11-04-2025
Listen: The lost tapes that reveal Kenneth Williams's hidden Christianity
Suggest to most people that Kenneth Williams – Carry On star, raconteur and regular panellist on Radio 4's Just a Minute – was a devout Christian and they are quite likely to answer with one of his famous catchphrases: Stop mucking about!
And you certainly wouldn't think he had any interest in the Bible if you listened to his 1987 edition of Desert Island Discs, recorded a year before his death at 62. Told by presenter Michael Parkinson that he could have the works of Shakespeare and the Bible to help him while away his days as a castaway, the offer was met with silence.
Here and there, though, Williams dropped the odd clue: the occasional recorded remark; mentions in his diaries; one of his Desert Island Discs that was a piece of scripture set to music by Brahms.
But stored away, almost entirely forgotten, were a series of recordings of Williams reading Bible stories, made 50 years ago. Now they have come to light again and form the heart of a BBC radio programme about Williams and his faith. Called Said the Actor to the Bishop, it will be broadcast in Radio 4's Archive on 4 strand on April 12, to mark the start of Holy Week, the most sacred time in the Christian calendar.
The bishop in question is James Jones, a former bishop of Liverpool, and former chair of the Hillsborough Independent Panel. Back in the 1970s, he was a producer at the evangelical organisation Scripture Union. Audio cassettes were highly popular then and he planned a series of tapes of famous actors reading Bible stories. Keen to use the best possible storytellers, he hired Derek Nimmo, Thora Hird, Dora Bryan – and Kenneth Williams, who by then was entrancing children through his storytelling on BBC One's Jackanory.
The rediscovered tapes reveal Williams using his extraordinary talent for voices to bring alive characters in the New Testament: he is a terrifying Devil, a brave John the Baptist, a plotting Pharisee, a very human Jesus.
According to Jones: 'It was his own faith that he brought to these stories. You can hear he believes in the way he reads.'
He could hear Williams' own experience of temptation in how he recounts Jesus being tempted by the Devil. 'Temptations were something like all of us that he lived through. But he was quite self-controlled. He didn't often give in to them,' Jones says in the programme. An example would be his friendship with the gay playwright Joe Orton with whom he holidayed. 'He wouldn't do what Joe was doing but he would quite like to know what was going on.'
The most moving moments come, though, with Williams's reading of two of Jesus's parables – the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. His account of the Good Samaritan, helping a man left beaten on the roadside, is full of tenderness and compassion. And with the Prodigal Son, as he recounts how the spendthrift older brother returns home after a ruinous life and is embraced with love by his delighted father, there is something else there too.
'He brought to it his relationship with his own father. There was an ache there for that love,' says Jones.
When Jones approached Williams, the actor was at the height of his success with the Carry On films, while also famous for radio's Hancock's Half Hour and Round the Horne, whose characters included Rambling Syd Rumpo and Sandy, of the camp couple Julian and Sandy, who often spoke the gay language Polari. While Jones was well aware of this success, he had no idea of Williams's private life – his solitude, his difficulties with his father, his gay encounters and, above all, his personal faith which he kept particularly quiet.
He got an inkling of it when Williams readily agreed to read the stories, and then heard far more about his religious beliefs when they talked over several lunches held at the time of the recordings.
'Faith really mattered to him,' says Jones. 'He would end every day praying and asking for forgiveness.'
In his diaries (published in 1993) Williams at one point writes: 'I am full of the feeling of nearness to God…For me God means Truth and Goodness and Beauty…one real act of love…please let me be capable of it.'
His was a religious sensibility that, Jones says, is almost mystical. The diaries also reveal a man with many friends, who he considers gifts from God, but also a person of great complexity, who had no life partner, could sometimes by cruel and rude and at times struggled with his homosexuality.
'He had an ambiguous attitude to fame, drawn to wanting to be recognised,' his authorised biographer Wes Butters says in the programme. 'In the Baptism story Jesus has to hold on to the voice he hears, and that is a very Kenneth Williams story – he wanted to hold on to the values that matter.'
Jones says: 'I do wonder if there was a sense of shame in him about who he was, about his sexuality.
'He was very critical of the Church and bishops, didn't like the structure. He didn't go to church. He felt his urge to entertain people would get in the way of being part of a church community. He had to get away to pray. Performance was a barrier to God.'
Some people claimed that he renounced his Christianity later in life but Jones says he knows nothing of that.
While Jones wanted Williams to read the Bible stories, full of admiration for his narrative skills but also a fan of his quick wit and mastery of double entendre used to impressive effect in the Carry On films and Round the Horne, Scripture Union was not so sure. They feared that Williams's bawdy reputation would harm their own. But it didn't happen. The tapes sold well but have since been forgotten. Scripture Union later destroyed the master tapes, but Jones kept his own copies. A mention of them to a BBC producer led to the programme.
Even Williams's own friends – including fellow broadcaster Gyles Brandreth, who tells the programme that Williams 'was the funniest man I ever met' – knew nothing of this side of Williams's life. But Wes Butters was aware.
'We would meet up every two or three weeks,' Butters tells Archive on Four. 'I wanted to hear all about the Carry On films... He would often talk about the quiet inner life and his striving for God.'
Born in 1926, Williams was the son of Louie, as he called his mother, with whom he shared a mutual devotion, and Charles, a hairdresser who was a Methodist and sent his son to Sunday school which is where he first discovered Bible stories. The family lived above his father's barber's shop in Bloomsbury, while Kenneth was evacuated during the Second World War to live with an Oxfordshire vet, returning with a new accent of elongated vowels. After army service he went into repertory theatre, wireless dramas and comedy, West End revues – and the Carry On films, appearing in more than any other actor. His diaries, published posthumously after his death in 1988, reveal his faith cheek by jowl with his film work. In 1964 he reports deciding to give up 'fags, then drink' for Lent, to 'start making some sort of gesture to God'. In the same paragraph he records a costume fitting for the James Bond spoof Carry On Spying.
In 1988, Jones, by then working as a vicar, was on the top deck of a bus in London when he spotted Williams, whom he hadn't seen for years, step off it and walk down the street. He thought about going after him but the bus moved off. A week later, Williams wrote his last entry in his diary – 'Oh, what's the bloody point' – and died of an overdose of barbiturates. Jones was desolate, forever wondering if he should have gone after him.
'It would be sad if all people remembered Kenneth for was 'infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me' [his iconic line from Carry On Cleo ],' says Brandreth. 'Now, thanks to these Bible readings, we get another side – Kenneth telling what for many people is the greatest story ever told.'
