Kenneth Williams was a nasty little man. I've never felt it neccessary to record this opinion, for his capacity to do real harm was limited by a personality that evoked only transient belly laughs. In recent weeks, however, there have been television appreciations of Williams as if his was a major thespian talent sadly unfulfilled. Last Monday on BBC2 someone said that Williams was always receiving scripts that were an insult to his intelligence. That's hard to visualise.

The Carry On films were his forte. I appreciate the bawdy but the best requires subtlety. The Carry On capers have none. No nuances. All balls, tits, and single entendres. They are naughty seaside postcards transposed for the silver screen. Williams contributed a braying laugh, flaring nostrils, a set of hyperbolic facial expressions, and a grotesque campness that must have reinforced the prejudices of all viewing homophobic nuts. Yet some people are talking as if he was some kind of unfulfilled English Walter Matthau!

I once met Kenneth Williams, in rather unusual circumstances. Michael Parkinson made mention of this meeting in the BBC programme mentioned above. It happened like this. Early one week, I got a phone call from Michael at the shipyard in Clydebank. He asked if I had seen his show on Saturday evening. I hadn't. He explained that Williams had been one of his guests and towards the end of the programme had made a scathing attack on trade unions. Michael described his comments as crap. This caused a bit of a stooshie.

Over the weekend Williams was demanding that he be given an entire Parkinson Show to debate and defend his ''crap''. The BBC rightly conceded but insisted that someone should defend trade unionism. Mike wanted me to do it. I was due to speak at a public meeting in Fairfield Hall, Croydon, on the Friday evening, with meetings all day Saturday and Sunday in London. Add a major network, the biggest viewing UK television programme that was being hyped up as a kind of shoot out at the OK Corral showdown, and it was becoming a very heavy weekend for me. I had sworn to doctors in Glasgow that I would take things easier. They were bound to hear of, if not see, The Parkie Show, and I would get pelters on my return.

But Michael Parkinson was getting stick for his outburst, and by then I was a pal. He's one of the good guys. One of the finest professionals to grace British television. His dad was a Yorkshire miner who got the black dust and left his native roots to work in Morris Cowley, Oxford. Once at a BBC reception he told me that Michael had been a disappointment. When I asked why, he replied; if he had stuck to cricket he might have been No 3 for Yorkshire and England. Compared to that prospect, any other kind of success was failure. In the glitter and false glitz of the occasion the old man's down-to-earth values were like a breath of fresh air.

After the meetings on Saturday I was taken by car to the studios and allocated a dressing room where sandwiches and coffee were provided. Sleep was out the question. I've never mastered the art of sleeping in small doses. But was happy to settle for lying back, relaxing with eyes closed, trying to think without anxiety. I was refreshed and shaving when Michael knocked on the door. He was very anxious. The flak had obviously been more severe that I had thought. I started getting anxious for Michael.

I didn't know Kenneth Williams, he hadn't really impinged on my consciousness. He was right-wing in politics and hostile to trade unionism, that was clear. But I've liked people who disagreed with me and have disliked others who have agreed with me. Unanimity in itself has no virtue. There is, after all, something unanimous about death. On the other hand life and dissent are indivisible. Kenneth had first of all to explain his position. He had demanded the programme. I hadn't been involved in the previous shebang. Michael's role was to haud the jaikets. As Williams spoke I was shocked not at his views but at the intellectual superficiality of his arguments.

There was something else, his ignorance was compounded by arrogance. There were asides that were potentially mean and carping. I decided to let him go on and on. Not to interrupt. Not to respond to his questions except in a few terse words. Let him rant on. Give him enough rope etc. My failure to respond was construed as weakness. His supporters in the studio audience clapped and mocked my refusal to elaborate in replies. I was listening to his case and would respond in due course, was my attitude. His rantings got wilder, his arguments weirder. He didn't like sick people or the mentally handicapped, he told us. He was exposed as a nasty little man, an intellectual pigmy, floundering in a hole he had dug for himself.

The studio audience, that the BBC ensured was 75% on his side because it believed that he was incapable of sustaining an intellectual argument for an hour, turned against him. One young mother of a mentally handicapped child gave him a roasting from the floor. At the end the audience were booing him. As the credits went up on the screen someone from his agency came on to the stage to get him off, muttering loudly, ''this is the last chat show for you''. Kenneth Williams was a bully. Cruel. Insensitive. And a 22-carat bampot. There are many such monsters in show business.

I did a chat show series for Grampian. One of my guests was Roy Castle who had been a feed for Jimmy James whom I rated a comic genius. The act was a comic trio, with Roy and another feed Eli. James played a drunk with an Anthony Eden hat and a cigarette that went from one end of his mouth to the other. As the three of them surrealistically conversed their heads would go in and out in imminent danger of a collision that never happened but added a frisson to the proceedings. After the programme Roy told me of his experience at Bernard Manning's Club when he topped the bill. At the finale Manning came on stage, grabbed Roy by the arm and told the audience what his fee was. He then proceeded to count it out note by note into Roy's hand. Castle was a multi-talented, nice, vulnerable, gentle man. Why didn't you kick him in that man's tender spot, I asked, though it was actually phrased more indelicately.

He couldn't. It was not in his nature.

Hollywood director and anti-Semite Howard Hawks mercilessly bullied Lauren Bacall when she was a teenage newcomer to the big time. When I asked her why no-one had objected in a Jewish-owned studio, the reply implied that his movies made money, and that was all that mattered. The monsters are seldom exposed by show business itself. In fact they're often honoured. Is this because they're too numerous, too powerful, or both?

There's is no business like show business, except modern politics. Politicians read speeches written by someone else. So do actors at the Royal Shakespeare. Spin doctors produce shows called party conferences, photo opportunities, press conferences. There are many people in show business that are genuinely talented and dedicated. But the business encourages narcissists. Our political leaders are becoming increasingly Caeserean. Personal pronouns abound in their every utterance. If Kenneth Williams had become a party leader his idiosyncrasies would have gone unnoticed.