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Kenny Everett: Difference between revisions
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He began his career in show business on the British [[Buccaneer Broadcaster|pirate radio]] station [[wikipedia:Wonderful Radio London|Radio London]] in 1964, where he first adopted his [[Stage Name]] as an alias to avoid legal problems. (He had actually been offered a job at the [[BBC]] as a presenter on the ''[[BBC Light Programme]]'' on the basis of an audition tape, but declined it in favour of the less constrained world of pirate radio.)
He almost immediately began the pattern of firings and re-hirings that characterized much of his career when in 1965 he was sacked after some outspoken remarks about religion on air. (Like most British pirate stations of the period, Radio London carried American evangelical shows and Everett's disparaging remarks about one caused its producers to threaten to withdraw their lucrative contract with the station.) For more than a decade and a half he bounced back and forth between the BBC and other radio outlets, including Radio Luxembourg and Capital Radio, one of the UK's first commercial radio stations -- sometimes voluntarily, and sometimes not. He was sacked several times for spontaneous quips made on the air (although in at least
During this time he refined and expanded his trademark style, incorporating surreal comedy characters, jingles and sketch comedy into his DJ routine. Along the way he became friends with numerous figures in the music industry, among them [[The Beatles]], whom he accompanied on their August 1966 tour of the United States; he also produced their 1968 and 1969 Christmas records. He also became close friends with [[Freddie Mercury]] of [[Queen]] after they met in 1974, and was instrumental in getting "Bohemian Rhapsody" released as a single in 1975. (While they were never lovers, they were deep, close friends, Everett becoming an advisor and mentor to Mercury during the 1970s, and Mercury was Everett's confidant, helping Everett to accept his homosexuality.)
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Although he had made the occasional television appearance starting in 1965 and including a four-year stint as an announcer on the game show ''[[Celebrity Squares]]'', it was in 1978 that London's [[Thames Television]] offered him a new venture which would eventually carry his fame across the Atlantic to the United States: ''[[The Kenny Everett Video Show]]''. This program, along with its successors ''The Kenny Everett Video Cassette'' and ''The Kenny Everett Television Show'', gave Everett an entirely new dimension in which to expand his comedy, and allowed him to create the iconic characters for which he is best remembered today.
During and after these shows he still maintained a presence on British radio -- and still regularly got fired for things he said on the air. One of the most infamous was the
== Marriage ==
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On 3 October 2012, the BBC broadcast a 90-minute TV biopic called ''The Best Possible Taste: The Kenny Everett Story'', which focused on the performer's relationship with his wife, singer Lee Middleton. It was based on the biography ''In the Best Possible Taste: The Crazy Life of Kenny Everett'' by David Lister.
The first episode of the third season of the [[Sky Arts]] TV series ''[[Urban Myths]]'', "Princess Diana, Freddie and Kenny: 'One Normal Night'" (aired 10 April 2019), presented a humorous dramatization of an incident reported by Cleo Rocos in her 2013 memoir ''The Power of Positive Drinking'', in which Everett and Freddy Mercury disguised Princess Diana as a gay male model and took her to the Vauxhall Tavern, an infamous gay bar. Actor/comedian/musician Mathew Baynton portrayed Everett.
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