Urban Myths: Princess Diana, Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett review - an unusually poignant episode with plenty of wicked laughs
As any regular reader of tabloid newspapers will tell you, rumours continue to swirl around Diana, Princess of Wales in death as in life.Urban Myths, Sky Arts’ always entertaining spin on celebrity legends, anecdotes and half-truths, launched its third series with one of its best-judged instalments. Beginning as ribald comedy before eliding into moving human drama, it followed an unlikely night out with three of the Eighties’ most enduring icons: Princess Diana, Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett.
Mercury has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been an enduringly fascinating figure for this series, already featuring as a bit-part player (played by David Avery) in episodes about Live Aid and The Sex Pistols (played by Kayvan Novak). Avery returned to the role with aplomb opposite Sophie Rundle’s impressively convincing Diana and Mathew Baynton’s winningly outrageous Everett; we joined the unlikely trio as they took a little time away from the public eye by getting drunk in front of The Golden Girls.
The three were at different stages of celebrity, none of them feeling truly satisfied: life as a royal had left Diana feeling paranoid; Everett was conscious his star was fading but couldn’t decide between chasing the spotlight or settling down; Mercury’s life of casual sexual encounters and pop megastardom was losing its lustre. What better than a hedonistic night out at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, London’s infamous gay cabaret bar, to cure the blues?
And so, while Everett jockeyed for attention in the shadows of his more famous friend, Diana, incognito as a male model, got lost in the crowd before finding herself backstage in the company of drag artist Gareth (Richard Gadd). As soon as the lesions on his skin, long kept hidden, were exposed, it was apparent all was not well and Gareth duly bared his soul to the most famous woman on the planet.
Pete Jackson’s script was never so crass as to conflate the situations of a man dying of Aids and a woman living in unthinkable luxury. Yet, as Gareth confessed his shame, fear, defiance and yearning to belong, it made a persuasive case that this apocryphal incident, or one like it, might have stirred in Diana both a sense of kinship and the campaigning zeal that made a genuine difference to public perceptions of the disease.
It was an unusually poignant episode for a series which often favours out-and-out silliness, although the bitching between Mercury and Everett – climaxing in a fight that made the celebrated Grant-Firth face-off from Bridget Jones’s Diary look macho and coordinated – still provided plenty of wicked laughs. The playout of Andrew Gold’s Thank You for Being a Friend may have been cheesy, but it was well earned.
