Whenever I ask him a question, Kenny Everett, as small and dapper as a ventriloquist’s dummy, crosses and uncrosses his legs like someone in desperate need of a lavatory, cups an elbow in one hand and his chin in the other, rolls his eyes, purses his lips as if waiting to be kissed, and makes a high-pitched whistling noise reminiscent of a kettle coming to the boil. This behaviour is hugely irritating and thoroughly annoying, and this has been going on for longer than I’m comfortable with. By now I’m looking around for something to hit him with.
I can only surmise that Kenny finds this amusing in ways I find unimaginable, and I wonder how easily the chair I’m sitting on will break over the head of the bearded little fuck. We are sitting in a control room at Thames TV’s Teddington studios, where this morning the third instalment of the recently launched Kenny Everett Video Show is being filmed. The show’s director, an ebulliently demonstrative man named David Mallett, who goes on to an award-winning career as a maker of pop videos (including David Bowie’s “Ashes To Ashes” and Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga”), is behind and above us, at the centre of a bulky console, barking instructions to the floor manager in the studio below us where Nick Lowe – here by sheer coincidence – is being fussed over by a crew of technicians after an aborted run through of “So It Goes”.
“Sorry about that, Nick,” Mallett apologises. “Absolutely our fault,” he gushes. “So sorry.”
Nick blinks wearily in the studio lights as the technicians move him about the set like an ornamental bookend.
“One more time, Nick, please, thank you. That’s lovely, Nick,” Mallett goes on, a geyser of apology and encouragement. “Right, let’s try it again.” Nick mimes another take of “So It Goes”, to Mallett’s evident satisfaction.
“That’s an absolute giggle. Lovely, lovely. Thank you everyone,” Mallett announces. “Let’s go down and have a look at it with Nick,” he adds. And so we troop down some catwalks and onto the studio floor, where Mallet stands with his arms magisterially folded across his chest and stares intently at a playback of Nick’s performance. “What do you think, Nick? Not bad, is it?” the director enthuses.
“Terrific. Wonderful,” Nick replies, clearly wondering what time the bar will be open. “Marvellous stuff,” Mallett chortles, and signals a break as we climb back up to the control room, where I again attempt to get some sense out of the giggling Everett, whose lack of interest in any aspect of the show that doesn’t include him is painfully apparent.
I’m here, of course, on behalf of Melody Maker, to talk to Everett about his big break into television – about which the only good thing I can say is that at least it will keep him off the radio. Everett, you’ll remember, first became known as a DJ on pirate radio, before being recruited for the starting line-up at Radio One, where, among other things, he gained a reputation for larkish controversy that would be better described as grim inanity. Whatever, some off-colour remarks saw him sacked from the station in 1970 and reinstated in 1972, shortly before he defected to Capital Radio, where he does little to endear himself to me by playing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” 14 times on the day it comes out.
By the time of which I’m writing, Everett’s radio shows have increasingly become a vehicle for his supposedly wacky humour, surreal comic inventions, comedy characters, endless spoof jingles and the much farting about that his fans regard as evidence of a rare broadcasting genius now ripe for an overdue transfer to television.
Everett, fidgeting constantly and making odd and worrying noises, is now telling me, I think, that after a couple of ill-fated earlier TV shows – including Granada’s Nice Time, which he co-presented with Germaine Greer, and three forgettable series for London Weekend Television that he now refuses to even talk about – he was initially reluctant to follow-up Thames’ idea for The Kenny Everett Video Show.
“Then they found my weak spot,” he gurgles.
And what would that be?
“Money,” he says, and it’s the first what you might call straight answer he’s given me. “Lots of it,” he goes on, briefly animated. “They started waving huge cheques under my nose. So I said I’d do it.” He then resumes a kind of percolating silence, making more bothersome noises but otherwise not saying much of consequence.
“Let’s get one thing straight about what we’re doing,” it’s left for Mallet to elaborate. “This is showbiz! It’s not another television rock show. It’s not – thank God – The Old Grey Whistle Test and Kenny’s not Bob Harris. I’m not knocking the Whistle Test or Bob,” Mallett goes on, making it clear that he has very little time for either, “but this isn’t a laid-back rock show. It’s meant to be big, brash and colourful. Like rock music itself.”
Everett, at this, makes the kind of noise that might put you in mind of someone in a shallow grave, having dirt shovelled in their face. I really do want to give him a clout. Given Everett’s apparently limited musical horizons – you get the impression if it’s not by The Beatles or Queen, Everett won’t be much interested – it’s Mallett who oversees the show’s musical content, such as it is.
“We only want the best,” Mallett says. “Rod. Cliff. Freddie.”
I am aswoon at the thought of such excitements therefore to come, and bleakly amused when I sit in with Mallett on a brief production meeting where he turns down a clip from Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, featuring The Band and Eric Clapton.
“Bloody rubbish,” Mallett announces with a theatrical flourish. “Can’t use that,” he says, sending on her way, suitably chastised, the production assistant who’d brought him the clip.
We are now gathered around a VCR and Mallett, to my mounting horror, is inserting a show-reel of clips from the first couple of recently-aired Video Shows, to demonstrate, I guess, Everett’s comic genius. I sit then through about 20 utterly grisly minutes of dismally unfunny skits featuring Everett in a variety of apparently side-splitting comedic roles, the most famous of which will become be-leathered biker Sid Snot and lecherous French lothario, Marcel Wave. What I am forced to sit through here is in all respects ghastly, stroke-inducing stuff that exploits the British public’s notorious tolerance for the kind of awful TV that makes you want to chuck a brick through the screen.
Mallett, however, is quickly besides himself, chuckling heartily, while Everett has started making a noise like a hyperventilating gibbon.
“Zat’s me!” he announces in a peculiar accent and pointing at the video screen. “Zat’s me, zat is.”
He’s on his feet now, doing a little dance, Mallett clapping along, which is a horrific thing to be witness to. I wonder if Nick’s still at the bar, and head that way at a brisk and thirsty trot, eager to be anywhere else but here.