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When standup comic Tom Allen received Attitude magazine’s comedy award last year, he used his acceptance speech to salute the subversive wits who paved the way for freedoms now enjoyed by queer people in Britain. Joining Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward on the list was an actor and raconteur singled out by Allen as “a big hero of mine”, and feted by everyone from Orson Welles to Judy Garland, Maggie Smith to Morrissey.
“I wanted to mention Kenneth Williams because he was so profound,” Allen tells me. “And yet, because he was also funny, that profundity hasn’t been acknowledged. As a child, I connected with his outsiderness. Rather than trying to fit in, he went in the opposite direction. Not only did he not apologise for being different, but he was queer in every sense, truly at odds with the world in which he found himself.”
Williams, born to working-class London parents 100 years ago, on 22 February 1926, was close to ubiquitous in British culture in the second half of the last century. On stage, screen and radio, from bawdy comedies to chatshows and children’s entertainment, his adenoidal voice was inescapable. Up and down the class scale it slid, swanee whistle-style, from sandpapery cockney to Sandringham pomp, the elasticated vowels so capacious you could run around in them.
Physically, too, he was unique. He described himself as a “dried-up prune-like poof” but the reality was more arresting: he was like a living Gerald Scarfe caricature, the flared nostrils wide as shotgun barrels, the twitching eyebrows telegraphing disdain, prurience or relish, the pinprick eyes glinting at whichever punchline or put-down was coming over the horizon. When he tipped his head back and peered at the audience down his knife of a nose, he had the look of an anteater about him. But his species of comedy – erudite and highfalutin one moment, vulgar the next – put him in mind of an altogether different creature. “Perhaps it’s my duty to be a sort of mosquito,” he said. “Someone’s got to continually remind people that we are animal.”
Michael Sheen, who played him in the 2006 BBC film Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa!, believes this was a vital part of his appeal. “He would be chatting about something intellectual and high-class, then suddenly be talking about his bumhole,” he says. “That lent him a sort of danger and spontaneity. He’s like a commedia dell’arte character, or the fool or trickster in mythology – he delights in pricking pomposity and turning expectations upside down. It’s about saying: ‘This is what is respectable. But here is the murky stuff underneath.’ There was nobody better at doing that than him. What David Lynch did for America, Kenneth Williams did for Britain, but in the form of light entertainment.”
Williams is best known today as a mainstay of the coarse, innuendo-drenched Carry On films. He whinged, snorted and scoffed his way through 26 of them, including Carry On Cleo (“Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!”) and Carry On Camping, which distilled his curdled, priggish essence into one indelible image: Barbara Windsor’s bikini top being catapulted on to his horrified face during an overenthusiastic morning workout.
His final contribution to the series came in 1978 in the dismal Carry On Emmannuelle [sic], in which he plays the French ambassador, continually refusing sex with his young wife (Suzanne Danielle) on account of an injury sustained during a naked parachuting accident. His co-star – now Suzanne Torrance – remembers him as kind and cheerful. “He was the ultimate professional,” she says. “He treated me so well and never acted like the star.” His nude scenes – he drops his underwear twice within the film’s first 10 minutes – were a particular delight for him. “Oh, he loved showing his bum. Loved it. He joked about his bottom hanging in pleats.”
There was far more to Williams, though, than his Carry On tomfoolery. In 1950, he understudied Richard Burton as Konstantin in a Swansea production of The Seagull. Orson Welles, who directed Williams on stage in London in Moby Dick, tried to persuade him to come to New York to play the Fool in King Lear. Judy Garland knew his sketches by heart, having “worn out the grooves” of the vinyl recordings of his 1959 theatrical revue, Pieces of Eight (in which his understudy was firebrand-to-be Ken Loach, who later said of him: “He was very nice … but he could be capricious. Sometimes, he just cut you dead”).
Peter Cook, who wrote some of the material in that show, predicted Williams “could be the funniest comic actor in the world”, while the critic Kenneth Tynan saluted his “matchless repertory of squirms, leers, ogles and severe, reproving glares” and anointed him “the petit-maître of contemporary camp”. After Williams’ death in 1988, Morrissey praised “his bomb-shelter Britishness, his touch-me-not wit, his be-ironed figure, stylishly non-sexual” and noted that “his facial features were as funny as anything he ever said”.
Maggie Smith, who became Williams’ close friend after starring with him in the 1957 revue Share My Lettuce, called him “an enormous influence” and admitted: “I pinch from him all the time.” Until she worked with him, said Smith, she had “never thought of colouring things as vividly as Kenneth does. I’d never thought that one could make a speech that alive.” More than two decades after his death, he was still inspiring her. The biographer Roger Lewis credits the comic as one of the sources of Smith’s performance in Downton Abbey. The desiccated, withering Dowager Countess of Grantham, Lewis wrote, amounts to “Lady Bracknell as played in drag by Williams”.
As a youth and during his national service, Williams worked as an apprentice cartographer. But what put him on the comedy map were his stints on nationally adored radio shows such as Hancock’s Half Hour and, later, Round the Horne. On Hancock’s Half Hour, which drew listeners in the millions, Williams played a rogues’ gallery of irksome neighbours and popularised a snivelling catchphrase: “Stop messin’ about!” He proved such a hit that the show’s star, Tony Hancock, jealously demanded he be written out.
On Round the Horne, Williams and Hugh Paddick played the camp duo Julian and Sandy, whose banter, written by Marty Feldman and Barry Took, consisted entirely of double entendres and the gay slang Polari. A prohibition on explicit language facilitated some of the filthiest innuendoes ever heard on British radio. Called upon by the avuncular host, Kenneth Horne, to spruce up the surroundings, Williams exclaimed: “Interior decor? Oh yes, Mr Horne, we’ll shove a couple of creepers up your trellis.”
First broadcast in 1965, two years before the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality between males over 21 in England and Wales, the sketches were subversive as well as funny. “The whole thing was outrageously rude and queer,” says Allen. “In a subtle, mainstream way, he changed attitudes hugely in this country. He was a queer person who people could love through laughter, and that was massive.” Not that Williams’ relationship with his sexuality was straightforward. Squirming shame had always been part of his comedy, and he often recoiled from effeminacy in other men.
Reviewing his autobiography, Just Williams, in 1985, George Melly wrote: “Someone who disliked him intensely couldn’t have done a better hatchet job.” But the extent of Williams’ self-loathing became apparent only with the posthumous publication, in 1993, of an edited collection of the diaries he had been keeping since his teens. Most of his vitriol was turned on himself, though others came under fire, too, whether colleagues (special enmity was reserved for his fellow Carry On regular Sid James, as well as for Hancock) or people of colour: “[Enoch] Powell was right, they should have stopped immigration years ago,” he wrote in 1979.
Now the world also knew the tortured, if barren, state of his sex life. “He would always say he was homosexual by nature, not practice,” says David Benson, who first played him on stage in 1996 in Kenneth Williams: Think No Evil of Us and is now touring My Life With Kenneth Williams. “He was celibate, and this intense internal pressure and conflict was partly what drove his comedy.” Sheen agrees: “The sense of not wanting to be penetrated by anything is central to him,” he says. “I don’t just mean sexually. He created this baroque personality that could so easily collapse if touched. It was to be admired only from the outside. There’s something wonderful about that but also tragic because it required that nobody get too close.”
No one did. Though that doesn’t mean he was a cold fish. Glyn Grimstead, who was 18 when Williams directed him in a 1981 London revival of Joe Orton’s four-hander, Entertaining Mr Sloane, remembers him as “absolutely delightful. Ken and I would catch the train home together. He’d get off at Great Portland Street and I’d go on to Plaistow. For me, it was a Professor Higgins/Eliza Doolittle relationship. I was very cockney, Ken wasn’t. He would teach me new words, correct my grammar. I loved it. Only later did I realise he came from the Caledonian Road [in London] and was as rough as I was. He was always jolly and lively. You would never have suspected he was desperately unhappy until you read the diaries.”
Turning misery into comedy had always been Williams’ speciality. “He would go on chatshows and say, ‘Ooh, I had a terrible night with my bowels. Agony, it was!’” says Benson. “People would fall about laughing but this was real pain he was talking about, as we know from the diaries. It wasn’t a joke, but he made it one, which is admirable.”
Williams had vague plans for his dotage. “I pay in a pension fund for when I’m over 60,” he said in 1967. “I’d like a cottage by the sea.” In fact, he died in his spartan London flat in the block where his beloved mother lived, less than two miles from where he was born. He was 62, the same age at which his father, a gruff hairdresser who scorned his son’s plummy tones and camp manner, had died. Williams always maintained that his father’s death from drinking poison had been suicide rather than an accident. An equivalent ambiguity hung over his own death from an overdose of barbiturates; the coroner recorded an open verdict. The final line in Williams’s diary (“Oh – what’s the bloody point?”) has been widely interpreted as a suicide note, though it was also a familiar expression of the despair that surfaced repeatedly throughout the millions of words in those journals.
“He regretted not being taken seriously,” says Allen. “The great tragedy is he did something enormously serious through his comedy, which he could never realise or acknowledge. He wasn’t seen as an activist, and would probably hate to have been. What we sometimes forget, though, is that radical action comes in many forms.”
‘The second night, he wore a deerstalker like Sherlock Holmes’: Ian McShane on working with Williams
In 1965, Williams played Inspector Truscott in the first production of his friend Joe Orton’s black comedy, Loot. After 56 performances, during which the cast had to learn three different drafts while touring, the production closed in Wimbledon, south London. Williams called it “the most painful period of my life”. The cast included a 22-year-old Ian McShane. His recollections today contrast with Williams’ contemporaneous diary entries.
Ian McShane: Ken was funny and charming. He and I got on very well. A couple of times we had dinner together at his favourite restaurant, The Seven Stars, in Joe Lyons’ Corner House. An Angus steak, a prawn cocktail and a black forest gateau: the height of sophistication. I also went back to his “rooms” as he called them, near Regent’s Park, and we had tea and a chat and worked on our lines. I was very fond of him.
Kenneth Williams: Ian McShane came back … He is v. willing and greatly talented. I like him. This morning I corrected him on a wrong reading of a line and said, “If you’d read the script properly, you wouldn’t make such a mistake …” and he said he’d been hurt by my shouting that at him in rehearsal. I apologised. One continually forgets how sensitive people are. (27 January 1965)
IM: Rehearsals were terrific until a couple of weeks in, when I think Ken started to get scared. I remember during one heated discussion, I said, “Can’t we just do the play?” and that earned me a withering look from Ken. There were constant calls for rewrites. That didn’t faze Joe, because he could come out with that dialogue in his sleep.
KW: Script in rags. Cast is utterly demoralised. I shouldn’t have set foot near this rotten mess. (10 February 1965)
IM: The production was overshadowed by Ken wanting to be funny all the time. If he wasn’t getting a laugh, he would resort to sticking his bum out or doing 17 different accents. The first night was bizarre. We opened in Cambridge and he came out dressed in a black raincoat. It was like, “What the fuck is he doing?” He looked like the Gestapo! The second night, he wore a deerstalker like Sherlock Holmes. He was genuinely funny – he just got nervous about the material. It was meant to go to the West End, so it was sad to finish in Wimbledon of all places.
A West End production in 1966 was a hit. Williams directed Loot at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, in 1980.
