Kenny Everett

Cheeringly, we have also seen the reappearance, from beyond the grave, of Kenny Everett, a groundbreaking DJ and comic who was denounced from some quarters as a pervert on the basis of his homosexuality.

There is perhaps a sliver of comfort to be had from the fact that, while Savile's reputation is finally getting the drubbing it deserves, "Cuddly Ken" is now being celebrated as a mischievous spirit pushing the boundaries of comedy and broadcasting. While a recent biopic on BBC4 looked at Everett's private life, interspersing the inevitable sad clown narrative with re-creations of his sketches, Radio 4 Extra was dusting down a long-forgotten doc Kenny Everett: The BBC Local Radio Years, which told the story of what happened when the broadcaster was removed from the national airwaves at the peak of his powers.

Everett was forever getting into deep water at work, whether being reprimanded for criticising the BBC's music policy on air or being handed his P45 for cracking a joke during a news bulletin at the expense of the wife of a Tory politician on Radio 1. Everett was subsequently offered a slot on BBC Radio Bristol, much to the ire of his former bosses who thought he should never darken the corporation's doorstep again. We learned how, on his first broadcast, he sang a song, set to the tune of "The Blue Danube", bemoaning his circumstances: "No food in the fridge, boo-hoo, boo-hoo/ No heat in the pipes, boo-hoo, boo-hoo/ No dough in the bank, boo-hoo, boo-hoo..."

Once local producers got wind that Everett was available for work, the comic found himself doing pre-recorded stints across the country, from Merseyside and Nottingham, to Solent and Brighton. Tapes would be transported from his home in the Sussex countryside to the relevant destination by railway, with minions dispatched to stations to pluck them directly from the train. A vetting process would then take place with producers weighing up the wisdom of airing the more risqué gags.

The usual customs of broadcasting were of no interest to Everett. His programmes were platforms for his array of daft voices, improvised skits and terrifically silly - yet technically sophisticated - jingles. His record choices were quirky, to say the least. "If you don't like it, ring me and I'll take it off," was a typical introduction. Listening to the acres of improv in this affectionate and meticulously researched documentary, contemporary music radio seemed horribly anodyne by comparison. For once, the word genius is apt.

Best Possible Taste: The Kenny Everett Story review

All in all, Best Possible Taste - The Kenny Everrett Story is a marvellous movie, and is a must see for any fan of the man, his style of comedy, or relationships with some real heart behind them.

Gigglebox weekly #60: Best Possible Taste; Red Dwarf

This week Ian Wolf meets Kenny Everett and encounters a bunch of smegheads.

Grace Dent on television: Best Possible Taste

Annoyingly, the Beeb's Kenny Everett story really was in the best possible taste.

Best Possible Taste: The Kenny Everett Story - review

Sympathetic portrayal of the conflicted, difficult DJ and comic.

Best Possible Taste: the Kenny Everett Story, review

Ben Lawrence finds warmth and humour in Best Possible Taste: the Kenny Everett Story, a biopic on the DJ.

Kenny Everett: Camp crusader

A brilliant biopic of Kenny Everett reveals the form's richness.

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.