In 1965 Kenneth Williams had his passport picture taken. The photographer kept urging him to smile. Williams refused. That night he wrote in his diary: 'I ignored the stupid fool. I must look as I usually look, and that is not smiling.' For almost all of his 62 years, as an extraordinarily original and inventive entertainer, Williams worked hard at making other people smile. But, like most genuinely funny people, Williams was melancholic. He lived, and died, alone in a small, obsessively tidy Marylebone flat, never inviting anyone in because they might ask to use the bathroom - 'I can't stand the idea of another bottom on my loo.'It was as a comic actor and raconteur that Williams will remain famous. His 40-year list of comedy credits reads like a Who's Who of groundbreaking hits: Hancock's Half Hour; Beyond Our Ken; Round the Horne, and for 20 years was a mainstay of BBC radio's Just A Minute. But it is for his 26 appearances in the Carry On films for which Williams will always be remembered. He was, as one critic recalls, 'a cross between a dowager duchess and a wasp with adenoids'. Based on previously unpublished material and interviews, Stop Messin' About not only records Williams' career, it also uses memories and anecdotes from scores of his friends and colleagues to examine a lonely, tortured and frequently hilarious private life.
