Kenneth Williams

Kenneth Williams' most memorable moments

King of the Carry On: Kenneth Williams' most memorable moments, 25 years on from his death.

It's hardly a dream line-up to kick off the new series of the Frank Skinner-steered Room 101: Reggie Yates, Miranda Hart and John Craven. It's a kind of post-Cameron vision of Middle England - a well-spoken young black man, a well-spoken, sexually unthreatening woman and a well-spoken John Craven, the Hawkshead catalogue of broadcasting.

Predictably, none of this lot has anything much to get worked up about: it's difficult to imagine any of them getting worked up about much ever, but really it's the format that's at fault. Room 101 doesn't work as a panel show: it needs individuals to warm to their theme, then accidentally-on-purpose reveal a colossal, Kenneth Williams-style inner Looney Tunes life. It also leaves Skinner with little to do, though he does manage to get in a decent gag about the Nazis to remind people that there are whole dark volumes of his comedy that rarely get opened these days, especially on the BBC.

I had seen the hat before, I was sure of it. Mr Khan's, that is, from Citizen Khan. So I Googled it and sure enough, it was the very same hat worn by the Asian man in Mind Your Language - not the one with the turban but the other one who smiled unctuously and shook his head from side to side every time he spoke. Mr Khan didn't shake his head in the same way, but he may as well have done, and he certainly wore the same hat, which must have been gathering dust in ITV's costume cupboard since the late 1970s, before being taken up now, three decades later, by the BBC.

In fact, the whole show seemed like it was stuck in a 1970s time warp. If the BBC's billing of it as the channel's first British Muslim comedy series had intended to give it some edge, this first episode quickly dispelled the spin. There was even a mention of Mr Mainwaring, from Dad's Army. Perhaps the point was that Mr Khan, a pompous community leader from Sparkhill, in Birmingham, was stuck in the past, but did this mean the jokes had to be too?

It's not to say that it was bad comedy, it just wasn't new. The straight-faced homage to sepia-tinted shows was all too transparent. In a scene in which a rotund, lusty woman called Mrs Bilal cornered the quivering Mr Khan in an office, it looked as if she had been directed to play Hattie Jacques (in a headscarf) to his (multicultural) Kenneth Williams. The smutty last line, as Mr Khan bundled her into his car - "Mrs Bilal, get your hand off my gearstick" - might just as well have been written by the scriptwriter for Are You Being Served?.

There were small moments of originality, but sadly, these were just flashes (the British convert, Dave; the Somali man whose accent Mr Khan couldn't understand - "what's he saying?"); and the odd topical joke - after watching News at Ten, Mr Khan proudly announced: "Pakistan was mentioned seven times... two in a good way."

The characters - Mr Khan, his long-suffering wife, his favourite daughter, who donned a headscarf every time he came in the room but was secretly a party girl, and his other daughter, who was preparing for her Big Fat Asian wedding - were such clichés that they may as well have been dragged out of the same dusty costume cupboard as the hat. How far has this come since Goodness Gracious Me? Not far at all. How much more contemporary is it than East Is East, or Bend It Like Beckham? Less so. How much funnier? Same answer.

To help the audience figure out that this was a PAKISTANI family who acted in a very PAKISTANI way, there were PAKISTANI flags on every window. Mr Khan was a tight-fisted old sod who bought mountains of cheap toilet rolls from the Cash & Carry and watered down the washing-up liquid because he was PAKISTANI. Mrs Khan wiped down the plastic cover on the sofa to keep it looking new because she was PAKISTANI. And they were having a wedding in the local mosque because they were all PAKISTANI. Comedy doesn't have a duty to represent real people, but it does need to be funny, and while a family comedy requires a broad appeal, this is no reason to unspool recycled jokes that worked a treat 40 years ago.

One of the longest running comedies on Radio 2 has made its return for the Olympics, as David Quantick presented a guide to the games for people who may not know that much about it...

The Blagger's Guide to the Games is full of information and rapid fire gags, cut in with sound effects and music left, right and centre. This is a four-part series, so it's longer and more informative that The Sinha Games, and covers certain aspects of the games further in depth. For example, there's an entire section about the austerity games in 1948 (when London last held the event), as well as a gymnastics guide.

The main aspect of this programme, for those who haven't listened to previous editions of The Blagger's Guide, is that it's so full of gags and material that often you miss some bits and have to listen to it again. My highlight of the show was a sequence about the austerity games, which featured impressions of Ben Elton, Kenneth Williams and Michael McIntyre all rolling into one. Excellent.

However, in the same section I was less keen on the rationing routine which featured a Dad's Army skit between Lance Corporal Jones and Mrs. Fox after the end of the war. It wasn't so much the lack of humour that was the problem, but my own pedantry. I'm a huge Dad's Army fan, and I know that in the final episode Mrs. Fox becomes Mrs. Jones. But that's just me...

There's much to enjoy from The Blagger's Guide..., though it's one of those shows that needs your full attention.

For the non-sportive, David Quantick returned to Radio 2 to give us his Blagger's Guide to the Games. Finger poised above the effects button and daftness turned up to 11, Quantick initially seemed to be holding back his quick-fire mind to allow slower listeners to keep up. But five minutes in and we were back to his usual rat-a-tat gag-and-fact-packed action. Every aside was a gem ("Even though the war had ended three years ago - that's longer than the Saturdays' chart career - Britain was still full of austerity"). The show even bears another listen, so you can catch great jokes just tossed in, such as when a standup comic flips from Ben Elton to Kenneth Williams to Michael McIntyre mid-rant, with no explanation. Warning: all Blagger's Guides are a little like listening to a over-caffeinated, over-researched man-boy in the grip of quip mania but, as a lot of my conversations are like that, I approve.

Danny La Rue's life set for big screen

The life of variety show entertainer Danny La Rue is to be dramatised in a new film.

The BFI-funded screenplay has been written by Martyn Hesford, who created the BBC Four biopic Fantabulosa, about Carry On actor Kenneth Williams.

There's more than one queen in this town: just because there's a jubilee looming, it doesn't mean we should ignore all those who aren't 'Er Maj. So here's an enlightening documentary on how gay entertainers have fared in showbusiness during her reign. It kicks off in 1952, at a time when its subjects would have been termed "flamboyant", and follows how perceptions of homosexuality have changed over the years. Classic purveyors of camp comedy such as Kenneth Williams, Larry "Ooh, shut that door" Grayson and Danny La Rue are represented, so expect secrets and titters aplenty.

If I may say this without repetition, hesitation or deviation, a radio institution celebrates an anniversary on Monday as the splendid Nicholas Parsons introduces the panel show he has chaired since its inception in just a minute.

Doubtless the shades of such esteemed departed panellists as Clement Freud and Kenneth Williams will be issuing some hollow challenges from the wings as panellists Ross Noble, Jenny Eclair, Gyles Brandreth and Paul Merton are asked to pontificate on subjects given out in the original series back in 1967, from "Why I Wear a Top Hat" to "Knitting a Cablestitch Jumper".

30 things you didn't know about the Carry On films

Two decades after the last Carry On film was made, the uniquely British series of low-budget films continues to amuse viewers who weren't even born when Kenneth Williams's Caesar declared 'Infamy. Infamy'.

The Beeb's drama department has carved out a neat niche with its biopics of beloved British comedy stars: from Kenneth Williams and Tony Hancock to Frankie Howerd and Morecambe and Wise. This latest film, first shown on BBC Four in January, is a worthy addition. Gavin & Stacey's Ruth Jones stars in an acclaimed dramatisation of Carry On star Hattie Jacques's life. Though she played an austere matron on screen, Jacques's private life was actually rather racy. The story focuses on the early 1960s love triangle between Jacques, her chauffeur (Aidan Turner) and her husband, Dad's Army star John Le Mesurier (a heartbreaking turn from Cold Feet's Robert Bathurst) - whom she continued to love, even when she moved her toyboy into their bed. It's a bittersweet story, superbly acted, and followed by a repeat of Jacques's 1963 appearance on This Is Your Life.