Jonathan Coe on Kenneth Williams, sex and the Sixties

The novelist Jonathan Coe reviewed The Kenneth Williams Diaries for the London Review of Books when they were first published:

Williams found the perfect expression for his personality in the Carry On films – despite their superficially heterosexual orientation – and became such a cherished emblem of sexual insecurity for gay and straight audiences alike. 

For above all this series represents (and celebrates) a peculiarly English sexuality, one in which an addictive, almost obsessional interest in sex is combined with horror and gaucherie at the prospect of actually performing it. 

In this respect they preserve a far more accurate record of the sexual atmosphere of the Sixties than films of ‘swinging London’ like Blow Up or Darling, which offer adolescent fantasies of sexual freedom when the reality for most punters must have been closer to Carry On Camping, with Bernard Bresslaw and Sid James making a pathetic pilgrimage to a nudist camp in order to gaze longingly at the ‘birds’ – pop-eyed, helpless and fundamentally out of the running. 

What Williams and the leering, pickle-nosed James had in common, then, was their status as sexual spectators, mesmerised but fearful.

I remember being taken to see Carry On Camping at the cinema, when I must have been nine. 

But then I was taken to see Danny La Rue's Christmas show when I was eight. I was one of the children who came up on stage halfway through the show. For some reason, there weren't many children there.