Kenneth Williams

William Blake said ‘active evil is better than passive good’. He could not have asked for a better demonstration of his maxim last night. An election is usually about choosing the right candidate, not trying to avoid the wrong one. Boris Johnson, centrist, liar, racist, homophobe, fantasist, inconsistent in policies, evasive in interviews, awkward in […]

The 1960s were by all accounts a schizophrenic time – on the one hand London was blooming with creative originality and artistic talent, while the rest of the country was stuck in a postwar past that had hardly shifted since the days of Clement Atlee. While Northern comics continued to tell racist jokes, a very […]

There are very few musically funny pieces, but Hoffnung was there master, although most required knowledge of classical music to get what he was doing. The first funny piece of music I ever heard was Hoffnung’s drum-roll at the start of his Albert Hall concert, which made everyone in the auditorium stand up, only to […]

Where do we first gain our love of words? For my mother, who lived in Brighton as a girl, the seaside Pierrots (see a modern-day version, the Pier-Echoes, above) taught her funny songs. These traditionally-dressed troupes toured all the seaside towns and are immortalised in the novel ‘The Good Companions’ as the Dinky-Doos. Many kids […]