It's 100 years since the birth of Kenneth Williams. Is there some truth to be found in his diaries, asks Mark Smith

This is how it ends: “saw the news, watched the dreary saga of murder and mayhem. By 6.30, pain in the back was pulsating as it’s never done before … so this, plus the stomach trouble combines to torture me – oh – what’s the bloody point?” There is no more after that, just a sheet of blotting paper to mark the place, then empty page after empty page. He was found the next day, in bed, dead at 62, his diary telling a story we didn’t know, including the bleak, lonely end with that bleak, lonely question: what’s the bloody point?

Had he lived, he would have been 100 today because February 22 was his birthday. I looked up all his birthdays in the diaries and they take you instantly into Kenneth Williams’s strange, contorted, brilliant world. 1953 has him being met at Central Station in Glasgow by his friend Stanley Baxter (“if anyone can help me, it is him”). 1965: “Eyes full of tears”. 1966: birthday cake on the set of Carry On Screaming (frying tonight!) 1975: “Lots of birthday cards which go straight in the dustbin.” 1988: “Nowadays I don’t care at all for celebrations…” Taken at face value, it suggests a life of torture, troubled, the misery behind the campery, but as usual it’s more complicated. There’s a reason, 100 years on from his birth, that we’re still obsessed.

The most important bit is his genius. It’s true that a lot of it got trapped and trampled in the Carry On films and that one of our most vivid memories of him is eyes wide, nostrils flaring, arms flailing at the bright yellow bra that’s pinged off Barbara Windsor’s bosom into his face. But some of the Carry Ons are actually very good (Screaming,........

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