I AM of the generation for whom Kenneth Williams was primarily a voice on Jackanory: he died when I was ten, growing up in a home where Carry On films were derided as naff and passé. I was, therefore, startled to discover his readings from the Gospels as revealed by Archive on 4 (Radio 4, Saturday).
This programme was widely — and deservedly — trailed in this newspaper (Feature, 11 April) and even parts of the secular press. I had feared that the readings might descend into Carry On archness, but Williams’s extraordinary emotional range brought scripture to life, aided by his ad libs explaining the cultural context of the text without breaking the flow of the narrative, illuminating matters familiar, no doubt, to regular churchgoers, but unknown to a general audience. This was useful, because the recordings’ original aim was to reach the unchurched young with that cutting-edge 1970s communications device the audio cassette.
The former Bishop of Liverpool the Rt Revd James Jones, then a young communications staffer with the Scripture Union, both made the original recordings and narrated the programme, with the particular assistance of the Dean of Southwark, the Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley, who appears to have struck up a friendship with Williams, of whom he had already been an admirer, thanks to a chance encounter.
It took a while for the programme to get under Williams’s skin, but, when it did, it was revelatory. The deeply camp Williams — perhaps Britain’s most high-profile gay man in a homophobic era — suppressed his sexuality, at least in his latter decades, perhaps because of a faith that was intense and austere if married to a hostility to the organised Church. His deep sense of his own sin, which nightly prayers for forgiveness attempted to expiate, was something probably absorbed from his sternly Methodist father.
I was left with the sense that I still didn’t know who the real Kenneth Williams was — but perhaps he never did himself.
One often hearsm particularly from the sort of Christians whose comfortable lives are light years from the persecution that they thrill to imagine for themselves, that we live in an age of aggressive hostility to Christianity. Up to a point, Lord Copper. The national broadcasting network still produces programmes such as Lent Talks (Radio 4, Sunday), exploring the Nicene Creed on its 1700th anniversary.
In the last of the five-part series, Dr Graham Kings, a former Bishop of Sherborne, reflected on “I look for the resurrection of the dead”, with the assistance of the doors of a Kenyan theological-college chapel, and Bach’s Mass in B minor. The latter has been a leitmotif during a series in which serious Christian thinking was put before the ears of a general audience by such contemporary luminaries as the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, and the writer and campaigner Dr Krish Kandiah.
I have only one complaint: why will the talks disappear from BBC Sounds after only six weeks?
