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, Cleo, Cowboy) and if you want to see him at his best, seek out An Audience with Kenneth Williams from 1983, because there is his brilliance in full flow. God knows how many times I’ve watched it, and how much I’ve laughed.

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And God knows how many times I’ve picked up the diaries because there’s brilliance, and wisdom, in them too, although not in the way you’d expect. For a start, there is happiness and unhappiness in every life story and Williams’s life was not as completely morose and miserable as you might think. He was certainly plagued by ill health in later years, and he may have taken his own life or may have died accidentally overdosing on pills he was using to control the pain, but he also had great success, and great friends, and took great pleasure in literature and music and life. Look at this unpublished diary entry from March 9th, 1971: “The air was mild and there was a light rain falling and I realised how utterly beautiful it all was. We sometimes forget the sudden surge of joy which good things bring. I walked home and had the omelette.” What day hasn’t been made perfect by the omelette?

Another fascinating thread in the diaries – and it’s certainly one I sympathise with – is the plight of conservatives forced to live through progressive times. Williams’s professional peak was in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s which means he lived through some of the best and worst governments of modern times. On many pages of the diary, you’ll find him placing his hope in Heath or Thatcher or railing against unions and strikers. January 31, 1972: “There are warnings of power cuts because of these filthy mining strikes. Oh! What a scourge and a blight is the English working man! What a dishonest, lazy bastard! Only exceeded by the Welsh and the skiving Scots.”

Did he mean it? Not quite. What you often find in the diaries is Williams raging against someone or something only to withdraw it a few pages later. February 1963 has him railing against Stanley Baxter for instance, calling him selfish and a bad friend, only to withdraw it later and curse himself for being so judgemental. And the anger you get from him often feels like the anger of someone who’s really angry at himself. He wasn’t getting what he wanted, he wasn’t fulfilled; he wanted to be doing great work on the stage but instead he was getting Babs’s bra pinged into his face and so he lashed out. It’s the reason that as he got older, the anger got bigger.

Kenneth Williams in 1967 Photo by Stone / Peter Daily Mirror / Mirrorpix via Getty Images

But the real tragedy is that a lot of it appears to have been a kind of self-inflicted wound. Orson Welles said to him: come and work for me in America. Hal Roach, Laurel and Hardy’s producer, said: I’ll make you a Hollywood star. Bill Cotton said: I’ll give you a big Saturday night show. But Williams said no to it all. There were also opportunities for sexual relationships, maybe even a partner, but again he couldn’t do it because, even though he used his sexuality, gloriously, as part of the camp persona he had in public, he couldn’t come to terms with his sexuality in private. Is it the biggest tragedy in the diaries? Maybe.

But there are lessons to be learned too. One of the great friendships of Williams’s life was with the playwright Joe Orton, who famously also kept diaries, although his were very different from Kenneth’s; Orton gloried in his sex life. I’ve met his sister Leoni, the keeper of his legacy, and I remember her telling me about Joe’s attitude to life: don’t be uptight for God’s sake, grab the opportunities because it’s the only way to remain sane. “It’s like Joe says,” she explained, “you should have fun with your genitals while you’re young because if you don’t, when you’re old you’ll regret it.” It was something Kenny couldn’t do.

But, as I say, the torture in private was the glory in public and I sometimes think we’ve slightly forgotten Williams’s legacy as a cultural frontliner, one of the first out of the trenches. One of his great successes was an act he did with Hugh Paddick on the radio show Round the Horne playing two outrageous gay men Julian and Sandy. This was the mid-1960s remember when such open, unapologetic and celebratory material was utterly unknown on radio or television, and the fact that Williams did it helped to change and improve the popular culture and enabled the stars that followed. It was Kenny Williams who made Kenny Everett, and many others.

All of this is in the diaries if you look for it, amidst the sadness. I’ve just read the entry for June 6, 1987 in which he says “after 60, life’s utter futility becomes cruelly obvious … you see that there is not going to be any happy ending, contentment or fulfilment” and that’s hard to read, especially as you see the pages count down towards the last page with the last question: what’s the bloody point? We don’t get the answer to the question of course – in these diaries or any others – but at least we can search the pages for clues. Maybe it’s in there, maybe it isn’t. But we keep looking.

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