CityLife

Interview: Robin Sebastian

Robin Sebastian

Though Robin Sebastian has been professionally impersonating legendary comedic actor Kenneth Williams on the stage, the origin of that impersonation lies at various London drinks parties.

“I would be a wine waiter and I think [I did it] just to try and make people laugh.

“I wasn’t actually pretending to be Kenneth Williams – it would just kind of come out, mucking around and flirting with people and getting people another bucket of champagne and it all sort of went from there,” he confesses.

Sometime later it was serendipitous for the actor that the Kenneth Williams role in Round The Horne Revisited – the stage version of the classic Sixties radio series Round The Horn – came up.

“My agent said well you ought to go for it. So that’s what I did and got it straight away, which was lovely, doesn’t happen very often.”
Round The Horne Revisited ran in theatres for several years and now the same team have moved on to create a stage version of the follow up radio series Stop Messing About.

“Essentially, it is like watching two episodes, two recordings of Stop Messing About. It looks very, very similar to Round The Horne Revisited,” Robin says.

The original radio series of Stop Messing About was created following the death of Kenneth Horne, the eponymous member of the Round The Horne team, when writers Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke decided to carry on the format without him.

“They had all these skits to use so they reformatted it and made the show called Stop Messing About and Kenneth Williams became the anchor man.

“They adapted it for the rest of the cast which were, like Round The Horne, Hugh Paddick and the announcer Douglas Smith. But instead of having Betty Marsden it had Joan Sims, who of course was great mates [with Williams] from the Carry On days.”

You may question how relevant a 40-year-old comedy script can be today, but there’s little doubt that it still works.

“This was a precursor to Monty Python and as a result it has followed on to The Fast Show.

“When we were in the West End, Johnny Depp came to see us because he’s a great fan of The Fast Show.

Robin adds: “He’d heard that we were the roots of it all and that was fantastic, people of his calibre turning up is quite amazing.

“It was really anarchic and marvellous wordplay, a lot of stuff is corny but a lot is very saucy as well; it’s got a bit of everything. It’s just a very pleasurable evening frankly,” he says.

Continued interest

For Robin himself, it is the kind of comedy he grew up with. Particularly Kenneth Williams’ work in the Carry On films.

“I remember the first Carry On film I ever saw was Carry On Cowboy; then I used to love Carry On Screaming as well,” Robin recalls.

He adopts Williams’ voice to exclaim his famous line from the film, “Frying tonight! I love all that sort of thing.

“At school our music teacher didn’t really like playing us music so he had a record of one of the characters from Round The Horne, Rambling Sid Rumpo (played by Williams), who was a wandering folk singer who sings stuff in a contrived language that’s very rude.

“So I got to learn those songs when I was 11 years old. I didn’t actually know what Round The Horne was,” he laughs.

Though Williams died over 20 years ago, there is continued interest in his work and in his life, particularly as his diaries revealed a lonely figure who may well have committed suicide due to persistent illness.

Sebastian has other thoughts about Williams though.

“Funnily enough, speaking to close friends of his, most people don’t think he committed suicide. People love to have this comic tragic character, like Frankie Howerd, ‘oh tragic, closet homosexuals’ or whatever it is and they’re all totally miserable.

“There’s a biography (on Williams) coming out this year and the author’s got access to all the diaries rather than the edited highlights and apparently the image of him is far brighter than you might imagine. I don’t think he was nearly as gloomy a character as people say.”

But ultimately, it is Williams’ comedy performances that Sebastian has concentrated upon as his inspiration rather, than the biographical detail.

“I’m much more interested in the lighter side of things. I wanted to replicate and work on the way he said things particularly in the show.

“I find it very annoying when you go and see a show and it’s a tribute act or it’s a band playing their well known hits and they don’t play it like you remember, they play it slightly differently.

“So I try to make it as accurate as I can by listening to the original recordi­ngs rather than reading his back history.”

Stop Messing About: The Kenneth Williams Extravaganza is at The Lowry from March 17 to 20, 2010.