Katherine Kelly

That's right; it's yet another melodramatic BBC Four biopic, exploring the life of a comedian including their darker, personal details - but this one contains some naughty bits.

The Best Possible Taste concerns the life of Kenny Everett, played here by Oliver Lansley. Lansley also plays most of Everett's comic characters, including Sid Snot, Cupid Stunt, Brother Lee Love and Marcel Wave, who commentate on the habits of their creator and his complicated love-life: namely being married to his wife Lee (Katherine Kelly), despite being gay...

Like Everett's own style of humour, the show itself was completely bonkers, with lots of quirky editing. There are several instances of scenes which display Everett's true feelings, only for the characters to stop the film and rewind it to show what really happened. For example, there's the scene at the 1983 Young Conservatives conference, in which in Everett's mind he wants to tell the world he's gay, but is stopped by Cupid Stunt, who then shows us that Everett actually blurted, "Let's bomb Russia!"

While The Best Possible Taste is worth a watch, it's not really one for the comedy anoraks. There's no mention of how his characters were formed, and several of his TV outings were not mentioned at all. Instead, the show mostly covers his private relationships and his DJ work. So, while this documentary may have been produced in the best possible taste, I can't say it was as funny as it could have been.

Best Possible Taste - The Kenny Everett Story opens with a pair of false teeth in a glass of water gurgling a variation on the standard biopic warning: "It's based on a true story, but some of the scenes have been 'scrungled'. It also contains... naughty bits."

Dropped into Kenny's weird and wonderful world, we are immediately reacquainted with several of its celebrated inhabitants, including Cupid Stunt, Sid Snot, Brother Lee Love, Angry of Mayfair and Marcel Wave. They are on hand to help recount the life and career of the consistently self-destructive, frequently self-loathing and sometimes self-centred radio and TV maverick.

Oliver Lansley perfectly captures Everett and his multiple incarnations. Katherine Kelly plays his wife, Lee, and Simon Callow puts in a suitably luvvie turn as Dickie Attenborough, who rescues the much-sacked Cuddly Ken from the broadcasting wilderness of producing jingles for a carpet warehouse.

A cult figure in his own lifetime, DJ and comedian Kenny Everett was something of a private enigma. In this dramatisation of his turbulent rise to TV fame, we get a glimpse behind the façade, with Everett's iconoclastic shoes ably filled by Oliver Lansley. Best value are the uncanny impressions of Kenny's best-loved TV characters, strutting across the screen to signpost the biopic action, while Katherine Kelly lends moving support as Everett's long-suffering wife Lee.

Kenny Everett was a man who always knew when to go too far. He was also an acquired taste; a thoroughly tiresome attention-seeker or a comedy genius, depending on your viewpoint.

This tender, ebullient biopic, featuring a tour de force from Oliver Lansley as Everett, charts an eccentric life, from Everett's early years as a DJ on the pirate station Radio London, to his complicated relationship with
the BBC. But its focus is the unconventional marriage of Everett, a guilt-ridden, closet gay, and his wife Lee (the brilliant Katherine Kelly).

Everett was hard work - needy, annoying and forever hiding behind silly voices and pantomime TV characters such as Sid Snot and Cupid Stunt, who are all played by Lansley, popping up to provide an off-kilter narration. Lansley is sensational: eye-popping, mugging and infuriating one minute, petulant and bereft the next. Best Possible Taste could slip into tears-of-a-clown cliché but, somehow, it doesn't.

Professionally, Kenny Everett has much to answer for. The DJ's anarchic innovations in broadcasting inspired everyone from Noel Edmonds to Chris Moyles to conjure up their own increasingly inferior versions. Personally, too, his life was chaotic, with years spent trying to reconcile the fact that he loved his wife but 'fancied Burt Reynolds'. Tim Whitnall's affectionate, even-handed biopic ties the two together beautifully, tracing the erstwhile Maurice Cole's career of delighting the public and cocking a snook at authority while edging, with considerable difficulty, out of the closet. It most obviously invokes BBC4's Python meta-biopic Holy Flying Circus, messing around with dramatic convention and reduces the fourth wall to rubble courtesy of Everett's army of alter egos. Katherine Kelly lends sympathetic, nuanced support as Kenny's wife, Lee Middleton, but really, this is The Oliver Lansley Television Show. Lansley - previously a jobbing comic actor - simply is Everett, in all his needy, contrary, charismatic brilliance. No lazy caricature, this is total immersion. A Bafta nomination is the least he deserves - it's a stunning performance.

Oliver Lansley gives a terrific performance in Tim Whitnall's biopic of the anarchic DJ Kenny Everett, which is partly framed around his relationship with the long-suffering Lee Middleton (Katherine Kelly). Middleton may have been Everett's rock, but it is Everett's mad genius that this film really salutes as it explores his struggle to contain his sexuality and his rollercoaster career - which took in everything from groundbreaking radio and TV shows to an infamous appearance at a Young Conservatives Conference.

I recommend Best Possible Taste, a warm, witty and respectful tribute to the ground-breaking DJ and comedian Kenny Everett that, while never shying away from the more troubled aspects of his character, actually goes out of its way to celebrate his genius.

Closer in spirit to the delightful Eric & Ernie and Tony Roche's winningly irreverent Holy Flying Circus - Ev's comic alter-egos, from Sid Snot to Cupid Stunt, act as a Greek chorus throughout - it's clearly a labour of love from screenwriter Tim Whitnall, whose ability to write about comedians with affectionate insight was previously established by his award-winning stage-play Morecambe.

With Ev's ex-wife and soul-mate Lee and his key collaborator Barry Cryer both acting as consultants, Whitnall's film abounds with a sense of anecdotal charm and detail that so many of these biopics lack. Sure, it begins with our hero recovering from a suicide attempt, and pivots around his struggle to come to terms with his homosexuality, but it never treats him crassly. Instead he's portrayed as an inveterate rebel with a self-destructive streak, whose total mastery of his craft clashed with his private anxieties. That's artists for you.

Framed as an unorthodox love story between Ev and Lee, it's a touching portrait of a sensitive, brilliant, loveable, maddening man trying to find his place in the world, before tragically passing away years before his time. Newcomer Oliver Lansley is simply outstanding in the lead role, inhabiting Ev's various personae - including his softly-spoken actual self - with uncanny accuracy and depth. If this magnificent performance isn't rewarded with a BAFTA next year, then I'll shake my fist at the sun in anger. That'll show them.

Ex-Coronation Street actress Katherine Kelly provides excellent support as the strong-willed Lee, and there are even a few colourful cameos from Freddie Mercury, Michael Winner and Dickie Attenborough (the latter essayed by Simon Callow in Full-Callow mode).

While many of these biopics often look as though they were made for the price of a packet of Swan Vestas, director James Strong does wonders with his resources here, producing a beautiful, inventive piece that its late subject may well have approved of. Alas, the budget cuts at BBC Four suggest that this will be their last drama for quite some time. But at least they've gone out on a high.

Video: Katherine Kelly on playing Mrs Kenny Everett

The actress played Becky MacDonald in Coronation Street and her latest TV role sees her playing the wife of Kenny Everett.

Katherine says Kenny and his wife Lee were very much in love even though Kenny was gay.

Katherine also says that Lee was very emotional when she saw Oliver Lansley, the actor who plays Kenny because his portrayal was so good.

Katherine Kelly interview

She made her name as Weatherfield's mouthy Becky, but there's been no rest for Katherine Kelly since she quit Coronation Street's cobbles. She pops up in a touching biopic about the late Kenny Everett, in which she plays the quirky star's ex-wife, Lee.