other popular comedians and actors also appeared, most notably Pamela Stephenson, Gareth Hunt and Don Warrington. Several regulars from Everett's television series also appeared.
The film was not a great success, despite winning "Best Science-Fiction Film" at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film (tied with Videodrome), and Everett did not make a successful transition to film star.
Political controversy
In the 1983 election campaign, the Young Conservatives invited Kenny to their conference in an attempt to attract the youth vote. Egged on by film director Michael Winner, Kenny bounded onto the stage, wearing the enormously oversized foam rubber hands familiar from his mock-evangelical character Brother Lee Love. He shouted slogans like "Let's bomb Russia!" and "Let's kick Michael Foot's stick away!" (Michael Foot was the elderly leader of the Labour Party.)
Later life
The radio shows continued in the same vein and were as popular as ever, but by the late 1980s the TV show format had run its course, and Everett's personal life was becoming increasingly complicated. He had married the singer Lee 'Lady Lee' Middleton (Billy Fury's former girlfriend) in 1966 ("Kenny proposed to me under a magnolia tree in Fulham", she later recalled).
By 1989 they had separated, and Everett came out as gay. He launched himself into the London gay club scene, and could often be seen in London club Heaven (then a very popular clubbing destination) on Saturday nights. He was an active campaigner for gay rights. In 1979, in character as Angry of Mayfair, he said to David Bowie, who was guesting on Everett's show: "I... FOUGHT... for people like you, and I never got one!"
He seemed never to fully come to terms with his sexuality, however, and suffered bouts of severe depression.
Death
By the 1990s Everett's health was declining. He died of an AIDS-related illness on 4 April 1995.
Shows hosted
The following is a list of the main shows Everett has presented:
Radio
Kenny & Cash Show Radio London - (1964-1965)
Kenny Everett Show Radio Luxembourg - (1966)
Midday Spin BBC Radio 1 - (1967)
Everett is Here BBC Radio 1 Saturdays 10am-12midday (1968-1970)
Kenny Everett Show BBC Local Radio (1971)
Kenny Everett Show BBC Radio 1 Sundays 1-3pm (1972)
Breakfast Show Capital Radio (1973-1974)
Kenny Everett Show Capital Radio (1974-1980)
Kenny Everett Show BBC Radio 2 Saturdays 11am-1pm (1981-1983)
Kenny Everett Show Capital Radio Saturdays 11am-1pm (1983-1988)
Weekday Afternoons Capital Gold 1-4pm (1988-1991)
Weekday mid-mornings Capital Gold 9am-12midday (1991-1994)
Television
Nice Time Granada Television - (1968)
The Kenny Everett Explosion LWT - (1970)
The Kenny Everett Video Show Thames Television - (1978-1980)
The Kenny Everett Video Cassette Thames Television - (1981)
The Kenny Everett Television Show BBC - (1981 - 1987)
Brainstorm BBC -(1988)
Gibberish BBC - (1992)
2007 Licence to Laugh a tribute
On November 18, 2007, ITV1 showed a tribute show to Kenny called Licence to Laugh. This celebrated thirty years since he burst onto ITV with the ground-breaking Kenny Everett Video Show (Thames Television, 1978 to 1980).
Friends and colleagues revealed what it was like to know and work with the man they affectionately dubbed "Cuddly Ken". Additionally, contemporary celebrities such as Chris Moyles and Chris Tarrant talked about their love for the outrageous entertainer, and discussed the ways Kenny had influenced them and their work.
It also featured archive footage and classic Kenny stories in tribute to his memory.