Walliams apology in row over ‘blackface’
LITTLE Britain stars David Walliams and Matt Lucas last night made a grovelling apology for using blackface on their BBC show.
The comics said it was ‘wrong’ that they portrayed other races on the sketch programme, and their follow-up series Come Fly With Me.
Their apology last night came several days after both shows were removed from UK streaming channels.
Posting the same message on Twitter at the same time, Britain’s Got Talent judge Walliams, 48, and Lucas, 46, wrote: ‘We have both spoken publicly in recent years that we played characters of other races. Once again we want to make it clear that it was wrong and we are very sorry.’
Little Britain, which first aired on BBC3 in 2003, was last week removed from streaming platforms Netflix, Britbox and BBC iPlayer over its controversial material, i ncluding Lucas’s depiction of a curvaceous
Thai mail- order bride, Ting- Tong, and Walliams’s character of Desiree DeVere, a black woman, whom he played in full blackface.
The shows have provoked criticism in the past but it was brought to the forefront once again following the Black Lives Matter protests across the globe. Walliams and Lucas have also come under fire from transgender rights activists over their ‘I’m a lady’ sketches, where the pair wore women’s clothes and facial hair.
Come Fly With Me was also taken off Netflix, but was not available on iPlayer.
Lucas has previously expressed regret about some of the content in the show. In a 2017 interview with the Big Issue, he said it was ‘lazy’ to ‘get a laugh just by playing black characters’.
He added: ‘If I could go back and do Little Britain again, 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.’