07/05/2023
On the May Day Bank Holiday, one of three extra long weekends in the UK during the month of May, northwest based internet station Merseyland Alternative Radio, broadcast a rare series of recordings featuring the popular and much missed gay radio disc jockey and comedian Kenny Everett, whose career sadly was cut short in April 1995 when he passed on from an AIDS related illness, just a year before the introduction of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapies totally changed the prognosis of those living with HIV. The recordings broadcast by Merseyland Alternative Radio, a popular station which has been on the air since 1979, when it started as a land based pirate broadcaster in Liverpool, focussed on Kenny's time at the first clutch of independent local radio services in the UK, during the seventies. Kenny Everett began his career in 1965, on Wonderful Radio London (pictured), one of the many offshore pirate broadcasters which through the middle sixties could be heard beaming in to the UK from ships and abandoned wartime gunning towers round the coastline. Everett's anarchic sense of humour got him in to trouble, even on the pirate radio stations, and he spent a spell with Radio Luxembourg, a rebel station broadcasting from powerful transmitters in central Europe, before coming back to pirate radio London in 1967. After the government moved to legislate against the offshore stations, Kenny moved to ashore to the BBC where he helped in the construction of the studios for Radio 1, the Corporation's own pop service. Everett's joking on the air several times got him the sack from the BBC, and he worked for the newly emerging Independent Local Radio stations such as Capital Radio in London, as well as Radio Victory in Portsmouth. Through the late seventies and into the early eighties, Everett made the smooth transition to television with a raucous series of very funny and risque television programmes, first for ITV Thames and later for the BBC. He also came out, of a fashion, in 1979, no longer publicly denying his homosexuality. But Kenny remained on radio through the rest of his life, presenting programmes for a variety of BBC and commercial stations. Wikipedia notes of his politics: "In an interview on Ireland's The Late Late Show with Gay Byrne and Sinéad O'Connor in February 1989, Everett was challenged by O'Connor about his support for the Conservative Party in the light of his homosexuality and the party's Section 28 addition to the Local Government Act. He said he would stand up for gay rights if he were asked providing "it was a jolly occasion", but he also felt that being in a minority and in the public eye, he could do more for gay rights by showing that he was funny and human rather than by marching in the streets."
There is more on Kenny Everett's diverse and varied career at these websites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Everett
https://www.radiorewind.co.uk/radio1/kenny_everett_page.htm
Merseyland Alternative Radio, meanwhile, can be heard every weekend, at www.mar.me.uk. The station broadcasts a radio "anorak" show on Bank Holiday Mondays through the year and this is the strand in which the Everett tribute was transmitted.
