INFAMY! INFAMY!

My name is Christopher Stevens. I'm a journalist and author, living in Bristol, England. This is assorted bric-a-brac connected to my celebration and anthology of Galton & Simpson, THE MASTERS OF SITCOM, and my authorised biography of the wonderful Kenneth Williams, BORN BRILLIANT My books: click here

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Love a bit of Drag! ;)

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Life on Earth with David Attenborough – is this the greatest TV show ever made? I think so!  Here's my list of the all-time 50 most influential television series in today's Daily Mail, including Downton Abbey, Dr Who and Fawlty Towers... but what have I missed?

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A door handle that looks like Kenneth Williams. Here, I say!

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I'm interviewing Michael Palin, as part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas, next month. We'll be talking about diaries... he's published two volumes of extracts from his, and wonderfully entertaining they are.

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It's Kenneth Williams's birthday today – he'd be 87. A performing genius – and a whizz on the typewriter too. Friends used to tell him he'd make someone a marvellous secretary.

Photo from the Radio Times.

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Kenneth & Dilys.

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Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques ride a bike.

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Peter Cook meets the Burtons, during the US tour of Beyond The Fringe, c. 1962. Doesn't Richard look pleased?

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Don't Panic!! Here's my tribute in today's Daily Mail to Clive Dunn, who played Lance-Corporal Jones in Dad's Army. 

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Carry on Teacher (1959)

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Fly Me To The Moon is the fanzine of Middlesbrough FC, and Mustapha Carayol is a nippy winger. 

Kenneth Williams enjoyed playing football, when he was a boy. His nose was broken during a game when he joined the Army in 1944 – that's how he got his distinctive nostril flare.

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"He's been having rather a lot of trouble with his teeth. TS Eliot, of course... not Plato."

Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller in Beyond the Fringe, as two Oxbridge philosophers discussing the hows and whys.

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Max Bygraves, Bernard Bresslaw and Tony Hancock, backstage at the Royal Variety Performance in the late 50s.

From my profile in the Daily Mail of Bygraves, who died on Saturday: "His life has echoes of a Dickens novel – the poverty, the success and the heartlessness exaggerated almost beyond caricature."

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"Oh hello... I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy" – The catchphrase that introduced Hugh Paddick as Jules and Kenneth Williams as Sand every week, in Round The Horne. 

Gawd knows what they're doing outside the Equadorian embassy – it's not as if it's the Marine Commando club, Paddington.

via @Brendan_Surrey