Picture this: the mid-1960s, Britain. The BBC controls nearly all the radio, and they’re about as exciting as a dial tone. So a ragtag crew of young DJs sails out past British waters, anchors a ship, and starts blasting rock music back to shore. Illegal. Subversive. Pirate radio. (Hey, that would make a great movie.) On one of those boats is a manic young disc jockey named Kenny Everett, splicing tapes, cracking jokes, and already showing the gleeful irreverence that would define his career.
That was Everett’s DNA from the start: chaotic, playful, allergic to authority. While the BBC played it safe, Everett was on a ship, literally rebelling with sound.
Most Americans have never heard of him. That’s a tragedy, because if you’ve ever laughed at Robin Williams riffing in Good Morning Vietnam or marveled at the sheer weirdness of Monty Python, you’ve already brushed against his wavelength. Everett was a British DJ, comedian, and TV personality who lived on a knife-edge between genius and chaos. He could take the stiff, buttoned-down world of the BBC and blow it wide open with a belch sound effect and somehow sneak in social commentary at the same time.
His career blossomed with those tape machines: two reels, overdubbing voices, noises, and audio chaos long before anyone called it “sampling.” He layered weird sounds until he built something that didn’t exist before. It wasn’t high tech. It wasn’t polished. It was raw, messy, and utterly new.
Flash forward a few years. It’s 1977. I’m in Herrin, Illinois, sitting in my room with two tape recorders of my own, convinced I had invented something radical: overdubbing sound effects onto my own silly voices to make a kind of bedroom radio show. I was a kid, messing around with the coolest toys I had. The irony was that one of the tapes I was using for sound effects was a rip of Captain Kremmen, which was Everett playing a radio studio like an instrument with a variety of silly voices. I literally remixed him into my own creations without realizing it. He was the ghost in my machine before I even knew his name.
At the time, I assumed Kremmen, an absurd sci-fi parody of dad jokes only funny to an 8-year-old, was the work of some Southern Illinois University student sneaking a weird sonic experiment onto WCIL at 5:05 every evening. I had no idea it was British, and no idea it was the creation of some wild-haired legendary DJ across the ocean. To me, it was just another oddball thing I stumbled across, recorded, and put in my 8-year-old’s library of weird sounds caught on cassette.
I didn’t learn who Kenny Everett actually was until I googled Captain Kremment around age thirty. Suddenly, everything snapped into place. Ohhhh, of course, Kremmen was in the same British humor lineage as Monty Python and Douglas Adams, who were already 60% of my sense of humor. Everett kicked the British influence up to 80%. That’s why those things felt sharper, stranger, and funnier than the polite observational humor of Friends or Seinfeld. The British didn’t just tell jokes; they dismantled the format while laughing at it, and Everett was right there on the front lines.
I later learned Everett wasn’t just weird, he was dangerous. In 1983, at a rally for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party, he appeared on stage wearing giant foam hands, waving them in the air and shouting, “Let’s bomb Russia!” It was meant as a gag, but it became legend and was one of the most controversial moments of his career. It was a comedy stunt, political satire, and a national scandal. Think Jimmy Kimmel without the tragic bits.
Everett burned brightly but never safely. He got himself fired from the BBC more than once, mostly for being too outrageous for management to stomach. He played with sexuality and gender on air in ways that scandalized Britain in the 1970s and ’80s, decades before drag shows or RuPaul became mainstream TV. He was openly gay in his private life but couldn’t be publicly, not without risking his career. So he smuggled it into sketches, characters, and camp humor that everyone sort of got but couldn’t quite say out loud. Fans adored him because he was fearless and funny. Executives feared him because he was unpredictable and unmanageable. That’s why he’s a cult figure today: beloved by the people who got him, quietly erased from the institutions that couldn’t handle him.
He also had his Cleo Rocos. For Americans who’ve never heard of her, Rocos was his glamorous sidekick on The Kenny Everett Television Show. Think Daisy Duke and Linda Carter turned up to 11. She was dazzling, camp, impossible to ignore, and the perfect foil to his manic chaos. She grounded him by amplifying him, keeping the lunacy sharp instead of sloppy. Watching them together was like watching a live-action cartoon with just enough balance to keep the whole thing from flying apart. I never had a Cleo Rocos. Of course not, I’m a middle-aged heterosexual male in the American Midwest, and glamorous camp icons don’t exactly wander into Studio B. A Cleo only shows up when you’re already on fire and need someone equally flamboyant to stop you from burning down the studio. I never got grounded; I just got weird and drifted off into tangents about the genius of 1970s British radio jocks.
That’s the kind of irreverent creativity I tried to throw on Indy In-Tune, and failed most of the time, I’m sure. In fact, I opened every episode of “Local is Our Genre” with his signature “And now…” before introducing Ben Cannon, the host, with my best immitation of an Everett gag. I’m sure nobody got it. Even now, every Thursday, I wear my Kenny Everett “Hello, darlings” t-shirt on Zoom calls with my UK teammates, who should know the reference instantly. Not once has anyone acknowledged it! Not a smirk. Not even a “nice shirt.” It’s like shouting into the void. As an American, I can’t help but feel that Everett’s spirit may have died a little inside me.
I don’t have his courage for chaos. I don’t have my Cleo Rocos. If I say something here that makes you laugh and think at the same time, however, then maybe I have a bit of his influence. And nooowwwwww, stay tuned for my next exciting post, which is sure to put a sparkle in your eyeholes …
