Discovering Kenneth Williams

'Good evening...'

One of my intentions when I began this blog back in 2016 was to attempt to describe how I first encountered various icons of popular culture. Pop cultural icons don’t come much bigger than Kenneth Williams, and to mark his centenary, I thought I’d delve back to see exactly how and when this inimitable entertainer first insinuated himself into my consciousness.

For a generation above me, Kenneth Williams first came to prominence as a member of the cast of Hancock’s Half Hour, in which he appeared regularly between November 1954 and October 1959. Ironically, he’d been spotted by the show’s producer Dennis Main Wilson in a serious role (the Dauphin) in a West End production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. As the resident character voice on the Hancock shows, Williams’ career was tugged in a different direction from what he’d originally envisaged. Soon he began to star in West End revues, establishing himself firmly as a comic performer. If anyone had been left in any doubt, his contributions to Beyond Our Ken (1958-64) and Round the Horne (1965-68) confirmed his comedy credentials and showcased the increasingly outrageous aspects of his persona.

I knew none of this at the time. The Hancock series had ended before I was born, and I have no recollection of hearing either Beyond Our Ken or Round the Horne until much later. What I do remember is a man with a funny voice who would crop up occasionally on the radio, repeating phrases like ‘give me your money’ in a sneering accent. This was, in fact, a sketch entitled ‘Hand Up Your Sticks’, written by Peter Cook for Williams’ 1961 revue ‘One Over the Eight’, which had been released on a Decca LP in 1961 and as the featured track on a 1963 EP. It was this EP, around the time of its release, that I kept hearing on the radio: I can’t have been more than two or three at the time, and I didn’t much care for the sound of Williams’ voice. He played the sketch in the so-called ‘Snide’* persona that he’d developed on Hancock’s Half Hour, portraying an inept bank robber who couldn’t master the simple phrase ‘stick up your hands and give me your money’ and kept coming out with garbled manglings of the words in everything but the right order. The LP version had been recorded in a studio without an audience, so there was no laughter to alert me to the fact that what I was hearing was supposed to be funny...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAfaXO_Szs

I had no idea who Kenneth Williams was beyond this silly, nameless voice, and I began to dread hearing the sketch, which would pop up in the Light Programme’s morning schedule with regularity. Curiously, though, I began to form a mental picture of him which was not far removed from reality.

I didn’t get to actually see Kenneth Williams until around 1967. ABC Television, who provided programmes for the ITV Midlands region at weekends, owned the rights to the early Carry On films, and would frequently screen them on Saturday evenings. My brother and I were allowed to sit up and watch them, and it was here that I first saw Williams doing his thing for the cameras. I particularly remembered a scene in Carry On Nurse (1959) where a bar of nougat made him nauseous: but I was still too young to put names to faces, and even though he became familiar for his performances across the other films in the series, I still didn’t think ‘that’s Kenneth Williams’ whenever he appeared on screen. So when, exactly, was I first able to put face and name together?

It was through television that I came to recognise celebrities, and Williams wasn’t a regular television performer at this time: his small screen appearances in the mid 60s were mostly guest spots on programmes including International Cabaret, Call My Bluff and The Rolf Harris Show. It was, I believe, Jackanory that finally did the trick. Beginning in December 1968 with The Land of Green Ginger, Williams would become a frequent contributor to the series, and his readings were always highly watchable on account of his animated expressions and range of humorous voices. His next appearance on the programme was in September of the following year, reading Tolstoy’s The Founding of Evil Hold School, and by the time he returned in October 1972 with Agaton Sax and the Max Brothers, he’d become a face I could put a name to. By this time, I was probably most familiar with Williams through his contributions to the radio panel game Just a Minute, on which he’d been appearing regularly since September 1968, and which I often heard when I came home from school at lunchtimes.

I still hadn’t discovered Round the Horne or, indeed, Hancock’s Half Hour, but I did stumble across the short-lived replacement series for RTH that ran for two seasons following Kenneth Horne’s death in 1969. Stop Messing About took as its title Kenneth Williams’ famous catchphrase coined for him by Galton and Simpson as part of the ‘Snide’ character in the Hancock series, but the risqué humour was far too advanced for me at the age of eight or nine. Nevertheless, it must have struck a chord somewhere, as I was able to remember the signature tune decades after its last broadcast, well before it re-emerged on Radio 4 Extra. I became further acquainted with Williams’ performing style via two further radio series, The Secret Life of Kenneth Williams, in 1971 and 1973, curiously produced by the BBC radio drama department despite being wholly comic affairs.

Of Round the Horne itself, I remained in ignorance until introduced to it through a friend at school who had a couple of LP collections. Of the series’ characters, the one I really latched onto was the folk singer with the peculiar vocabulary, Rambling Syd Rumpo. He’s mentioned in my diary on February 12 1975, when a Radio 4 compilation, Celebration, presented ‘a reminder of entertaining Radio and Television characters who have become household names’ (I was also, around this time, discovering the comic genius of Peter Sellers, who was featured in the same programme). Rambling Syd was illustrated in the Radio Times and a few weeks later, I bought an EMI cassette of the album ‘The Best of Rambling Syd Rumpo’, originally released in 1970 and hard to obtain on vinyl (which explains my choice of format).

In the summer of 1976, I finally caught up with Hancock’s Half Hour: the radio series had been repeated on and off over the years, but it was only when it arrived on Radio 4 for a series of Monday evening broadcasts that I tuned in at last. Kenneth Williams appeared in all but one of these repeated episodes, and his ‘Snide’ persona soon became a favourite part of the programme (it’s easy to see how Hancock came to resent Williams getting ‘easy laughs’ with the character’s exaggerated voice and catchphrases). By the time of another repeat run in the autumn of 1977, I was making special mention in my diary of ‘Kenneth Williams (+ silly voice)’.

In 1982, I began, belatedly, to catch up with Round the Horne, when episodes from the second series were repeated on Sunday lunchtimes. Kenneth Williams’ occasional (scripted) tantrums were a favourite part of the programme, but curiously I was less enamoured of the beloved double act that was Julian and Sandy, and didn’t come to fully appreciate them until much later. By this time, Williams had lent his many voices and cartoon image to the five-minute animated series Willo the Wisp which, solely on account of his contributions, became essential viewing not only for its intended audience of children, but many older viewers like myself.

By now, I probably thought I knew Kenneth Williams as a performer as well as it was possible to know any television, film or radio celebrity. It wasn’t until the posthumous publication of his diaries that I (and, indeed the vast majority of people) fully appreciated the truth about his complex and tortured private persona. What was it about these ‘funny voice men’ that caused such traumas in their personal lives? Peter Sellers was another tortured genius, differing from Williams in that he imposed his internal psychodramas onto his family and colleagues. Like Williams, he found his calling through wartime service in the entertainments branch of the armed forces, and also had ambitions to be taken seriously as an actor, as opposed to a provider of comic characters.

Sellers’s manic personality ended up destroying him – the cardiac problems that finally killed him arose after deliberately inhaling amyl nitrite (‘poppers’) in an attempt to bolster his sex life with new bride Britt Ekland. Williams, morbidly depressed and suffering from an endless list of niggling ailments, ended it all on 15 April 1988 with an overdose of barbituartes. His last diary entry said, hopelessly, ‘oh, what’s the bloody point.’

We could have answered that one at the time, and 38 years later, as his centenary is celebrated on the BBC, the answer is even more obvious: Kenneth Williams was a beloved entertainer whose persona and performances delighted and entertained millions during his lifetime and continue to do so to this day. That, surely, was ‘the bloody point...’

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[* ‘Ken (Snide) is how Galton and Simpson habitually indicated Williams’ annoying character in the Hancock programmes, but the part he played wasn’t really ‘snide’ in the true sense of the word – the correct defintion is of one who is ‘derogatory or mocking in an indirect way’ which doesn’t fully or even accurately describe the wheedling idiocy of Williams’ Hancock persona.]