The shocking truth about Kenny!
CUPID STUNTS: THE LIFE AND RADIO TIMES OF KENNY EVERETT BY DAVID AND CAROLINE STAFFORD (Omnibus Press £19.95)
Pity the poor dyslexic who may pick up this book. But Cupid Stunt, along with the punk, Sid Snot, the super-hero, Captain Kremmen, and Spod, the alien from the Planet Thoon, was one of Kenny Everett’s famous television characters. She was a starlet with balloons for boobs who kept criss-crossing her legs while assuring us that everything was ‘all in the best possible taste’.
It wasn’t, of course. Everett, who died of Aids in 1995, now seems an embodiment of tacky Seventies Light Entertainment. Hot Gossip was the suggestive dance troupe on his shows. Mary Whitehouse complained about him and them, which did wonders for the viewing figures.
He was zany and wacky, glittery and silly, and the choppy editing style of his programmes prefigured frenetic pop videos. Everett did the voice-overs for Celebrity Squares. He was a guest on Blankety-Blank. He went on chat shows - Parky twinkled, Russell Harty blushed, and Mavis Nicholson chuckled.
Veteran showbusiness personality Barry Cryer says: ‘Kenny’s stated policy was that his shows would only contain daft bits, outrageous bits and loony bits’.
Because absolutely everyone on the box these days contrives to be exactly like that (not even Poirot or Marple make coherent sense: all style and no substance), David and Caroline Stafford, authors of this otherwise brilliantly witty and affectionate biography, have quite a task making Everett seem original.
14:
Number of times Everett played Queen’s newly-released Bohemian Rhapsody on his show in one day
Because the first point to be made about this ‘funny little bearded man in a dress’ is that he was the creative child of Spike Milligan, who’d been zany and wacky and what-have-you, in the Fifties. As a youngster in working-class Liverpool, Everett had lapped up The Goon Show. ‘Just listening to those voices’, he said, ‘made me feel all warm and cosy. They never said anything horrible or hurtful.’
Everett loved Milligan’s comedy explosions and catchphrases, the surreal energy and splat noises made with socks full of custard. The wireless represented a fantasy realm - and any realm was better than Liverpool. ‘I hated Liverpool. I had no friends.
‘Beating up people is a big thing in Liverpool.’ Especially if your real name was Maurice Cole, you had blonde curls, allergies, a rash, and your mother sent you to school in a bow-tie. Everett (he changed his name in homage to Edward Everett Horton, a camp Hollywood character-actor) was such a sissy he wouldn’t use the outside lavatory, and had to go to hospital for an emergency enema.
‘Nerdy, needy, weedy, anxious and afraid,’ Kenny’s passion was to fiddle with clocks, watches, pianos and tape-recorders. Having left school early, he worked in a bakery, ‘scraping gunge from sausage-roll trays’, and in his spare time assembled a reel of daft sound-effects, which he posted to the BBC. A producer called Wilfred De’Ath (who was recently interviewed by Operation Yewtree officers was impressed, and invited Everett to London for an interview.
As the Staffords explain, Everett’s manufacture of bizarre jingles and comedy noises would remain his great and enduring love throughout his life. ‘Kenny lifted his programmes with cut-ups, home-made bits, blasts of the classics, running effect into funny voice into record into ad.’
He’d over-dub the tracks, sing all the parts, doing the counterpoint and harmony - all decades before computers. Everett was more than a disc jockey, he was ‘the mad scientist in his Wireless Workshop’, an object-lesson in elegance, rhythm and precision, ‘press this, adjust that, keep talking, watch the timing, and this comes in here’ - even if what it all amounted to wasn’t exactly Mozart but ephemeral boings, bips and doo-doo-ron-rons.
Suggestive: Dance troupe Hot Gossip with Kenny Everett
Everett served his apprenticeship on a pirate radio ship anchored off Harwich. ‘The studio was in the stern. As well as rising and falling, it skittered and swung.’ He then graduated to a Sunday morning slot on the BBC, with a growing audience of ‘lunch-cooking and homework-avoiding’ people.
Like Milligan before him, Everett often fell out with his producers - the pipe-smoking ex-army officers who’d have been happier in the Institute of Chartered Accountants, who sent him formal warnings when he said a rude word or blabbed in the press that the Corporation ‘has as little to do with pop as cement’.
But as Tony Blackburn says, Everett’s radio shows ‘reflected his brain, which was all mixed up. It was all crazy, and he was a crazy person, really’.
A large part of Everett’s craziness was compounded by his homosexuality, about which his working-class Catholic background filled him with guilt and self-disgust.
As the Staffords point out, he was ‘one great big jumble of confusion’. He thought that by taking LSD in large quantities he’d start finding women attractive.
To further make himself not gay, he married Lee Middleton and moved to a farm in Wales.
All in the best possible taste: Kenny Everett's alter ego Cupid Stunt
The bride’s wedding dress was made from a lace tablecloth ‘that sat eight’. He and his wife ‘started knitting and made a rug together’.
Kenny also ‘threw himself into hand-milking cows and discovered he had a knack’.
It was to no avail. Kenny’s sexual fantasy was that he was in a Nazi submarine being ravished by the Kommandant.
He met a Red Army solder called Nikolai who’d tie him up in his flat and then leave.
On one occasion, trussed and abandoned, Kenny tried to get to the phone, but unfortunately ‘fell down the stairs’. He also had a crush on a carpenter, a sound engineer at Capital Radio, and a Spanish waiter called Pepe.
He was promiscuous and contracted HIV.
Lee, meanwhile, ‘found solace in spiritualism’. She had a lesbian affair with a tennis player who ‘in a previous life’ had been her husband.
Everett transferred from radio to television in 1970. Stunts such as being suspended by a crane while dressed as a bandsman with a balloon tied to his head became weekly fodder. But with fame Everett became very self-indulgent, personally and professionally. He went on cocaine binges with Freddie Mercury, and at the BBC, if the car park attendant didn’t bow and scrape and show him to the VIP area, he’d flounce off home.
His nadir was reached when he shouted ‘Let’s bomb Russia!’ at a Young Conservative Pre-General Election Rally at Wembley.
His crime was not that he’d urged nuclear war but that he was a Thatcherite.
Everett suddenly became ‘un-PC old hat’. But inside wacky, zany etc Kenny Everett, sad little Maurice Cole always still lurked.
As a sign of how conventional he really was, Everett used to go on rambler holidays in the Peak District with his bank manager.
‘He liked to change into pyjamas as soon as he got home and listen to Brahms.’
This seems as unlikely - but is as true - as Ade Edmondson, the former foul-mouthed star of The Young Ones and Bottom, presenting a transcendentally dull 12-part series on The Dales.
