Best Possible Taste: The Kenny Everett Story

James Strong
2012-10-02

5
89 min

Schoolboy Maurice Cole, growing up in 1960s Liverpool, is picked on for being effeminate but is already making his own comedy tapes, one of which impresses agent Wilfred De'ath through whom he gets a job on a pirate radio station, changing his name to Kenny Everett. Though sacked for annoying the sponsor his popularity sees him working on the BBC's newly-formed Radio One. Around this time he meets and marries Lee Middleton, who not only sticks by him through his career lows but is sympathetic when, following a drugs over-dose, he admits to being gay. She even helps him find a boyfriend though, unlike his friend Freddie Mercury, he is reluctant to come out. Following their divorce Kenny is best man when Lee marries actor John Alkin and, in 1985, in typically flamboyant style comes out, owing to having not one but two 'husbands'. However, in 1989 he is diagnosed as HIV+ and, in 1995, a year after winning the prestigious Sony award, dies of AIDS aged fifty.