Sewers of Paris: I was Quite Happy to be the Villain (Ep 374: Tork Shaw/Kenneth Williams)
Added 2022-02-10 17:01:02 +0000 UTCNext week would have been the 96th birthday of Kenneth Williams, an incredible British performer who hid queer culture in plain sight on the BBC back in the 1960s. For this week’s episode of The Sewers of Paris podcast, we’re diving all the way back into the archives to one of my very first episodes, a conversation with game designer Tork Shaw. Tork would listen to tapes of Kenneth Williams in the car with this family growing up, and he'd hear something of himself in the bookish, aristocratic, quick-witted gays like Kenneth Williams. Tork didn't quite fit in at school -- everyone around him was sporty and posh -- so he cultivated a caustic wit, modeled on the characters he heard, and despite being a small, unathletic kid, his classmates grew scared of him and he was voted "worst bully" in his class. But by the time he was teenager, he was feeling ready to set that aside. "I didn't want to be mean anymore," he said. "What happens if I let go of everything I've done in the past?"
