Television - A morbid biopic does Kenneth Williams little justice, writesAndrew Billen
Fantabulosa! (BBC4)
In his appearance on Desert Island Discs in 1987, the year before his death, Kenneth Williams was asked what he would like on his gravestone. Any inscription would, he said, have to top Dorothy Parker's "This is on me".
Williams, who could turn an endoscopy procedure into chat-show gold ("The surgeon announced I had a spastic colon - as though I had come into money"), would surely have wanted any epitaph other than Martyn Hesford's relentlessly gloomy Fantabulosa! (13 March, 9pm, repeated on 17 and 20 March).
The playwright Terry Johnson, our foremost reanimator of dead comedians, generally takes a dim view of them. But Dead Funny, in which he pays tribute to funny men such as Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd, Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick, about the Carry On troupe, and Not Only But Always, about Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, were at least comedies.
In Fantabulosa! Hesford goes straight for Williams's private life and finds a joke-free wilderness. For 80 minutes we see Williams, through Michael Sheen's brilliant impersonation (did he get his nostrils specially flared for the part?), writhing on the rack of his life. When his psyche isn't torturing him, his guts are, his frail body having robbed him even of the comedy of ye olde English fart joke. "I'm in purgatory," he complains. "The pain never stops."
The production begins jauntily enough with Williams cycling through London to the strains of "The Ballad of the Woggler's Moulie", otherwise known as Rambling Syd's cordwangler song. But when he reaches his bare, beige, linoleumed flat the music stops, and outside enters an eternal English autumn. In the hall Williams breaks wind - "Two whiffs of that and you're greedy" - and goes to the kitchen to boil a kettle, first unpeeling the cling film with which, obsessed about hygiene, he has covered his gas stove. The only moment of near happiness he enjoys is while hoovering his flat in his bathing trunks, combining his hitherto incom-patible interests in sex and cleanliness. His orgiastic delirium is truncated by the arrival at the door of his despised father, who has decided to attempt a reconciliation with his "nancy" son. Told to go away, Dad poisons himself with, neatly enough, a bottle of detergent.
The not-quite-buried subtext of Willi-ams's cordwangler lyric is that, ridiculed by women, the young cordwangler finds sexual release elsewhere, only to be caught by the "Bow Street Runners". The not-quite-buried subtext of all of Williams's performances is that while trading as an asexual who sees erections as beneath him, he is at least getting some homosexual action off-stage. But Williams really was too fastidious for sex, or too scared of it. His friend Joe Orton was up for anything and anyone; Williams turned the most blatant sexual overture into a conversa-tion about the weather. On a Carry On, he fancies a young lighting engineer, but Charles Hawtrey moves in on him first. Dejected, Williams asks an astonished Joan Sims to marry him. But the only sex Williams ever has is with himself, and we see more onanism than we might care to. Woody Allen's aphorism that masturbation is at least sex with someone you love does not apply here. A narcissist manque with a taste for long mirrors, Williams found his own body repulsive.
This drama, based on Williams's own diaries, is morbidly interesting and wonderfully acted (David Charles's cameo as Hawtrey is remarkable), but too long and too much on the one melancholy note. It is not only Williams who looks forward to his death; after an hour, so did I. For Hesford, Williams's life is an endless negative. His father despises him. His mother mollycoddles and romances him. Tony Hancock accuses him of coarsening his sitcom. He is unpopular with his colleagues. When the Carry On films are finished, so, more or less, is Williams.
Johnson's play Dead Funny ends with the death of Benny Hill in 1992, a day before Howerd's. "What was it?" someone asks. "His heart," he is told. Johnson's contention is that, in order to be funny, you need to have something wrong with your heart. Hesford obviously agrees. After his father's suicide, Kenneth and his mother sit in a cafe agreeing, to the astonishment of his agent, that Dad's death is a great boon; it has been a "rat trap" of a marriage. So Williams is subjected to a double illness-as-metaphor diagnosis: he was both gutless and heartless.
But Hesford's screenplay is heartless, too, ignoring the love that Williams's comedy inspired. At a press conference for Carry On Don't Lose Your Head, one of the weakest Carry On outings, a snooty reporter crushingly asks Williams if people find such things funny any more. The day before his death, we see Williams looking out of his window and discovering that the road diggers he has been entertaining with patter have left without saying goodbye. And in the creepiest set piece of all, Williams, whose braying laughter we assume has been entertaining the customers at a cafe, turns out to be sitting there alone with his agent. But right to the end, Williams did have an audience. Thank goodness BBC4 took pity on his memory and, half an hour before Fantabulosa!, showed Kenneth Williams In His Own Words. It reminded us of one thing Fantabulosa! chose not to: that Williams could be bloody funny.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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