With Matt Lucas back on the box with Pompidou and David Walliams rarely out of the limelight it seems like a good time to revisit this interview. I spoke to the duo for the Reader's Digest in 2007 just as Little Britain was going stratospheric. We met in a Greek restaurant in East London but the lunch was very rushed as they had an important meeting at BBC TV Centre, which was in West London in those days. I shared a cab with them across town and we continued the interview in transit. They were both very good company. David Walliams had sea bass. Matt Lucas paid for the cab. Look out for David Walliams doing Lou and Andy with Stephen Hawking on Comic Relief.
Little Britain isn’t just a comedy programme – it’s a phenomenon. From its humble start on radio in the UK in 2001, the sketch show has spawned three hit TV series, three million DVD sales, three Bafta awards, countless catchphrases and a range of merchandise that includes talking character dolls, greetings cards and nightwear.
It has transformed its creators, David Walliams, 35, and Matt Lucas, 32, into wealthy household names. The road to fame has been long andwinding, however. Lucas and Walliams first met in 1990 at the UK’s National Youth Theatre. Lucas is a business consultant’s son, Walliams is the son of a transport engineer. A shared love of cult comedy show Vic Reeves Big Night Out forged their friendship and soon they started writing and performing comedy together.
Their first show, Sir Bernard Chumley and Friends, went to the Edinburgh Festival in 1995 and toured Britain in 1997. Lucas’s talents were spotted by his heroes Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer; in the late 1990s he gained cult recognition on their BBC game show Shooting Stars. Walliams, meanwhile, had a number of small TV appearances.
They teamed up again for Rock Profiles, a series of spoof documentaries about rock stars (including Elton John). Then characters such as Dafydd, “the only gay in the village”, delinquent Vicky Pollard, and carer Lou and his not-really-disabled charge Andy began to take shape.
Reader’s Digest caught up with the duo for an interview before their record 35-night stint at London’s 3700-seat Hammersmith Apollo last year, part of a UK Little Britain tour that sold more than 800,000 tickets. While their characters may go around vomiting, insulting fat people and committing petty crime, Walliams and Lucas in person are charming and happy to chat about the tour and their future plans.
RD: You’ve played more than 140 shows in the past year and face another 70 more. Is touring fun or exhausting?
Lucas: It has been gruelling, but it helps that we get on very well. We’re very close because we’ve shared a lot of strange experiences in the past few years – mad things like the fact that we now need security guards.
Walliams: Matt and me maybe have one drink [after a show]. We have to protect our voices. But being onstage isn’t boring. We have fun every night – we have to or the show wouldn’t work.
RD: How does the live performance differ from the TV programme?
Walliams: Each sketch is different every time. There’s a lot of improvisation, particularly when things go wrong or we forget our lines.
Lucas: Some of our smaller characters become bigger onstage. Des Kay, the former children’s TV entertainer who now works in a hardware superstore, had only a tiny part in the TV series but he comes into his own on tour because he gets audience members onstage to help him perform magic tricks.
Read more of the interview here
