First viewed : 25 February 1982
Kenny Everett returned to the BBC after falling out with Thames TV over the scheduling of The Kenny Everett Video Show. He'd already started broadcasting on Radio One again but his new TV vehicle began early in 1982 just after Top of the Pops on a Thursday. Fearing that Thames would hold copyright on his previous comic characters Kenny introduced a number of new ones for this series most famously Cupid Stunt the infinitely vulgar film star based on Bette Midler talking to a cardboard Michael Parkinson
I saw the first show and a fair few others but it never quite grabbed me in the same way as the ITV version. Kenny had lost a little of that manic energy and seemed more of a skilful comic actor than a genuinely anarchic force ( obviously, his appearance at a Conservative party election rally the following year greatly accelerated this process ) . The characters quickly became bogged down by their catchphrases and fitting them all in meant the show started to look formulaic in the same way as The Two Ronnies. The scripts also came to rely too much on innuendo . I remember watching one episode at my hall of residence and my best mate there contemptuously remarking "They should re-name it "The Kenny Everett Gay Show ".
However there was at least one reason for the heterosexual community to watch, in in the form of Brazilian -born actress Cleo Rocos who , always revealingly clad, acted as a comic foil to Ken in many of the sketches. Her first appearance was a very funny sketch where she was a politician being interviewed and described the SDP as offering " a middle course" while the camera zoomed in inexorably towards her ample cleavage.
There was usually a musical guest and the first show had Bill Wyman being predictably wooden in a misfiring sketch about Ken mistaking him for Jagger. Bill then got to perform his dreary new single A New Fashion which contains the unfortunate line "Gimmee, gimmee gimmee some good old fashioned melody " to which my sister instantly ( and accurately ) retorted "Well this hasn't got any !"
The series ended in 1988, Kenny and Cleo moving on to a one series-only quiz show Brainstorm after which he mainly went back to commercial radio before his death from AIDS in 1995. He was only 50 but his time had gone past, a trailblazer already superseded by the likes of Chris Evans. Rocas has manfully tried to keep her career afloat since, a fairly disastrous appearance on Celebrity Big Brother proving conclusively that she wasn't funny in her own right. Dirk Benedict also skewered her fading credentials as a sex symbol by disparaging her "middle-aged cleavage" and reporting her for sexual harassment. Her latest venture is as a tequila distiller.
Your comment about his time having passed may well be on the money: I do remember his death, but mainly as (at the time) I had no real idea who he was.
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