An extract from Cupid Stunts, The Life And Radio Times Of Kenny Everett, by David & Caroline
Stafford, published by Omnibus in 2013.
For the benefit of US
readers who might never have heard of him, Everett was once the nation’s
favourite DJ, a zany, carefree, anarchic wit who transferred his talents to
television in risqué comedy shows that were funnier and filthier than
anything else on TV. Simultaneously he became the nation’s most popular
entertainer and its self-appointed moral watchdog Mary Whitehouse’s worst
nightmare.
This extract focuses on what was
probably his most controversial ever appearance – at the UK Tory Party
Convention in 1983. He was their unlikeliest supporter but the truth is Kenny
didn’t really know what the hell he was doing.
On
September 2 David Stafford will be on a panel discussing Kenny at the National
Film Theatre.
It was Margaret
Thatcher’s fault. Or Michael Foot’s. Or Lynsey de Paul’s. Or Michael Winner’s.
One of them. Or more likely still it was Kenny’s fault.
Margaret Thatcher had been swept into
power in the 1979 general election with a Conservative majority of 44 to become
Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. A hard-line right-wing monetarist Tory,
her first term of office saw manufacturing output cut by 30% with closure of
factories, mines and shipyards. Unemployment rose to its highest level since
the Great Depression of the 1930s and there were riots it Liverpool, London,
Birmingham and Leeds.
Michael Foot was the Labour leader of
the opposition; a left-wing intellectual and chronic asthmatic who often used a
walking stick to support a tricky leg he’d acquired in a car accident some
years earlier.
Lynsey de Paul was a pioneering female
singer-songwriter, whose hits like ‘Sugar Me’, ‘No Honestly’ and ‘Rock Bottom’
brought a rueful moment to those who had nurtured a fond belief in pop as a
great liberator that would free the human spirit and let it soar. She had been
‘romantically linked’ with Ringo Starr, George Best and Sean Connery, among
many others.
Michael Winner was a well-respected
film director, producer and restaurant critic responsible for such notable
works as Death Wish, I’ll Never Forget
What’s’isname and the lesser known Won
Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood.
In May 1983, Kenny and Cleo Rocos went
to a party at Lynsey de Paul’s house. Michael Winner gave them a lift home. On
the way Michael, a Tory in those days, asked Kenny whether he’d mind getting up
on stage at a Young Conservatives’ Pre-General Election Rally at Wembley. Bob
Monkhouse and Jimmy Tarbuck would be acting as Masters of Ceremony, Lynsey
would be singing a song, wrestler Mick McManus, swimmer Sharon Davies,
cricketer Freddie Trueman and a bunch of other celebs would be up on stage, too
– so no pressure. Although he was never keen appearing in front of a live
audience, Kenny agreed and didn’t give it much further thought.
He turned up at Wembley Conference
Centre on June 5 with a borrowed costume and the big pair of big foam hands
that he used for the evangelist preacher, Brother Lee Love. Everything was last
minute. His agent, Jo Gurnett, had been asked to fetch the hands from his flat.
“He lived on the top floor and it was a long way, carrying two bloody big hands
for him.”
In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline And Fall, the hero sits in his rooms
at Oxford while outside the aristocratic vandals of some dining club, drunk,
roam in search of havoc to wreak. All at once the shouts acquire a “shriller
note” and “any who have heard that sound will shrink from the recollection of
it; it is the sound of the English country families baying for broken glass.”
That night, in the Wembley Conference
Centre, although representatives of the English country families would have
been far outnumbered by rat-faced trainee estate agents and blubbery
business-studies graduates, that same, unmistakable, “shrill note” could be
heard.
Lynsey de Paul sang the song she’d
specially composed for the occasion.
“Vote Tory, Tory, Tory
For election glory
We don’t want U turns
So we’ll vote for Maggie T”
Kenny took the stage
wearing his giant foam hands, no script, nothing planned, but an audience to
please. He had their measure. He gave satisfaction.
“Let’s bomb Russia!” he shouted.
There were wild cheers.
“Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away!”
The crowd went crazy.
Seeing he was on a roll, he leaned into
the microphone and confided: “Do you, know I was talking to Maggie the other
day – we were having one of our little teas together and I said to her, I said
‘Maggie’, I said ‘You’re rolling that joint all wrong…’”
The audience laughed and snorted and
bayed themselves hoarse. They were in the palm of his huge foam hand.
If he had taken a dollop of actual shit
and thrown it at an actual fan the effect could not have been more dramatic.
Obviously Kenny was ‘joking’ but what, in this context, does ‘joking’ actually
mean? Was bombing Russia and kicking Michael Foot’s stick away official
Conservative Party policy, people wondered, and if not why were Kenny’s
proposals so enthusiastically cheered? Did Kenny
want to bomb Russia and kick Michael Foot’s stick away? Did Margaret Thatcher
smoke dope?
The Prime Minister found it necessary
to issue a statement insisting that, “No one is talking politically about
bombing the Russians. Every single thing I do is to deter any hostilities of
any kind of breaking out. No one was seriously suggesting anything to the
contrary at the time.”
Representations were made to the
Russian Embassy to explain that Kenny Everett had no control over Britain’s
nuclear arsenal, and neither were his views representative of Britain’s foreign
policy.
Barry Cryer has no doubts about what
Kenny was up to. “He was taking the piss out of the whole audience,” he says.
“He thought it was like a Nuremberg rally.”
The Nuremberg theme was picked by the
press, too. But Kenny, rather than being applauded for exposing some great
horror about Young Conservatives, was cast as something closer to the Hitler
role.
The News
of the World
went with: “Not funny, Kenny.”
The
People
voted him “Wally of the Week.”
“When Mr Kenny Everett bounced onto the
stage at a Conservative youth rally and shrieked ‘Lets bomb Russia, Let’s kick
Michael Foot’s stick away,’” said the Daily
Mirror, “he was being himself. He is a fool by profession. Mr Everett may
be the foolish face of Toryism. But his
audience was an ugly one. Mr David Steele described their type yesterday, ‘I
find there is a breed of Conservative candidate,’ he said, ‘which is frankly
unpleasant. There is an abrasive quality, an uncaring quality, a very
right-wing quality about many of the Tory candidates.’”
Billy Connolly, who had turned out in
support of a Labour candidate, rushed to his friend’s defence. “I know Kenny
and there’s not an ounce of bigotry in him. It is the donkeys at the back of
the hall who were bawling support that I worry about. I abhor what he said but
I didn’t take it seriously.”
Barry Cryer had a possible solution. “I
said to him, ‘You must go to every party meeting – Tory, Labour, SDP to confuse
them. Just turn up everywhere!’ That would have been perfect.” Kenny didn’t
take the advice.
“That was when the press turned,” says
Barry. “It’s the old story. It’s a cliché – you can praise people and build
them up and knock them down. They had something to beat Ev up with now and that
hurt him. I was with him a lot through the years subsequently when he was being
interviewed and every single journalist brought it up. And he’d look at me and
go ‘Oh here we go.’”
As if to atone for his gaffe,
subsequently Kenny never missed an opportunity to have a go at Thatcher.
One of his great treats for a while was
to be taken by his friend Francis Butler, a restaurateur, to Francis’ parent’s
house in Gerard’s Cross for Sunday lunch. He adored Mr and Mrs Butler and
embroidered them a little sampler, intertwining their names, framed in a pink
frame. They hung it in their downstairs toilet. Their daughter, Francis’
sister, had married Ben Cross, the actor. And thereby hangs a tale.
“Margaret Thatcher, in the early
eighties, threw a party at 10 Downing Street for television celebrities and
stars,” says Francis. “My brother-in-law, Ben Cross, was invited. My sister
went along and she bumped into Kenny there and Kenny clung on to my sister
because he was feeling a bit inadequate. Anyway, he was sitting on a sofa with
my sister and Margaret Thatcher stalked by with this white gaunt face with the
dash of purple lipstick. And as she strode past Kenny said, ‘Oh waitress, could
we have two cups of tea, please?’”
Later, in his TV show, he did a sketch
in which Sid Snot spots a picture of Margaret Thatcher in the pub and remarks
that she looks like a pig. A fellow drinker takes offence and lays into Kenny
with a starting-handle. They roll about fighting until Sid manages to blurt out
an apology, saying he didn’t realise his assailant was a Conservative. “I’m
not,” says the thug, “I’m a pig farmer.”
The best came in November 1983 when –
this is the way he told the story anyway – at the end of his Radio 2 programme
his producer handed him a joke on a bit of paper. Without scanning the contents
first, Kenny read it out on air. “When Britain was an empire,” he said, “it was
ruled by an emperor. When we were a kingdom, we had a king. Now we are a
country, we’re ruled by Margaret Thatcher.”
The following March the BBC did not
exercise its option to renew his Radio 2 contract. “His programme is not
scheduled for this quarter,” they said. “Kenny does a short term series. And it
hasn’t been decided what the next schedule is to be.”
Kenny was convinced he’d been sacked
for the Thatcher crack. “The whole affair is over one joke. But talk to the BBC
and they’ll tell you we had artistic differences.”
Kenny never did another regular show
for BBC Radio. He should worry. Capital welcomed him back with open arms and he
took over a Saturday morning slot.
No comments:
Post a Comment