Free Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 by Danny Baker

at the top of this chapter was that, despite my apparently glitzy job, we were still living on the Silwood Estate where I’d spent my entire life. Indeed, from our front room, I looked straight down on to my mum and dad’s flat in Debnams Road. But now Wendy and I wanted to start a family – couldn’t wait – and both of us realized that, lovely in design though our place in the sky was, losing crates of milk in those lifts would be as nothing to the thought of chasing up and down the stairs after a runaway baby in a pram. Therefore we decided to buy a house. The only problem was, we had not a single shekel in savings and neither of us – nor anyone in our extended families – had a clue how you went about implementing such a crackpot decision.
    Thank God then, for Carry On star Kenneth Williams.
    Veterans of these tales will know that the universe has been terrifically, almost perversely, kind in laying fate’s fast track before the locomotive of my life and, inevitably, here we go again. Because when I examine the extraordinary circumstances that led us to suddenly owning a beautiful Victorian house bordering on a lovely London park, it really is Kenneth Williams that I should thank first for making it possible. We will come to that fortuitous whim of the cosmos presently, but first here’s how I came to meet the brilliant public persona and private man of letters in the first place.
    A feature of the short filmed items that peppered the Six O’Clock Show was that they usually had a well-known face pop up at somepoint to give the package a bit of a boost. In the voice-over I would say something like:
    ‘Another person who remembers the war-time blackout beetroot thief of Balham is actor Donald Sinden. He recalls one night when he almost came face to face with the purple-fingered fiend  . . .’
    Upon which Sinden, voice rich as a plum cake, would give us a juicy sound bite from his ‘childhood memories’.
    We found most celebrities would rattle off a bit of overheated hogwash for us, provided we sent a car and offered expenses – particularly if they were currently appearing in an underperforming farce at the Whitehall Theatre. We would show them walking past some obviously placed posters for this doomed production seconds before they coughed up the necessary light anecdote and thus show-business honour was satisfied all round. Nowadays every branch of the media is so stuffed with monotone-grey lunatics whose sole job is to make sure nobody is falsifying anything that even fanciful stories about wartime beetroot thieves would be decried as the greatest deception since Watergate. Consequently nobody in broadcasting has much fun any more and rotten plays featuring nudists in suburbia close months before they otherwise might have done.
    During the very first series of SOCS , the star-turn on a piece I was fronting was to be Kenneth Williams – a prospect that thrilled me even more than the thought of palling about with Frank Zappa. Some of my more hipster friends might find that hard to understand, so let me explain. One was Frank Zappa. The other was Kenneth Williams. And there you have it in a nutshell. Even in terms of songs listened to and LPs bought – a process by which I weigh most things in my life – I was a fan of Kenneth Williams long before the Mothers of Invention advised me that all the smart set were doing sardonic these days. His album On Pleasure Bent was a delight I had learned by heart since it first popped up in the Spa Road record library just a cat’s whisker before the summer of love changed my shirt colours from pale to neon, although rather presciently it did have a psychedelic cover. Two songs in particular on the album left their mark: ‘Above All Else’ – a yearning lilt worthy of Noël Coward that told thestory of how a computer fell in love with a weighing machine – and the raucous rasp of ‘Boadicea’,
    So if you look around the place
and see a Roman nose upon an