TV highlights - Sat 29 September - Fri 5 October
Best Possible Taste: The Kenny Everett Story (Wed, 9pm, BBC4)
Younger viewers might find it hard to appreciate how wild and anarchic Everett’s primetime comedy, sketch and music show seemed in the mid-1980s. It featured characters like the grotesque failed movie actress Cupid Stunt and lecherous old punk Sid Snot, it had very scantily clad girls called Hot Gossip (choreographed by Arlene Phillips) and later Cleo Rocos, and it managed to give off the sense that naughty things were being done and people might well get into trouble. It was huge. This biopic tells the story of the show’s madcap creator, Everett, a closet homosexual who nevertheless married a woman. It was in some ways a happy marriage, but they eventually divorced and he died of an AIDS-related illness in 1995. Oliver Lansley is spookily good as the manic, fragile Everett, and Katherine Kelly (Becky in ‘Corrie’) excellent as his wife. Figures of the age like Freddie Mercury and Michael Winner are also enjoyably impersonated.