Just Williams

It’s tempting to believe that somewhere in the bowels of Broadcasting House in London the voice of Kenneth Williams is still roaming, rich, ribald and ever-so-fruity, ready to jump out and surprise us. He was just so unmistakable on air, both fantastically intimate with the microphone and very aloof, but never better than playing someone totally off-the-wall. The wireless was tailor-made to suit his temperament, which could be flamboyant and out-of-control and yet was also intensely private and controlled. Without him and his zany characters (he died in 1988, aged 62) radio comedy especially has never been quite the same, with no one to take on his mantle of absurdity. There have been others as risqué, or as tongue-in-cheek, but no one quite matches his daring because everyone now cares too much. Williams was intensely proud (and often thought the material he was given nowhere near matched his intellectual gifts), but he was also always prepared to go right to the edge, or even over it.

Radio 4 Extra’s tribute evening on Saturday (to mark what would have been his 90th birthday) gave us clips from some of his most well-known appearances on Hancock’s Half Hour, Round the Horne, Just a Minute), compèred by Robin Sebastian, who does a mean impersonation of the man himself. But we also heard a newly edited version of Diary of A Mad Man, which Williams made in 1963, based on a Gogol short story about a man who descends into schizoid paranoia. Williams is quite terrifying as he steadily grows madder and madder in his fantasies, wrapped up in his own world, totally alone, just some strange electronic sounds as an accompaniment. No one else could have said, ‘The caliph of Baghdad has a wart right on the end of his nose’ with quite as much menace.