Kenneth Williams. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty
On April 14 1988, Kenneth Williams spent a few hours on chores, ate fishcakes for lunch on his own and then - tormented by stomach pain and worn out by his ailing mother - downed a massive overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. He signed off in his diary with the memorably bleak epigram, "Oh - what's the bloody point?"
Today's Rob Brydon documentary on Radio 4, The Pain of Laughter: The Last Days of Kenneth Williams focused on the sad end of Williams' life. "Tears of a clown" is an overplayed comic archetype that doesn't really do the extremities of Williams' existence justice; "mental breakdown of a court jester" would be more appropriate. Pegged in the public eye as a nostril-flaring, camp absurdist, the actor was best known for his roles in increasingly lame Carry On films and excavating himself on chat shows.
It was only with the 1993 publication of his diaries (superbly edited by Russell Davies) that Williams' true nature was revealed. A self-confessed "suicidalist", he talked of ending his life from 1947 onwards, while struggling against his own obsessive puritanism, painfully unrequited homosexual desires and lack of creative fulfilment.
It's almost entirely this darkness - rather than the acting - that has sparked a critical reassessment of Williams; two Channel 4 films, Michael Sheen's biopic and now Brydon's show all focus on this dark underbelly, none of which would have been visible without Davies' exhaustive work.
Williams reputedly threatened several people with inclusion in the diaries, which he kept daily. However their real, unique power - and what Williams couldn't have known - lies in how much they transcend their subject when read as a whole. I have almost no interest in Williams as an actor and his critical rehabilitation has certainly not been based on the Carry Ons. But the diaries function on several other levels: as an unbearably sad portrait of a manic depressive; as a thumbnail history of London over 40 years; as a perfect study of the chronic instability of the creative's life; and as a damning indictment of the irreparable damage done to generations of homosexuals by the rank idiocy of the state meddling in people's private lives.
It's for these reasons that I'd suggest Kenneth Williams' Diaries are the most significant diary/memoir of the post-war years. Compared to, say, Alan Clark (exactly how you'd expect), Alastair Campbell (evasive) or Piers Morgan (not always entirely straight with the truth), Williams produced a truly brilliant piece of writing that drew the world around him while mercilessly exposing himself like no one else. Can you think of anything better?
