SIDEBAR - KENNY EVERETT

Liverpool-born Maurice Cole changed his name to Kenny Everett as a legal precaution before making his broadcasting debut on pirate Radio London, the slickest of the illegal stations that ringed the coastline of the United Kingdom in the mid-1960s. A sometimes surreal sense of humour that was part Beatles and part Goon (the influential British radio comedy of the 1950s, The Goon Show, starring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe) soon established Everett as one of the outstanding personalities of pirate radio, and he became one of BBC Radio 1's original recruits. That sense of humour also ended his career as a live broadcaster on Radio 1 when, in response to a news item, he suggested that the wife of the transport minister had passed her driving test by bribing the examiner. Everett returned to the airwaves in 1972 with a prerecordedand thus censorableSaturday morning show, which he taped in a home studio, where his experiments with sound, especially voice treatments, created a unique and instantly recognizable hybrid of oddball comedy and music radio. He left Radio 1 to join Capital Radio at its inception in October 1973, first presenting a weekday breakfast (morning drive-time) show and then, as a blossoming television career took more of his time, moving to weekend mornings. The success of The Kenny Everett Video Show and its successorsin which his fascination for what could be done with the ever-evolving technologies of television echoed his earlier audio improvisationsmeant that until his death in 1995 he divided his energies between both media and, by doing so, redefined the role of disc jockey as a springboard to broader areas of entertainment. John Pidgeon