Best Possible Taste: The Kenny Everett Story

Kenny Everett was a contradiction. A lower middle class Catholic upbringing in Liverpool. He was married but gay. He was risqué, controversial, outlandish but also a Tory at a time when they were anti-Liverpool, homophobic and lacking in a sense of humour. I cannot imagine Mrs Thatcher sitting down to watch his shows.

I only know Everett from his television show and not his career in radio. It always amuses me that he managed to get away with his show on ITV in the early evening which featured rather too much female flesh and Hot Gossip.

When he switched over to the BBC my older brother constantly moaned as to why the BBC hired him. However with more money, more writers and more polished performance his Kenny Everett Television Show was a huge hit.

This bio-pic is delivered in a disjointed style with his comic characters appearing as the chorus. In a sense you get to see his varied creations which he was famous for and his complicated life which started with making radio jingles at home before he got into pirate radio, getting fired by the BBC multiple times, his dilemma with his sexuality, friendship with celebrities such as Freddie Mercury, his deteriorating marriage. It was well known in the early 1980s that he was having a platonic relationship with his wife who was also living with her lover, an actor who actually appears in this film as a journalist.

What actually makes this film are the performances from Kathleen Kelley and Oliver Lansley who is exceptional as Everett. You actually believe him as Everett and he also spot on as the various guises such as Cupid Stunt, Marcel Wave and Sid Snot.