David Walliams discusses with YOUR EX’s Oliver Hall his bond with his Little Britain co-creator Matt Lucas, their controversies and his love of all things ‘gay’!
It’s 11.30pm at David Walliams’ London home when our Zoom cameras connect. Unsurprisingly, he’s somewhat sedate but extremely generous with his time, humble and fairly flirtatious.
“I would usually be tucked up by now… you’ve got me in a slightly delirious state, which is probably good because I’m basically going to be very unguarded and say some things that I’m going to regret terribly,” he confesses early on, before telling me, “You said ‘yes’ too quickly,” after he had charmingly credited Little Britain co-creator Matt Lucas for the show’s success.
As he tells me he would usually be sipping on cocoa at this hour, I note a glamorous-looking bar fridge stocked with champagne that sits behind him.
“The only reason there is champagne in there is because I never ever drink it,” he protests.
“I barely drink at all! So basically, when you come over and visit me, I’ll open the champagne. I will sip on the froth and then not drink anymore because I don’t like it. I don’t really like the taste of alcohol, and I’ve only been drunk twice in my life, and I didn’t enjoy it.”
Naturally, I have to enquire about these two occasions. He explains that one involved falling off a chair and farting as he hit the floor. The other led to vomiting out of a taxi window.
“People mainly drink to lose inhibitions, but I don’t really have any inhibitions!” he says with a smile.
That smile is particularly familiar. Now known to belong to one of the most prolific children’s authors of the last decade, a long-running judge on Britain’s Got Talent and, of course, one half of the duo that produced Little Britain, a defining comedy show of the early 2000s that defied how gay comedy characters had previously been portrayed in sitcoms. No longer were we being laughed at – we were laughing with everyone else.
“We felt that our characters were winners, and we were celebrating them,” David reflects.
“I’m glad it resonated with lots of people. When we went on tour, we were both thinking, ‘I wonder if our audience is just gay men.’ They were certainly the ones that had the front-row tickets, but the rest of the audience was very mixed, including kids. At the time, I felt there was something positive about the fact that kids and early teens were seeing gay characters on TV that were just being fun and positive and visible… I’m not trying to say the show’s profound, but it introduced some of those ideas into the mainstream, and hopefully it broke down some barriers for people.”
One of the most successful BBC comedies of its time, Little Britain, drew a massive worldwide audience, spawned American and Russian versions and produced vast quantities of merchandise, including charity singles and a video game.
But the show was not without controversy. In 2020, Little Britain (along with Lucas and Williams’ less-successful follow-up Come Fly With Me) was pulled from Netflix and the BBC’s own iPlayer for both Lucas and Walliams’ use of different ‘blackface’ characters. “[We] have both spoken publicly in recent years of our regret that we played characters of other races. Once again, we want to make it clear that it was wrong, and we are very sorry,” Walliams posted on Twitter at the time.
Two years later, the show returned to BBC iPlayer with the characters removed. The BBC stated, “Little Britain has been made available to fans on BBC iPlayer following edits made to the series by Matt and David that better reflect the changes in the cultural landscape over the last 20 years since the show was first made.”
Some viewers still took umbrage to characters like Andy Pipkin (who was pretending to have a disability) and cross-dressing character Emily Howard, who Walliams is quick to point out was referencing gender expression and not gender identity.
“We invented that character about 25 years ago. Culture moves – it develops, and that’s exciting. Some things feel less relevant, others resonate more, and you can’t foresee these things… You can’t think that in 20 years’ time someone’s not going to like this… New people come along. Their voices are heard. They find a new way of doing things, and older things are swept by the wayside. That’s inevitable,” he reasons.
Controversies aside, Little Britain remains one of the most popular and influential British comedies of this century, and Walliams is looking forward to reuniting New Zealand audiences with some of his characters when his ‘An Audience with David Walliams’ tour descends to our shores later this month.
“They won’t be cumming on stage,” he says with a wry smile, twisting my use of the word ‘coming’. “It’s not that kind of show, but a couple of characters will be appearing on stage. There’ll even be an interaction with Matt (Lucas) at a point in the show. He will be on the screen, so there’s lots of surprises.”
The Little Britain Live shows that Lucas and Walliams toured around the world ended up cementing the next stage of Walliams’ career, after meeting a fan who had dressed up as Emily Howard on his school’s dress-up day. Impressed with the boy’s bravery, Walliams was inspired to write a children’s book. “I thought maybe, instead of it just being something for fun, maybe this was something the boy needed to do.”
The Boy in the Dress became the first of over forty published children’s books that Walliams has penned – a venture that Matt Lucas recently suggested may have made more money than Little Britain itself.
How it all began:
Lucas and Walliams met, aged 17 and 20, at London’s renowned National Youth Theatre, doing a summer course that had helped birth the careers of star actors including Daniel Craig, Helen Mirren and Benedict Cumberbatch.
“What brought us together was just a shared love of watching comedy,” Walliams tells us. “I remember one boiling hot Saturday night in summer. I came around his house in North London, where he lived with his mum. We went down to the video shop, and we got this obscure British comedy film, Roy Chubby Brown’s UFO, which means ‘you fuck off’. It was this beautiful evening; the world was out having picnics, lying half-naked in the parks of London with a bottle of wine, and we were in, watching the one British comedy movie that neither of us had seen because we were curious about it. That’s who we were, nerds who love comedy, and in fact, we’re still just nerds who love comedy to this day!”
Walliams says the two never planned to work together but ultimately did due to their complimentary comedy skills and contrasting builds.
“Matt is a mesmerising performer, and if you’re going to work with someone, I always think, work with someone a lot more talented than you are because it’s going to bring out the best in you.”
Arguably, it was Lucas who played Little Britain’s most influential characters, like Daffyd, Andy and Vicky. Walliams acknowledges this and insists it was easy to set ego aside for comedic success.
“What Matt does with Vicky Pollard – no one else on Earth could do that! It wasn’t like we were competitive – because we were skilled in different ways. Obviously, I’ve got an ego because I’m a performer. But I wanted to bring what he was doing, quite rightly, to the fore – because it was so special. I liked nothing more than writing a sketch with him, even if I wasn’t going to be in it. What mattered was that we were coming together to make something that we both thought was funny and that we wanted to share with people.”
Their first gig was performed in a London community centre to a single-digit audience, but the two would go on to play sold-out arenas.
“None of this is foreseen. We didn’t really have set ambitions. We just saw these great comedians who were on the BBC, like the Young Ones, Not the Nine O’Clock News, Vic and Bob, and thought how amazing it would be to have our own show.”
Walliams’ best friend at high school, Robin (who he still describes as his best friend in the world), was gay, and the two had bonded over gay culture, from the bands they listened to to the films they watched, he tells us, recommending any readers who haven’t seen it yet to check out Fassbinder’s Querelle.
Matt Lucas was not out when he and Walliams first met, but in a recent interview, he has credited Walliams with teaching him to be fearless enough to come out to his mum. Lucas described the first time the two went to the theatre together. Walliams arrived wearing a dress, long black socks, a hair clip and makeup. Lucas said everyone on the London tube stared, but it ultimately taught him not to care.
“I could see that it was weighing on his shoulders, and I wanted to show him it’s fine. I’m going to put on a dress. I don’t care. I’m going to go to a gay club and dance all night. I mean, I’m camper than he is. He likes his football and is a big Arsenal fan… I’d rather go to a Kyle Minogue concert,” Walliams laughs.
He tells us his wardrobe was inspired by his then girlfriend and promptly pulls out his phone to show a picture of the two of them in their early twenties, heading out clubbing, wearing matching hot pink ensembles.
“I had a girlfriend who loved dressing up and going to gay clubs. We didn’t feel the need to be conventional, and we liked being fabulous. I felt really lucky, actually, because she never wanted to suppress that side of me – that flamboyance. So we took Matt a couple of times, but you find these things at your own pace,” he tells us.
In a 2013 interview with the Radio Times, Williams suggested he was pansexual but has not talked publicly about his sexuality in detail since.
“I suppose I always played with a lot of those things,” Walliams admits. “I’ve always been drawn to feminine things. I’ve never really felt macho, but I don’t want to lean into that ‘I’m a queer artist’ stuff, because it’s annoying when straight people say they’re queer because they wore some eyeliner once!”
However, Walliams confesses that few things make him happier than putting on a dress.
“I suppose I like being transformed. It’s fabulous when people dress up… I know people have lots of different reasons why they might want to do that. For me, it’s just exciting being able to express yourself in that way.”
It is now well past midnight in Walliams’ timezone, so I begin to wrap up. “Are you coming to my show?” he asks, following up with, “Will you come backstage?”
‘I’d love to,’ I assure him.
“Will you rush backstage afterwards to catch me in my underpants?” he interjects, adding, “Because that’s what I always do when I go to the theatre – if you get upstairs quick enough… I remember when I took my mum to see Jude Law in Henry V. You’ve never seen her go up those stairs so fast. When we got there, he said, ‘Sorry, I haven’t got my shirt on,’ and my mom went, ‘Well, don’t put it on on my account,’” he recounts.
I am belly-laughing as I realise Zoom is counting down to cut us off. This does not stop Walliams from continuing.
“I’ll have a bottle of champagne, a couple of glasses and just my underpants on!” he says with a wry smile as Zoom disconnects us.
David Walliams will perform an adults-only evening show (An Audience with David Walliams) and a family-friendly daytime show (David Walliams’ Book Show) on Saturday 28 September at Auckland’s Aotea Centre, on Monday 30 September at Wellington’s St James Theatre and Wednesday 2 October at Christchurch Town Hall. Visit tegdainty.com for tickets.
