Hello, Darlings!: The Authorized Biography of Kenny Everett by James Hogg and Robert Sellers rev

When I was a teenager, The Kenny Everett Television Show was required viewing. It wasn't remotely funny – or at least, not to me – but, if you missed it, you were in trouble; everyone watched it, and everyone talked about it the next day at school. Gizzard Puke, the unfeasibly stupid punk; Cupid Stunt, the American actress with the unfeasibly large breasts; Reg Prescott, the unfeasibly short-sighted handyman: Everett played them all, and with weirdly urgent gusto. Like the child who, having unexpectedly made his parents laugh, repeats the same joke every day for the next month, he seemed never to tire of their catchphrases. (The series, which had begun its life on Thames Television, ran for seven long years on BBC1.) You could practically set your watch by Cupid showing you her knickers.

Still, his edge of desperation – he seemed always to be trying so hard – had, I suppose, a certain kind of horrible fascination. Last year, BBC4 made an Everett biopic (starring Oliver Lansley) that captured it perfectly: the Fotherington-Thomas walk, the craven smile, the fear in his eyes. Everett, poor thing, was an impostor in his own life. Even once he'd come out – he famously introduced his "two husbands" to the press in 1985 – he still appeared ill at ease. Hardly surprising, then, to discover courtesy of his biographers that he was both obsessed with cleaning, and a hoarder; such compulsions are often linked to anxiety and depression. However, I should point out that this is my interpretation, not theirs. Hello, Darlings! is about as deep as one of its subject's briefer skits; its authors prefer to see Everett's strange habits as yet more evidence of his lovable eccentricity than as symptoms of mental illness.

Everett was born Maurice Cole in Seaforth, Liverpool, in 1944, the son of a tugboat captain. In adulthood, he made much of his impoverished roots, but this was mostly embellishment: contrary to what he claimed, the family certainly had a bathroom. Nor were his Catholic parents half as devout as he said – and when he enrolled at a seminary, it was his idea, not theirs. (He left under a cloud, having made free with the communion wine.) Obsessed with radio from an early age, it was a tape of the "station" he ran in his boyhood bedroom that won him his first gig on the pirate station, Radio London, which broadcast from a ship off the Essex coast. Everett was madly seasick at first, but pirate radio suited him: it meant access to studio equipment 24 hours a day (DJs did three weeks on, and a week off), and all the time in the world to invent loopy characters (as the first zoo DJ, Everett was the father of Steve Wright and all the rest). By the time the government finally shut down the pirate ships in 1967, then, he was something of a star – not to mention a friend of the Beatles – and jobs at both the BBC and Capital followed. In the 70s, he moved into television, and after a few false starts, his shows began to draw audiences some 15 million strong.

His characters, on radio and on television, were clearly a refuge: being someone else was easier than being Kenny Everett. For a long time, he longed to "fix" his sexuality. Early on, there was a boyfriend, Peter Brown – Jonathan King introduced them – but after they split up, he interested himself in women, relying on LSD to help him find them attractive (Everett was also addicted to the sedative Mandrax, and a heavy user of cocaine). He fell for Lee Middleton, Billy Fury's girlfriend, and eventually they married; 10 years later, when it was over, it was Lee who pulled for him John Pitt, an Australian waiter (he and Pitt lived together for a while). In the 80s, having fully thrown off his guilt about his sexuality, he took up nightclubbing with a vengeance, and it was on one such evening out that he met Nikolai Grishanovich, the lover from whom he would eventually contract HIV. Grishanovich was one of the two husbands he eventually unveiled to the press (the other was a Spanish waiter, Pepe Flores), and he died of an Aids-related illness in 1991, the same year as Everett's close friend Freddie Mercury. Everett died in 1995.

There is, I think, a serious and searching book to be written about light entertainment in the 70s and 80s: all those things we couldn't, or wouldn't, see. But this, alas, is not it, nor even a marker on the way. It's not only that it's so badly written, so clunky and so cliched (people are "real characters", events are "almost surreal", and the Coleherne pub in Earl's Court is the "thriving hub" of the Aids epidemic). Rather, it's that it singularly fails to look beneath the surface of things. I understand that the authors intended it to be affectionate, and that writing an authorised biography is a tightrope walk of diplomacy. But kindness comes in many forms. Flaws tend to make a person more, not less, human, while context, however uncomfortable or awkward, is the key to understanding how such kinks and creases mark a life. Smooth these things out, and you risk reducing even the biggest of personalities to pop culture footnotes, their stories curled and yellowing, like old copies of the Radio Times.

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