Review of Kenny Everett: The Complete Naughty Bits!

Introduction

Nostalgia`s a funny old thing, innit? I remember Kenny Everett as being the funniest thing on telly. Of course, it was in the darkest days of the late 1970s to early 1980s, and I was an impressionable teenager at the time.

Born Maurice Cole on Christmas Day 1944 in Liverpool, Cuddly Ken made a name for himself as easily the most off-the-wall radio DJ in the history of steam radio. Where most DJs were content to feed the cliché that would ultimately be sent up by Smashie and Nicey, Ken constantly pushed the envelope. His shows were fantasias of surreal humour that would have done Spike Milligan and the Goons proud. It was inevitable he would branch into television.

Television was Kenny Everett`s playground. After a series of mostly-forgotten experiments that never quite tapped into his talents, he landed the show he will probably be best remembered for. The Kenny Everett Video Show was four seasons and three specials of his own brand of weird, running from 1978 to 1981. The shows were made for Thames by David Mallet and Royston Mayoh, with writing by Barry Cryer, Ray Cameron and Kenny himself. While Orson Welles said a film studio was the biggest electric train set a boy ever had, Kenny`s delight was a tv studio and the technical marvels being introduced at the time such as chromakey and Quantel. In the recording studio, he could turn his lone voice into a choir. In the tv studio he could do the same thing with his whole person.

The Kenny Everett Video Show was one of the first rapid-fire comedy shows, introducing viewers to an array of weird and wonderful characters such as Angry Of Mayfair (a stereotypical Times reader in pinstripe suit and bowler, but when he turned around the back of his suit was missing and he was wearing a bra, pants and stockings with suspenders); Brother Lee Love (a gospel-singing evangelist with enormous prop hands); Marcel Wave (a lantern-jawed Frenchman with a line in double-entendre and the demeanour of Pepe Le Pew) and Sid Snot (a Hells Angel with his own unique take on life). In addition to the comedy, the show featured guests who would frequently find themselves the butt of an Everett joke (Terry Wogan, Sir Cliff Richard, David Essex and Bernard Manning among others). The highlight for most, however, were the "naughty bits", which consisted of dance routines by the then-groundbreaking troupe Hot Gossip. Hot Gossip were choreographed by Arlene Phillips and designed as a much more risque version of Pan`s People. Costumed by fetish shops and dancing to the latest pop tunes, they were a sensation (but look very very tame now.) A final ingredient of the show was an ultra-surreal animated segment featuring his space hero character Captain Kremmen. The segments were provided by Dangermouse animators Cosgrove Hall.

After the Kenny Everett Video Show, Kenny defected to the BBC to make The Kenny Everett Television Show, which built on the success of the Thames series and introduced the world to punk Gizzard Puke, Reg Prescott DIY Disaster Area and the immortal movie starlet Cupid Stunt. Ken came out in 1985, a move that did little to dent his career, and he was as popular as he had ever been when tragically he succumbed to AIDS complications on 4th April 1995. Tributes universally demonstrated that everything he had done on television was done in the best po-ssible taste.

This disc contains two hour-long compilation shows made by Thames, and previously released on video. The material comes from the Kenny Everett Video Show and the Kenny Everett Video Cassette (the title of the final fourth season).

Video

Image quality on these two compilations is not as high as it could be, largely due to the source material being another generation or so down from the studio tapes. Colours are reasonable, definition quite good, although because of the way the show was shot (mostly against whitespace backgrounds) contrast is pretty funky. The sequences are presented in the original 4:3 aspect ratio. Some videotape artefacts are evident, such as tape dropouts, which leads me to wonder if any video restoration or remastering was carried out on this title. I would suspect that the disc is simply a mastering to digital of the dupe masters used for the VHS tapes - adverts for which are included in the extras.

Audio

The sound is reproduced from its original no-frills mono by Dolby Digital 2.0. Soundwise, the real treat of the disc are the Captain Kremmen animations, where Ken`s genius for the surreal comes into play.

Features

A text biography of Kenny Everett is included on the disc, along with the aforementioned adverts for the VHS tapes. The entire run of the Captain Kremmen animations are included, amounting to a 13 minute short programme on the disc. Similarly there is a 21 minute compilation of the Hot Gossip "Naughty Bits". Sadly, the disc does not include HOH subtitles.

Conclusion

A sadly disappointing compilation disc of a show I remember with a great deal of fondness. Kenny Everett (I always think of him as "Kenny Enema" as Gizzard Puke once referred to him) was one of the most original souls television has ever introduced us to. I remember all of his great characters, all of his great gags, and I was looking forward to this release so much. The trouble is I`ve now realised the best shows were the ones he did over at the BBC…