New documentary for ITV

ITV is to air a documentary about Kenny Everett this Christmas, featuring unseen home movie footage and family photographs.

Let Us Praise… Kenny Everett will ‘celebrate his professional career but with people who knew him very well’.

Burning Bright Productions has already started work on the hour-long film. The company previously made the ITV documentary Billy Connolly’s Big Send Off, as well as Almost Royal and Adam Buxton’s BUG.

‘There’s very little been done in collaboration with his family before,’ executive producer Karen Steyn told Chortle. ‘We’re really excited about it because nothing big has been done on him for quite a long time.’

Steyn previously worked on the long-running ‘The Unforgettable…’ series of TV documentaries that profiled Kenny Everett in 2000 – and has also featured Benny Hill, Frankie Howard, Tommy Cooper and Les Dawson, among many others.

Everett, who died 20 years ago this April, was a committed archivist and left more than 200 reel-to-reel tapes and cartridges from his DJ career, comprising shows, songs, interviews, sound effects and jingles.

His sister Cate Horgan donated them to the British Library’s sound archive. And in their 2013 authorised biography, Hello, Darlings!, writers James Hogg and Robert Sellers revealed that they were in the process of researching their content.

Raised Catholic in Liverpool, Everett studied for the priesthood at Stillington Hall near York. But he was expelled as one of a group who broke into a chapel late at night to conduct a mock Mass and drink communion wine.

He renounced religion but still struggled to accept his homosexuality and only came out publicly in 1985. Seeking forgiveness from the Church shortly before he died of an Aids-related illness, Everett requested a full Requiem mass at his funeral.

Television’s last documentary tribute to Everett was ITV’s Licence To Laugh in 2007, a celebration of his work for the channel featuring archive footage and friends, colleagues and contemporary celebrities sharing anecdotes and praising his influence.

He made his television debut on Granada Television’s Nice Time in 1968. But it took a decade for Thames Television to give him The Kenny Everett Video Show, a vehicle for sketches and characters like Sid Snot and Captain Kremmen, co-written by Barry Dryer, Dick Burgher and Michael McIntyre’s father Ray Cameron.

He switched allegiance to the BBC in 1981 with The Kenny Everett Television Show. And in 2012 BBC Four broadcast the biopic The Best Possible Taste, focusing on the performer’s relationship with his wife, singer Lee Middleton, starring Oliver Langley as Everett.

By Jay Richardson

Published: 10 Jun 2015