The battle of Little Britain
Explosive backstage rows. Seething jealousy over their very different fortunes. A candid new book by Matt Lucas gives a shocking insight into what he REALLY thinks about his ex-comedy partner David Walliams . . .
Walliams wealthy? ‘He can probably buy his own jet, decked out in pink’
They even fell out over Maltesers
THE acidic American writer Gore Vidal once complained: ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.’ And it’s especially true of comic double acts. Every triumph showered on David Walliams is eating up Matt Lucas inside.
The two were once equals on Little Britain, the scabrous TV sketch show that won three Baftas and launched a live stage show so successful, it earned an entry in the Guinness World Records book.
But the two have never been more distant, as he reveals in a memoir, Little Me: My Life From A-Z, that uncovers their explosive backstage fights as well as the manic performances that made them, briefly, the most celebrated comedy duo in the country.
The book opens with an ominous splash of vitriol. ‘I know things that would ruin people’s careers,’ he mutters in the introduction. ‘I certainly know things that would finish mine.’
He warns readers that they’ll have to pay attention to hints and asides, if they want the juiciest gossip. ‘I’m not looking to burn bridges,’ he adds. ‘You might have to read between the lines here and there. If I spill all the beans, then no one will trust me, no one will hire me.’
At 43, his career is hobbling along and he needs to keep working. As Lucas says, it’s a short step from a stint in Doctor Who’s Tardis, which he completed this year, to a humiliating spell in the Celebrity Big Brother house, which he ardently wishes to avoid.
The result is an autobiography that tries to wear a civilised face, but cannot resist sticking in the knife. ‘Walliams has now sold so many children’s books,’ he snipes, ‘he can probably buy his own private jet, all decked out in pink, with a river inside it for him to swim up’ — a swipe at the fame Walliams acquired when he swam the Channel and, later on, the length of the Thames.
That feat, which boosted Walliams out of the comedy leagues and into the superstar A-list, also comes in for some snide mockery. Lucas is at pains to point out that he’s gay, that he’s always been gay, and that he has never slept with a woman. But when his comedy partner was making headlines with his charity swim from England to France, Lucas confesses he was seriously tempted to steal some thunder: ‘I posited the idea of auctioning off my heterosexual virginity. And I was only half joking.’
Speculation has always surrounded the sexuality of Walliams, a man with a taste for glamorous girlfriends who also delights in his ambiguous image — his own autobiography was titled Camp David.
Lucas is happy to stoke that controversy, by revealing that when they first met at theatre school in the early Nineties, Walliams liked to scandalise: ‘He’d think nothing of going out for the night in a skirt, black lipstick, fingernails painted and a clip in his hair, often with his then-girlfriend Katy on his arm. He revelled in the shock he created. I thought he was nuts. He once told an interviewer he’d like to live the last ten years of his life as a woman and I’m not entirely sure he was joking.’
The two men were genuine friends once. When they first met, Walliams bowled Lucas over with his Frankie Howerd impression. He was less impressed by Matt’s lukewarm attempt at Jimmy Savile.
They took a show to the Edinburgh Fringe, showcasing comic creations such as Sir Bernard Chumley, an amiable buffer with a short fuse, and ResErection The Christian stripper.
Walliams played a psychopathic prisoner on the run who had a dreadful line in sexist jokes and one of the double act’s earliest catchphrases: ‘Nice one lads, sorry women!’
A typical gag ran: ‘What’s the difference between a radical feminist and a bin-liner? A binliner gets taken out once a week! Nice one lads, sorry women!’
The show attracted the attention of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, who invited Lucas to play a giant baby in a pink romper suit, keeping score on their panel game Shooting Stars.
It was a tough introduction to TV: not only were Reeves and Mortimer notoriously unpredictable performers, but the director insisted on filming Lucas’s contributions at the end of the day, when the guests had gone and a tired audience was ready to shuffle home. It brought him a first taste of fame, though, aged just 21.
The day after the show launched, Lucas was on the escalator at Camden Town Underground station when a shout startled him. A man was frantically pointing: ‘TV! I saw you on TV!’
This success was slow to spread to the double act with Walliams. They landed a series of ten-minute comic shorts, called Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes: one TV critic sniffed that the BBC would be better off screening ten minutes of silence, in memory of their careers.
Undeterred, they kept inventing comic characters together, such as Emily ‘I’m a Lady’ Howerd — inspired by Walliams’s penchant for cross-dressing — and Andy and Lou, the spoilt man faking disability in his wheelchair and his clueless carer.
The idea for the ill-educated teenager Vicky ‘Yeah-But-No-ButYeah’ Pollard came from a short film Lucas made at university, interviewing members of the public in Bristol’s Broadmead shopping centre.
One teenage boy had a West Country accent so thick and inarticulate that the comedians couldn’t resist imitating him — and, along the way, turning him into a truculent woman.
The turning point came with the notion of linking their sketches via a portentous voice-over by a theatre luvvie. They settled on either former Doctor Who actor Tom Baker or Harold Pinter: the former agreed to do it, before they could even ask the playwright.
After a brief stint on radio, the characters transferred to TV, first on BBC3 and then, when ratings rocketed, to BBC1.
By the third series, they were drawing 12 million viewers and the show was a cultural phenomenon. Though some critics found the humour unbearably coarse, others applauded the return to traditional comedy of a kind not seen since the Dick Emery era.
Cashing in with a national tour in 2005, the duo were amazed when 250,000 tickets sold out overnight. They ended up playing to 800,000 people in 250 shows, many of them arenas so vast that they couldn’t hear the audience laugh.
To help with the timing of the punchlines, they rigged up microphones around the auditoriums, to pick up the reactions.
That tour took its toll. Walliams and Lucas hadn’t performed live for eight years. The most sophisticated element of their previous show had been a gag where all the lights went out. When they came back on, the audience discovered Walliams and Lucas apparently engaged in a sexual act. It was crude in more ways than one.
By contrast, Little Britain Live featured aerial stunts on wires, endless rapid costume changes and mountains of prosthetics. The two men demanded separate
‘I wouldn’t make that show now. It’d upset people’
dressing rooms but found they had to prepare together before every show, just to cope with all the technical issues each night.
Inevitably, they started getting on each other’s nerves.
Disputes started over silly things, such as Walliams’s insistence that jumbo packs of Maltesers should be provided by the promoter at every venue. Lucas, a connoisseur of cheap chocolate, objected — there were much better choices than Maltesers, he felt.
The tensions came to a head in Oxford, a few nights before a Comic Relief special that meant even more rehearsals and difficulties.
The sketch that provoked the bust-up saw them as Judy and Maggie, two ladies of the Women’s Institute who vomited uncontrollably at the mention of lesbians. Inevitably, the ladies shared a passionate on-stage kiss.
Lucas accused Walliams of failing to shave every day: it was inconsiderate, he said, because his stubble was giving him a painful rash.
Walliams retorted it couldn’t possibly be painful — ‘uncomfortable’ at worst. The argument escalated into a screaming match, both men hurling foul-mouthed insults at each other.
They calmed down and made their peace before the curtain went up, but it is clear from the precision of Lucas’s description that he hasn’t forgotten a word of it. Another explosive row split the partnership further at the end of an Australian tour.
They struggled on, with an American version of Little Britain and a lamentable airport sitcom called Come Fly With Me, but the damage was done.
At the same time, Lucas was plunged into the worst crisis of his life, when he discovered that his partner Kevin McGee was hiding a drug addiction.
The couple had celebrated a civil ceremony in 2006, one that had divided Lucas’s Jewish family: his older brother Howard declared he would not attend because he ‘didn’t hold with that kind of thing’ — before reconsidering, and making a heartfelt speech at the reception.
It may seem hard to believe that McGee was able to conceal a serious drug problem so well that Lucas suspected nothing, but the comedian is an innocent where illegal substances are concerned: he has never tried cocaine or LSD, he says, and rarely even touches alcohol.
Within 18 months of the ceremony, McGee was in rehab, where he announced the relationship was over. Eighteen months after that, McGee killed himself.
This part of his life, Lucas says, is a blur: ‘I guess I was too busy drowning to take anything else in.’ But he also admits that he discovered the gay dating app Grindr, and used it to embark on an orgy of sexual excess ‘that would put Casanova to shame’.
It’s tempting to read these revelations as symptoms of extreme showbiz self-absorption. Lucas tries to maintain a pleasant mask, but it’s obvious that he’s his own favourite subject.
Even his mother, he confesses, gets fed up of him talking about himself. An impression slowly builds that throughout his life Lucas has left a trail of people who don’t like him very much. While playing Doctor Who’s companion Nardole this year, he amused himself by making deliberately impossible and pointless demands on the ‘go-fers’ or errand boys. One typical request was ‘eleven bottles of Dettol and a peanut’.
He is also dangerously thin-skinned.
When he arrived at the Doctor Who set for the first time, a wideeyed junior stage hand asked him if he was ‘excited’. Lucas bristled: did the youth suppose this was his first time in a TV studio?
But he can also reveal an appealing vulnerability.
He lost his hair aged six, waking up one day to find clumps on the pillow. Within days, he was pulling out the last tufts to impress his friends.
Doctors at first attributed the illness to the trauma of a car accident two years earlier, but decades later he was told by a specialist that his alopecia was probably due to an over-active immune system: his body had ‘rejected’ his hair.
From the age of six, though, he felt the world saw him as a hairless freak. Friends and strangers alike called him ‘Baldy’ or ‘Slaphead’.
In the school dining hall, an older girl told him that he was bald because he had leukaemia and was going to die.
His father bought a bottle of patent hair restorer made from seaweed, and kept rubbing it into little Matt’s scalp until his own hands came out in a rash.
Acupuncture was tried, before the boy was eventually sent to school with a wig. It’s hard to imagine a worse humiliation for a child.
Unable to cure his son’s baldness, John Lucas revealed his own secret shame: he too was bald, and had been since he was 13. He showed young Matt how his toupee peeled off. Aghast and delighted, the boy promised to tell no one — then ran to school and spread the gossip throughout his class.
John Lucas had an even worse revelation to follow. Divorced from Matt’s mother, he had his sons to stay most weekends, and one day casually remarked that he was involved in a court case: some business colleagues claimed he owed them money, but it was ‘nothing to worry about’.
A few days later, Matt’s mother Diana sat him down and explained his father had been sent to Wandsworth prison, with a nine month jail sentence for fraud.
The shame of it hurt Matt as much as the shock of being unable to visit his father, until a transfer to an open prison came through.
These candid confessions do not necessarily make the spiky, acerbic Lucas any more likeable, but they do help to explain why he is so frequently defensive. Life has hurt him badly. It’s natural to lash out before he can be hurt more.
All this is little comfort for fans hoping to see a revival of Little Britain. Lucas says he is ‘aware’ that people want to see the duo reunited, and says he can ‘respect’ that. He feels they ‘made magic’ together, and wonders if it isn’t better to leave it in the past.
However, in an interview last week, Lucas said he would not make jokes about transvestites and would avoid playing black characters if he remade Little Britain.
He said: ‘I wouldn’t make those jokes about transvestites. I wouldn’t play black characters. Basically, I wouldn’t make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now.
‘Society has moved on a lot since then and my own views have evolved. There was no bad intent there — the only thing you could accuse us of was greed. We just wanted to show off about what a diverse bunch of people we could play.’