Richard Williams, the most graphic of film-makers, was vividly recalled by David Robinson. That Dick also provided the blind medium of radio drama with one of its finest performances demonstrated the depth of his craft.
In 1963 Dick had commissioned a dramatisation of Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman from James Burke for an animated feature he never completed. He had also commissioned music from Peter Shade and recorded the orchestral score. For the demanding solo role of the clerk swirling into madness he had cast and directed Kenneth Williams.
Dick told me about this project when we were talking after recording an interview for the BBC and I asked him if the audio still survived. He sent some material on disc to my office. What I heard suggested that it would make splendid radio. When he told me that all of the music and Kenneth’s performance existed on 35 mm soundtracks, Radio 4 agreed to broadcast it. Dick then sent crates full of the 35mm film to Broadcasting House and we enlisted the brilliant sound engineer John Whitehall to transfer the recordings digitally and set about reassembling the music and performance.
John then discovered that one reel of film was missing. Undaunted, he scoured the existing tracks, sampling them and recreating the performance that Dick had elicited so beautifully from Kenneth, and the soundtrack of Diary of a Madman was broadcast on Radio 4 in February 1991, with the first stereo broadcast that April; radio at its best.
Ned Chaillet
In 1977 I interviewed Richard Williams in his rabbit warren of an office on Soho Square, where he was still working on his endlessly elusive magnum opus, The Thief and the Cobbler. Williams had imported some of Hollywood’s finest to help realise his “magnificent obsession” including one of Disney’s greatest, Art Babbitt, who, while Williams shyly retreated from the room, colourfully summed up his new boss.
Said the then 70-year-old Babbitt: “He’s a director, designer, animator and has a good layman’s knowledge of music. He’s a dreamer. He has more to learn as far as animation is concerned, but, God, he can draw like a bastard.”
Quentin Falk
