Everett to refuse treatment for Aids

KENNY EVERETT, the TV and radio personality who has the Aids virus, says he will refuse medication if the full- blown disease takes hold so that he can die more quickly.

'I have decided not to take anything when it starts getting hideous because that way I'll go faster,' he said yesterday.

'I'd hate to cling on because I'll be more beautiful and fabulous in my next life. I hope they don't find a cure just after I've spent the last of my pension.'

Mr Everett, 48, whose television comedy shows were hits in the 1980s, is a disc jockey for the London radio station Capital Gold.

He announced he was HIV positive earlier this year and believes he has been infected for at least a decade. Speculation about his health mounted in 1991 when his Russian lover died of Aids.

'I know the horrors of Aids, but what's the point of looking ahead to your death when you can be getting on with something jolly in the meantime?' Mr Everett told Hello] magazine.

He was having a relationship with a man but sex was out of the question because of the virus. He had been celibate for four years.

'Sometimes I think, 'Ooh, it would be nice to have that facility back again', but then I think of something else. It's like the priests used to advise us at training college, to rush off and play rugger as soon as we had any naughty thoughts. Sex can become an obsession and you lose track of everything else.

'The person I am having a personal relationship with is not in showbusiness so he does not want anything in print about him. I have a lot of really nice friends and one rather special one, but we don't do rude things, unfortunately.'

Mr Everett said he had regular medical checks and was fit apart from the HIV virus, so he hoped to be one of the 10 per cent of carriers who do not develop full-blown Aids.

He said HIV had made him more relaxed and philosophical about life. 'I don't really care how I go. I'd hate to live forever and be alive when all my friends have died of old age.'

(Photograph omitted)