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Kenneth Williams Wants Some Attention:
The Horror, the Self Made Depravity
When I was a kid, we had a 1950s 45” of Kenneth Williams doing funny/sad surrealist style skits. (‘I’ve got a viper in my pocket, it’s not an asp.’) It’d been my mother’s as a kid, and with her brother, they ‘d added an ‘S’ to the beginning of his name: hence I will always know the poor sod as ‘SKenneth’.
Actually, SKenneth wasn’t so much of a poor sod, as a poor would-be sod. Who wanked a lot. at least according to last night’s Beeb2 offering; a docu-drama on the aformentioned wannabe, the title of which escapes me.
Showing all that wanking, I thought, was rather demeaning to poor SKenny, who I had never thought of as poor prior to watching this thing. In fact, only this Friday at a charity shop I bought an lp record of Willo the Wisp, for a friend’s son. The 1980 bbc just-before-the-news childrens show is narrated by a cartoon version of Mr Williams, (voiced by said Williams himeslef), as a wispy entity watching the doings of woodland characters, including Mavis Cruet (the ‘Fat Fairy’), Evil Edna, and The Moog (the Doppy Dog), amongst others.
And go there Kenneth, once more with feeling, give it some. So if the characters of Doiley Wood are so great, all with it’s own version of Williams, then why do we need to remember this version of Williams, the sordid ‘lets get it over with’ wanks, misery of the real man’s life?
Maybe he left his diaries for just this purpose. From what this docudrama made out, he kept diaries virtually all his adult life, from his friendship with Joe Orton, his hatred of ‘this crapola’ of Carry On films, and beyond. The other side of his life is all chronicled, his characters – the mental pain (curled up on his bed in the foetal position), his physical pain, both real and imagined, his inability to have real sex with a real bloke. (As his mother says to Ken’s mate Joan Simms over Charles Haughtrey’s transgressions with a beautiful young male bit-player ‘my Kenny’s not like that, … he’s, erm what’s that word? Asexual.’)
This went to his bitter end, when he was told ‘once your act was unique, but they’re replacing you; Larry Grayson is a complete copy of your act, and John Inman is doing it too’, and he started to appear on chat shows coming out about his mental illness. Pity he didn’t have anything else to come out about.
Is it different if you haven’t actually done it? We want to remember the other Kenneth Williams, the one with that strange, bunged up voice (is it a coincidence that he had medical problems with his arsehole/digestive system?) We wanted to laugh at him? or with him? he who often randomly flashed his dick in ‘real life’ cackling furiously at the disgust?
And of course, he went to his grave being what we wanted him to be, the thing we could laugh at, but also who somehow shared with us all our sadness. Who understood himself, and therefore understood us, and our prisons; Who understood himself, even though he was trapped in his own prison. In one sense, we killed him, this society killed him; a man who had to act rather than be himself, who had to play characters (‘oooh, stop mucking about’), laugh about his own queerness, the one who did that brand of media camp first, but who died a virgin, by his own hand (barbituates, since you ask).
* * *
Since that strong feeling for SKenneth, last weekend, I have thought about the thing I wanted to put but deleted, from the Gnostic gospels. That, when on the cross, Jesus laughed at the Romans stringing him up; he thought they were the losers, and he was a supreme being, who didn’t feel pain, (at the very least, he’d trained his material body through meditation). I like the idea of this, I’m not a Jesus botherer on the whole, but I am interested in the imagery the authorities at the time used to pacify what could be a dangerous revolutionary force (anti dominator culture).They changed it to make us all feel guilty all the time: so, Jesus suffered for our sins.
I couldn’t say whether SKen was an exceptional person, for what he seemed to be was a very raw inner self, and a collection of acted parts that protected him, in public. After all that, he didn’t have much time to be himself, to work out what his autonomous, authentic, free self was, at all. The comic who could not really laugh. We all do this, more or less, but for him, it was those parts, those characters, those voices, which the public wants/ed. These parts which were his breadandbutter. Towards the end of his life, and now, thirty years later, in the age of realityTV soul-searching (for buying the right – or wrong – dress), we want all the gory dysfunctional details, so maybe Kenn was spared. But, somehow, it is Kenneth Williams, amongst countless others, who suffered for our sins. I know, it sounds bloody awful schmaltzy as fuck written down, but it just kept hitting me. Suffering for the lost chance to be authentic, for what some breeders would call his own sins, (uncommitted, but thought nonetheless). And in many senses, it was suffering in the worst ways, aware, isolated, and buttoned up.
