Little Britain stuff

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Matt Lucas lands role in 'Misérables' special
By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent
3 June 2010
The Independent

A huge, one-off production of the popular musical Les Misérables is to be staged at the O2 Arena in London featuring the comedian Matt Lucas, it was announced yesterday.

Three different versions of the show will be performed in London during the same week for the musical's 25th anniversary – a theatrical first. Other names who will appear in the O2 Les Misérables show on 3 October include the opera star and Broadway performer Alfie Boe, Gary Barlow's protégée Camilla Kerslake, the pop star Nick Jonas and a cast of 300.

The show, which includes a variety of well-known numbers such as "I Dreamed a Dream" and "Do You Hear the People Sing?", first opened in October 1985 at London's Barbican. It will be the first time Lucas has returned to the stage since he pulled out of a West End play late last year following the suicide of his former partner Kevin McGee.

The comedian has previous experience of appearing in musicals, playing the role of Leigh Bowery in the Boy George show Taboo in 2002. For the O2 show he will take on the role of Thenardier, while Jonas – best known as one of the Jonas Brothers – plays Marius.

The performance will also feature members of the original 1985 cast, including Lea Salonga, as well as others who made their names through the show such as Norm Lewis, who appeared in the Broadway run. As well as the original production running at the Queen's Theatre, there is also a special 25th-anniversary production which is being staged at its original home, the Barbican, for a 20-night run.

Les Misérables became the longest-running West End musical in 2006 – two years after moving to the Queen's Theatre from the Palace Theatre, its home since December 1985. Earlier this year, it celebrated its 10,000th performance, and worldwide it has been seen by 56 million people. The West End producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh is developing a film version.

Tickets for the O2 show go on sale on 6 June.

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David Walliams the Bond Girl dishes on married life and his X Factor favourites
26th October 2010

He has become a household name dressing up as women for Little Britain, but comedian David Walliams realises it might be the most attractive trait. Asked what kind of husband he is, the funnyman, who wed model Lara Stone in May, he replied: 'One who likes to dress up as Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger. So probably not the ideal husband!'

The 39-year-old spoofs the 1964 James Bond film in a new photoshoot - is a fan of 007 movies, and reveals guests at his stag night sang songs from the films - 'Alan Carr did Goldeneye'. Of married life, Walliams says he is a 'bit neater' than his 26-year-old wife and is 'always picking up her shoes,' but concedes 'she's into cooking and things.'

The couple are huge fans of X Factor, the Little Britain star reveals in this week's issue of Heat magazine, and names Rebecca Ferguson as their favourite. 'We both love Rebecca,' he says. 'I said, "I'd like to bathe her," and Lara said, "We should put her to bed, tuck her in and read her a story!" She's so sweet. Every time Lara sees Rebecca on the show, she's like "She's so beautiful." She's kind of magical, really.'

He also compliments 17-year-old Cher Lloyd's talent, but worries for the over-28s. 'It's an extraordinary situation, your fate being in the hands of Louis Walsh,' he quips. Walliams has also found himself compared to axed Diva Fever member Josef Al-Smadi - or as the actor call him, 'the one with the floppy hair.' 'I saw him prancing around in his day-glo cycling shorts and I said to my wife, "I don't look like him do I?" and she said kindly, "No, my darling."'

Walliams is promoting his latest children's book Billionaire Boy. He says of writing his 'over the top' characters, 'You write something - a bit like the characters in Little Britain - and you think there'll never be anyone as over the top and grotesque as that, and then Chloe Mafia arrives on the X Factor and you think you haven't gone far enough.'

The comic says he had just met Dutch model Lara as he completed his second literary offering, Mr Stink, 'So I put her name in the book, which she liked.' Lara, who has fronted campaigns for Calvin Klein, Jean Paul Gaultier and H&M, even taught him some Dutch swear words for Billionaire Boy. She has also instilled some romantic sentiments into his vocabulary, teaching Walliams how to say 'I love you' - 'Ik hou van je.'

He says he doesn't mind others seeing his high fashion wife's nudity: 'She's beautiful, and it's lovely that other people see it as well.'

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That picture of him in gold on the bed is great!

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Just David Walliams
Katie Law
November 2nd 2010

David Walliams arrives at Soho House bang on time for our interview to promote Billionaire Boy, his latest children's book, just published, about a fat, rich 12-year-old boy who gets bullied at school. The publicist at HarperCollins has made it clear from the outset that this must be a “bookcentric” interview and that the 39-year-old, cross-Channel-swimming, cross-dressing Little Britain comedian-turned-superstar won't talk about some subjects, which I assume means life with his new wife, supermodel Lara Stone, her rehab for alcoholism and whether or not he's gay.

Still, without any prompting, while being photographed — in sober navy wool suit and open-necked pink shirt — Walliams launches into a gentle tirade against the journalist who has just written that at their May wedding (a lavish affair at Claridge's), “toasts were made with popcorn rather than champagne in deference to the bride's sobriety”.

“No, we didn't,” he exclaims, his face — which alternates between impassive composure when he's being serious and animated camp when he's not —lighting up. “It's totally made up. There were drinks. Yes, Lara doesn't drink but everyone else had them. And because of the way the internet works, it becomes, like, well some journalists — obviously not you — but some, they just copy as fact.”

Yet a moment later, he dismisses it as “harmless really”, indignant at the mistake but pleased at how many column inches he and his Dutch wife have been clocking up between them. Even the question of whether they want “gay babies” has been grabbing headlines.

Walliams doesn't express any preference himself but concedes that Stone — to whom he proposed marriage after a brief courtship and a string of relationships with some famously gorgeous laydees — has changed his life. “It's lovely now because I start to think about the future in a way I hadn't before. The future was always work. I like working but it's not nourishing in the way that being in love with someone is nourishing. It's a great thing being married and being able to have a discussion, like, you know, shall we have some children and when. You don't need to go out, a great night could be staying in watching The X Factor.”

Whether together or apart, at home in Belsize Park or out and about, London's hottest couple are everywhere. Earlier this year Stone signed a modelling contract with Calvin Klein for three of its labels and she is this month's Vogue cover girl, while Walliams has been gracing the nation's TV screens and billboards with co-star Matt Lucas in Little Britain mode for a big Nationwide Building Society ad campaign, billed “Proud to be Different”.

They have also just finished filming a new series for the BBC together called Come Fly With Me: six half-hour comic episodes, going out at Christmas, about life in an airport. Lucas and Walliams play about 20 characters each — from airline owner to lavatory cleaner. “It's exciting because it's a completely new chapter in our careers — a whole new world; there's no overlap with Little Britain in terms of characters.”

Both with Lucas, whom he originally met at the National Youth Theatre, and solo, Walliams anticipates a long career that extends far beyond Little Britain. “Look, we've made one successful comedy series together. That's good,” Walliams pauses, “but I don't think you can live your whole life on that.”

He'd like to work onstage again to recapture the success he had in 2008, playing in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land. “I got a real kick out of working with Michael Gambon in the West End.

Harold Pinter died during the time we were running. It was an incredible interlude in my life, where I was performing with one of the world's greatest actors who I've admired since I was a child, and meeting the world's greatest living (at the time) playwright. So it was like, how did that happen?”

Paradoxically, the man who is known for pushing boundaries and offending people in his comic sketches is almost reverential when talking about stage actors, and he clearly has a burning ambition and the potential to conquer stage acting.

“I'd love to do a play again and learn. I know I wasn't a skilled dramatic actor but I want to learn from the master. I went to see Simon Russell Beale the other night in Death Trap. If I got the chance to work with someone like him or Derek Jacobi or Judi Dench or Maggie Smith ...”

He trails off, lost in thought. Stage acting, he continues, is more challenging than anything filmed because “you're trying to formulate a performance that you're going to repeat night after night and there's a much longer rehearsal process.”

Surely it also requires a lot more physical stamina? “Well, it's not going down a mine, is it?” he chuckles. “Or swimming the Channel. That was hard work.” In fact the 2006 swim, which raised more than £1 million in aid of Sport Relief, was the toughest physical thing he's ever done.

“Training in the North Sea in December. Your body shakes uncontrollably from the cold, which makes it miserable. I do enjoy swimming now and yeah, I do exercise, but people think that because I did that one sporty thing I'm some sort of athlete. I get in a taxi and the driver says [Walliams's voice deepens] You doin' anything in the Olympics, David?...' I'd like to do something else like that but if you mark yourself out, you just get asked again and again. I could have failed to swim the Channel and I could now be the butt of jokes on panel shows. But to achieve something like that does make you more positive.”

For all his achievements and success — critical and material — Walliams seems surprisingly insecure, starstruck even by his own stardom. He appears to want to be liked, to have approval. When I tell him how much the jokes in Billionaire Boy made me laugh, he replies graciously and sincerely: “Oh thank you, that's a good start.”

He believes he would not have got the book deal or done a lot of other things, including sitting in this interview, had it not been for the success of Little Britain. “I suppose when it started on TV, that was a big throw of the dice for Matt and me ... I'm interested in what people think of my work and I read reviews. I'll read this interview and see if you liked me or not.”
He laughs but he's deadly serious.

For while Walliams may be quite svelte nowadays, he was once, and in some ways remains, that unconfident 12-year-old boy, Joe Spud, in Billionaire Boy, the fat kid with no friends who almost came last in the cross-country race at school and got laughed at by everyone else. He is also Dennis, the frock-wearing bully victim in his first book, The Boy in the Dress, just as he is Chloe, the lonely 12-year-old girl heroine in his second book, Mr Stink. You feel, and it's rather touching, that he can't quite believe how he got to be where he is: rich and famous, mates with the rich and famous.

Unlike billionaire's son Joe Spud, he had a suburban upbringing in Surrey. He went to the fee-paying Reigate Grammar, his late father was a civil engineer for London Transport and his mother was a laboratory technician at Sutton Grammar. Although he has a sister two years older, now a primary school teacher, Walliams describes his childhood as mostly solitary. “I liked spending time on my own with my imagination.”

Like Joe, however, Walliams has discovered that self-made wealth — he is reported to have earned £1.8 million so far this year — has its problems.

He says: “I wouldn't have written this book if I hadn't become wealthy and successful. Friends don't fall away but you notice people change in a slightly different way around you. You have a kind of power. It's weird.”

To date, the books, which are engagingly rude and funny in a Little Britain-lite kind of way, have only featured heroes who are 12. “It's a good age, the last age before you reach puberty. I think I'd find it too complicated to write about that experience, being, like, a teenager and, you know, having those kind of feelings.”

His first two books so far have sold about 140,000 copies and both have been nominated for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize. Walliams is delighted because it vindicates him as a writer.

“There's a credibility issue when you're already well-known and you write a book, because other people have degraded books by just putting their name to them but not actually having written it. Obviously I'm already a writer, so that's appropriate but in articles I often get lumped in with those people, like, celebrities Katie Price and David Walliams' ... but I've actually written it.”

As the interview ends, the publicist hands Walliams the latest copy of Heat magazine. In another publicity push for the book, Walliams has posed naked, blondly bewigged and painted in gold, apparently dead on a bed, Bond girl-style. Silence follows as he becomes utterly absorbed in reading his interview about “married life, his X Factor obsession and how to swear in Dutch”. I want to tell the publicist that it wasn't my fault we talked about all those other things.

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Little Britain author shunned by literary 'snobs'
November 16, 2010
smh.com.au

David Walliams, star of Little Britain, cross Channel swimmer, cross-dressing comedian, children's author and celebrity newlywed, is a tricky character. On one hand, he refuses - today, at least - to talk about his personal life and marriage to supermodel Lara Stone, 26.

"That's something that's not in the remit of this interview," he declares, when asked how married life is treating him. Fair enough. He's entitled to his privacy, even if he has talked at length about his and his young wife's life in a recent issue of Heat magazine.

When it comes to his books, Walliams, 39, does not like to be labelled a celebrity author lumped together with the likes of Katie Price, although being famous must surely not have harmed sales of his children's books or the promotion of his latest, Billionaire Boy.

He makes rare appearances on the literary festival circuit, having done Cheltenham Festival last year, and his first two books have been nominated for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, so it probably won't be long before he's a regular at literary events or has become a Booker judge.

"There's still some snobbery," he reflects. "Sometimes I'm linked as a celebrity author when newspapers write, 'Celebrity authors like Jordan and David Walliams ... ' Hang on! I've written a successful comedy show. I don't feel like I should be demoted to a celebrity author. I'm a celebrity because I'm a successful writer and actor. I wasn't on Big Brother."

There are those who would argue that there are lots of writers out there who haven't been published because their name isn't known. "But then I was at one point an unknown writer who was trying to get a comedy show on Radio 4, so I've been in that situation," he points out. "I don't feel like being an author is some career I shouldn't have had. I don't feel like a fraud. In the book publishing world, I would imagine that some of the more high-profile books end up paying for some of the less high-profile ones."

High profile he certainly is - he and his Dutch wife are all over the place, on adverts, magazine covers, in newspaper gossip columns. What does Lara think of his books? "She likes them - but I don't know if she'd say if she didn't like them," he laughs. "But I don't let people read the books until after they've gone to the publisher's, so it would be too late if she thought I ought to change something."

He reads his reviews and is quick to note that his two previous children's books, The Boy In The Dress and Mr Stink, were extremely well received. His third book, Billionaire Boy, aimed at nine-to-12-year-olds, is another entertaining and witty read about a fat, lonely 12-year-old, Joe Spud, the richest boy in the world.

The story follows his adventures at secondary school as he is bullied, finds a new pal and then dumps him for a pretty girl who isn't all she seems. It does, however, have a happy ending and an underlying moral that money doesn't buy happiness.

The book isn't autobiographical, says millionaire Walliams, but there are parts of it that are personal and he says he wouldn't have written it had he not become rich and famous and had the experience of how people's behaviour towards you changes when you become wealthy. And the message is important, he notes.

"It seems that kids are increasingly interested in money and fame. Things today can happen quickly through television. You could be completely unknown, then appear on Big Brother and two months later people know who you are and you can be making money out of magazines. Kids think that people can wave a magic wand and make you rich and famous."

Switching from writing for adults to writing for kids has been difficult, he admits. "Little Britain was a show meant for adults but kids liked it, just as I liked things when I was a kid that were a bit forbidden for me, like Not The Nine O'Clock News. It was a bit too rude and sometimes I'd be made to stop watching it because there was a joke about something I wouldn't understand. I know the children's books can't go to the places that Little Britain goes, but I still wanted them to have a sense of naughtiness and pushing the boundaries. They're a little bit rude but not terrible."

Walliams, whose late father was a civil engineer for London Transport and mother was a lab technician, grew up in Surrey and joined the National Youth Theatre, where he met Matt Lucas. It was the beginning of a long professional partnership.

As a single man he was often seen out on the town and was romantically linked with some gorgeous women including Denise Van Outen and Natalie Imbruglia, although rumours abounded about his sexuality, thanks to his camp performances and cross-dressing characters.

All that has changed. In May, he married Lara and they had a glitzy London reception. Now, he just prefers to go home after work. "You don't need to go out, a great night could be staying in watching The X Factor," he has said.

He's just finished filming a new six-part BBC comedy series Come Fly With Me with his Little Britain co-star Matt Lucas, centred on life in an airport, which will be screened at Christmas. He and Lucas play about 20 different characters, although he won't reveal any details.

"It feels exciting to create a whole new world of characters," he says. It's a continuity of what we do but in a different setting. It may be about life in an airport, but we haven't completely changed our style or our sense of humour. If you like Little Britain, you'll probably like this."

After his hugely publicised cross Channel swim in 2006, which raised STG1 million ($A1.61 million) for Sport Relief, Walliams says he's thinking about doing another event next year, but won't reveal what it is. "When you're doing something like that, it's incredibly time-consuming. The Channel swim meant nine months of training and I had to take three months off work to do it. Now I get asked to do loads of things for charity and I have to be careful. It's a huge commitment."

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Interview: David Walliams and Matt Lucas
Comedy duo say they are proud of Come Fly With Me, their new BBC series.
Stuart Husband
13 Dec 2010
telegraph.co.uk

In a basement bar in the West End of London that’s part English tea room, part Prohibition era speakeasy – the floral wallpaper and the empty bottles of Mumm champagne in the fireplace in uneasy symbiosis – Matt Lucas and David Walliams are also going through their familiar high-contrast double act. Posing for pictures in what seems to be their preferred off-duty mufti – suits and ties – they’re like Gilbert and George refracted through a Carry On prism. They hold hands, clutch each other’s knees and – at least in Lucas’ case – crack their faces into manic grins. Walliams is a little more circumspect.

An imposing 6ft 4in, he’s impeccably attired in a petrol-blue suit that’s undoubtedly crafted by his friend and seeming obsession, the designer Tom Ford. (When he was getting his house redesigned – Noel Gallagher’s former Supernova Heights in north London, no less – Walliams showed the builders pictures of Ford’s LA home and said, more or less: ‘I want that one.’ His new wife, the Dutch model Lara Stone, has said that Ford is practically the third person in their marriage.)

Lucas, almost a foot shorter, looks like a schoolboy whose mother’s best smartening-up efforts are forever doomed to come undone – his shirt untucked, his tie askew. He’s more impetuous and irreverent, keen to undermine any remark that might carry even a faint whiff of the portentous.

When talk turns, as it inevitably must, to Jordan, Walliams opines that her ostensible day job is creating a photo-opportunity for herself: ‘Where does her real life end and her media existence begin? I doubt if even she knows where the line is any more. She’s sort of trapped in her own meta-narrative.’ Lucas raises his eyebrows. ‘I also have to try and juggle two different existences. There’s the Matt Lucas that you know and then there’s the real me – who I call Katie Price.’ Such is the comic chemistry that spawned Little Britain and its attendant mania – viewers and DVD sales in the tens of millions, the ‘yeah but no buts’ and ‘I’m a lay-dees’ hard-wired into the DNA of a whole generation.

What tended to get lost in the avalanche of verbiage expended on the show – the grotesquery of the incontinent pensioners and breast-feeding men, the accusations of mockery at the expense of a disfranchised underclass – was the sheer brio of Walliams’ and Lucas’ characterisations, plus the darkness that lay behind a lot of those characters.

Both Walliams and Lucas have been in therapy – the former a victim of bullying at his Reigate grammar school, the latter able to pick and choose his demons from growing up bald, gay and Jewish in north London – and have talked of their struggles with depression. (When Walliams was on Desert Island Discs, his luxury was a gun, not to bag his dinner, but so he could shoot himself if necessary.)

So, as the Little Britain juggernaut wound down, and the pair went off to flex other muscles – Walliams to act in Pinter, swim the Channel for Comic Relief and write bestselling children’s books about troubled boys who find happiness in, for instance, cross-dressing; and Lucas to play Leigh Bowery in the stage musical Taboo and Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland – the question of what they would next wrest from their psyches was a more than academic one.

Now we have the answer – Little Britain on Ryanair. Such, at any rate, is how Come Fly With Me is likely to be received. In the show, centred on a budget airline called FlyLo, Lucas and Walliams play upwards of 20 characters, regular and fleeting, including Omar Baba, the airline’s Al Fayed-style owner; Mickey and Buster, a pair of hopeless paparazzi; Feargal, an Irish trolley dolly (‘I’m one of 10 brothers. We’re all gay. Except for Finbar. He’s bi.’); Simon and Jackie Trent, a husband-and-wife pilot team with a troubled marital back-story; Taj, the exuberantly bearded airport buggy driver; Precious, the evangelical coffee-concession proprietress; and a pair of Japanese schoolgirls eager to catch a glimpse of their idol, Martin Clunes.

The degree to which you find it ‘happy flighting’, as another character says repeatedly in the first episode (the nearest the show comes to a copper-bottomed catchphrase), will depend on your partiality to Walliams’ and Lucas’ revisiting of their classic sketch-show tropes. No self-lacerating sim-com in the mode of Simon Amstell’s Grandma’s House for them, it seems.

‘I think if we did a downbeat sitcom where we played two bitter comedians moaning about people shouting our catchphrases at us in the street, we’d get great reviews,’ Walliams says wryly. ‘But I imagine it would be quite a turn-off for the public.’ ‘Our skill is in characters,’ Lucas avers. ‘The broader and more cartoony the better.’

Come Fly With Me, which starts on Christmas Day, came out of an intense period of idea-workshopping that the pair embarked on around 18 months ago. ‘We sat down and over the course of two or three weeks, we created a show a day,’ Lucas says. ‘It was a rich period. The airline idea was one we came up with. And the more we talked about it, the more we thought, there’s life in this.’ ‘All human life can be found in an airport,’ Walliams emphasises.

The show was filmed in two real-life airports (we’ve been asked not to name them, but airport anoraks should easily identify them). ‘They were hard environments to shoot in,’ Walliams says. ‘You can’t control it. You’ve got tannoy announcements, people wandering in and out of shot, all kinds of distractions. But it brings a great reality to it that you couldn’t have faked.’

‘They’re real people and real planes,’ Lucas beams. ‘My mum and stepdad are eating a Cornetto in one shot. I did a scene where I was crying, and some guy came and stood right in front of me, watching me act,’ Walliams says. ‘It was really inhibiting. I had to drive a buggy and I can’t drive, and I wasn’t wearing my glasses,’ Lucas says. ‘That was more daunting, for me and everyone else.’

‘You only killed one person, didn’t you?’ asks Walliams archly. ‘The other weird thing was, the security people had to come and watch us getting our heavy prosthetics applied, so that they could verify our new “identities” when they took us back air-side. Doing this, I began to realise why no one else has ever done a scripted series set in an airport.’

‘But it’s useful as a setting, because everyone has an experience of going there and it’s usually an anxious one,’ Lucas adds. ‘Did I pack my passport? Will I be able to afford to use the toilet? 75p for a wee, a pound for a pooh?’ He grins. ‘Forgive me – let’s not go down that route. This show’s actually much cleaner than Little Britain. There’s something in the current climate that made us rein it in a bit. There’s still some edge – that’s what we do – but it’s slightly more family-oriented.’

‘It’s a bit realer than Little Britain,’ Walliams says, ‘but we’re still reserving our right to change gender, race and sexuality as much as we can.’

Certainly, there’s nothing as crude in Come Fly With Me as projectile bodily fluids or naked fat-suits, but surely some might still have qualms about the minstrelsy inherent in Walliams and Lucas blacking up to play Precious or Taj?

‘We play young-old, black-white, fat-thin, straight-gay,’ Lucas declares. ‘We don’t want to limit ourselves and Britain is multicultural. But we’re not making any political points.’ ‘If you start to close that down, you end up not being able to play anyone but yourself,’ Walliams says. ‘In that case, should Daniel Day-Lewis have played Christy Brown in My Left Foot? Shouldn’t it actually have been someone with cerebral palsy?’

‘That’s what acting is – playing someone else,’ Lucas says. ‘And then, with the writing, I remember someone using the phrase “class tourism” about Little Britain…’ ‘Well then, let’s burn the works of Dickens and Shakespeare,’ puts in Walliams heatedly. ‘I mean, if you can only depict people of your own class…’

Maybe it depends on what you think comedy’s for, I offer. Amstell said in a recent interview that he thought it should be directed upwards. ‘I don’t know what that means,’ Lucas says flatly. ‘He means don’t attack people who are weak, right?’ Walliams says. ‘Attack those in positions of power or privilege. But I don’t think comedy is necessarily an attack. It’s finding humour in life. I don’t think if you’re making a joke about something you’re automatically demeaning it.’ He pauses. ‘Obviously you check yourself, make sure you’re not poking fun at someone’s racial characteristics. They have to have their own life as opposed to being a generalised representation of class or ethnicity. That’s when you’re in trouble.’

‘Vicky Pollard had her own life,’ Lucas says. ‘So did Harry Enfield’s Slobs or Catherine Tate’s Lauren, or Steve Coogan’s Pauline Calf. You just find your own way of doing these characters.’

They pause for a ruminative sip of water. It’s clear that they take their comedy pretty seriously, but they insist that they didnt feel any pressure to attempt to outdo the Dark Side of the Moon-sized shadow cast by Little Britain.

‘No part of me thinks that Come Fly With Me will be as big,’ Lucas asserts. ‘And no part of me is bothered about that. It’s not something you can control. Nobody maintains the highest level of success for the entirety of their career. No one. Madonna, Michael Jackson… they all go through their peaks and troughs. There’s a type of excitement you generate when you do something good and you’re perceived to be new. But it’s transient by nature. It doesn’t work forever for anybody.’ ‘The main thing is, you’ve got to be proud of what you do,’ Walliams says. ‘And we’re both proud of Come Fly With Me.’

‘And there are fashions in comedy like everything else,’ Lucas continues. ‘Right now, there’s a boom in stand-up with people like Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay, who are very accomplished and pretty clean, and there seems to be something in the air that says that’s what people want. But then in the next few years the new Bill Hicks will come along and everybody will be ready for that.’

‘And then Michael McIntyre will be like Bob Monkhouse,’ says Walliams, sounding not displeased at the prospect. ‘It’s like when Russell Brand came along, a lot of people suddenly looked old-fashioned. Someone will find a new way of doing a sketch show and Little Britain will look decidedly previous-generation. We’ll be the dinosaurs. So we’ll have to reinvent it, not sit there moaning. It’s like Miranda Hart reinventing the sitcom.’

‘She’s brilliant,’ Lucas enthuses. ‘So warm. She’s going to be huge. Right now people want Miranda rather than misanthropy.’ ‘But there’s room for everything,’ Walliams argues. ‘I remember when we did a Comic Relief sketch with George Michael, and we went out for dinner with him, and I asked him what music he liked in Wham! He said: “Oh, me and Andrew loved Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures.” And I thought, yes, they’re both brilliant and not mutually exclusive. I’ve got Wham! and Joy Division albums.’ ‘I’ve only got Wham!’ Lucas says with a simper.

If the duo slip into the roles of elder comic statesmen with some ease, it’s perhaps because of the perspective afforded them by the kind of access-all-areas level of celebrity they’ve attained.

For Lucas, there’s a budding Hollywood career and the possibility of revisiting the role of Leigh Bowery (he’s bought the film rights to Sue Tilley’s biography of the performance artist-provocateur); for Walliams, there’s the stonewalling when asked if he’s been approached to be a judge on Britain’s Got Talent (‘I haven’t signed on to do anything,’ he mumbles), and his continuing (and sometimes complicit) tabloid ubiquity (he shows me some shots on his iPhone of himself and his wife backstage at the X Factor with Wagner, the former flashing showbiz smiles, the latter looking characteristically bemused).

But along with the opportunities have come the inevitable conflicts; both men have had their personal travails publicly raked over in unedifying fashion. So how have they found being famous so far?

‘Denise van Outen said this thing to me about fame,’ Walliams says with a grin. ‘It’s exciting at first, then it becomes really naff and a bit embarrassing. You can’t turn it off. It’s a bit tricky when something bad is happening in your life and you can’t be the person that people want you to be, because someone’s died or something…’ ‘… and you’re trapped in your house for a week,’ puts in Lucas, sharply.

‘That’s when it’s kind of tough,’ Walliams continues, ‘especially being a comedian, because you’re not like you are on Jonathan Ross or Little Britain, but you don’t want to disappoint people.’ He checks himself. ‘But let’s get things in perspective here. We’re not down a Chilean coal mine.’ ‘That turned out to be a great career move for those guys though, didn’t it?’ Lucas says.

And for the last time today, the pair dissolve into mutual giggles.

‘Come Fly With Me’ begins at 10pm on Christmas Day, BBC1

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Matt Lucas wins payout over 'grossly intrusive' Daily Mail article
Comedian and actor sued for invasion of privacy in story on aftermath of ex-partner's death
Jason Deans
guardian.co.uk,
16 December 2010

Comedian and actor Matt Lucas today won substantial undisclosed damages and an apology over a "grossly intrusive" and inaccurate Daily Mail article in the wake of his ex-partner's death. The Little Britain star sued for invasion of privacy over an article which appeared in March this year – five months after the suicide of Kevin McGee, whom he married in a civil partnership in December 2006 and divorced just over two years later.

The story, headlined "How Matt Lucas learnt to laugh again", constituted an unlawful intrusion into his grief and suffering and an invasion of his privacy, according to Lucas's law firm, Schillings. It was particularly damaging because it contained a number of untrue allegations, including the complete fabrications that Lucas had ignored McGee's calls, had become a virtual recluse and was hosting a large birthday party to "move on".

Schillings solicitor John Kelly said the article, about which Lucas had received no warning, caused him considerable upset and distress. He added that Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers had published an apology, retracted the allegations and agreed to pay substantial damages and the actor's costs.

The apology, published on page 20 of today's Daily Mail, stated: "An article (March 1) 'How Matt Lucas learned to laugh again' caused great upset to Mr Lucas which we did not intend and regret. The article on Mr Lucas's return to public life following the tragic death of Kevin McGee suggested he had ignored Kevin's calls, became a virtual recluse, and hosted a birthday party to 'move on'. We accept this was not the case and apologise to Mr Lucas."

Lucas said in a statement: "This has been and continues to be a very difficult time for me and all those who loved Kevin. My deep pain and sorrow have been made even greater by the intrusive and defamatory stories made about my private life in the Daily Mail. I had no choice but to bring these proceedings to protect my private life and my right to grieve in peace.

"I'd like to add that I take no pleasure or sense of triumph in this settlement. I am just relieved that this case has been resolved and I sincerely hope this sort of intrusive reporting will now end."

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Interview: Comedians David Walliams and Matt Lucas
21 December 2010
By James Rampton
scotsman.com

DAVID Walliams is having the time of his life on a decommissioned jumbo jet at an airfield in Surrey. For a segment of Come Fly With Me, his and Matt Lucas's likeable new BBC One "mockumentary" about air travel, he is dressed up as Penny, an über-snooty First Class stewardess for the (fictional) Great British Air.

The comedian looks resplendent in Penny's pastel-shaded uniform and matching scarf, orange bouffant hairdo and the sort of thick mask of make-up usually only employed by showgirls and embalmers. First Class is empty on this flight and so, much to her horror, Penny has been drafted in to serve in Economy. She dons a surgical mask and gloves to hand out the shepherd's pie and mushroom risotto to what she calls "cattle class".

"What looks nicer?" asks one passenger innocently. "I wouldn't feed either to a stray dog," replies Penny, visibly turning up her nose and frantically wiping her hands on her apron.

Between takes, Walliams and Lucas come over to chat to me in the Economy seats – complete with GBA head rests. I begin by pointing out that Penny could have been ripped from the headlines – just that week, the newspapers are full of the story of Steven Slater, a real-life steward on an American airline.

At the end of one particularly trying flight, he had switched on the PA and launched into an expletive-laden rant at the passengers, before grabbing a beer from the trolley and making a dramatic exit down the emergency chute.

"Isn't it funny?" smiles Walliams, 39. "Reality always outstrips fiction. Whatever you make up, something more incredible always pops up in real life. So you think you've invented the most monstrous air hostess in the world, and then along comes a real steward who is even more extraordinary! It's like Barry Humphries always said: there were actual politicians in Australia who were far worse than Sir Les Patterson."

That's the thing about Lucas and Walliams – however cartoony and over-the-top their characters seem, they always have a basis in reality, reflected in the way newspapers latched on to the extreme characters the comic duo created for Little Britain and pressed them into service as emblems of this country.

"If they were running a story about teen delinquency, they'd use a picture of Vicky Pollard," 36-year-old Lucas recalls. "We were employed as a shorthand – we entered the culture. It was very flattering."

The characters from Come Fly With Me could take off in the same way. Before you can say "I'm A Catchphrase, Fly Me," their best lines will no doubt be parroted in playgrounds across Britain. It helps that Lucas and Walliams, who each play 20-odd different characters, are both clever comic actors, able to magic up characters with a single gesture or look.

Take Taaj, a member of the ground crew for FlyLo, the fictitious no-frills airline on Come Fly With Me. "Taaj works for FlyLo, but his real ambition is to be an action movie director," says Lucas, who plays the character. "That's all he talks about. He's written a movie called Future Cop 2000 and says things like, 'My favourite films are Alien Vs Predator, Freddie Vs Jason and Kramer Vs Kramer – although that one didn't have the best action sequences.'"

Another set of characters who may soar are Simon and Jackie, a couple of bickering co-pilots for GBA. "They're the only married pilots at the airline," explains Lucas. "Simon had a one-night stand with an air stewardess, so Jackie, who was a dental hygienist, spent five years retraining as a pilot so she could fly with him and make sure he was behaving. The beleaguered Simon says, 'It was only a one-night stand,' and she replies, 'But you did it again in the morning, so to me that counts as an affair!'"

Lucas and Walliams have been canny in setting their new series in an airport, a location viewers can instantly relate to. "When you're telling people what the show is about, they immediately say 'I get it!' " Walliams observes. "You don't have to say, 'Well, it's this government ministry where all the employees are incompetent.' Everybody knows what an airport is. It's part of all our lives. We've all been to one. It's the comedy of the familiar."

An airport is also a readily identifiable crucible of frustration. In Come Fly With Me, Lucas and Walliams have parlayed the hassles of air travel into humour. The age-old rule applies: no conflict, no comedy. "Everyone knows the stresses of an airport – and stress is a great source of comedy," says Lucas. "We all know what it's like to be delayed, to go through all that scrutiny and security, to be late and panicking, to try and fail to get an upgrade. Also, air travel is in the news every day. Every morning when I get up, I see a story about it on Ceefax." 'Oooh, you've done well," Walliams interjects with a laugh. "You've got Ceefax!"

This is typical of the banter between the pair. Best friends since meeting at the National Youth Theatre two decades ago, they send each other up in a way only close mates can get away with. At one point Walliams waxes lyrical about the joys of rummaging around in the dressing-up box.

"It can be difficult to be subtle and not cartoony in prosthetics. But when you see characters like Bubbles and Desiree from Little Britain on screen, it makes all the hard work worth it. It's such fun watching those transformations. Funnily enough, Transformations is the name of a shop for transvestites. I go past it often because it's close to where I live in London." "In fact," Lucas wades in, "that shop is why you moved there, isn't it?"

Little Britain could be controversial, with its old lady who couldn't stop urinating in front of people, and the grown man who insisted on being breast-fed by his mother in public. "I don't know if you heard about this row over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross that triggered a big debate about bad-taste humour," Walliams deadpans. "People started looking for other things that had gone too far, and we got caught up in that."

But the pair stoutly defend comedy's right to offend. "Comedy has a social function and part of that function is to ruffle feathers," Lucas argues. "Look at Spitting Image – that played a very important social role. A hundred and fifty years ago, Punch was making satirical jokes about politics. It's vital that comedy does jokes about that." Walliams picks up the baton. "It's about the release of tension. Vicky Pollard is the modern equivalent of a Hogarth picture. Social satire has been around since people have been around."

However, Lucas says that in the wake of the Brand-Ross furore, they have toned things down in Come Fly With Me. "The culture has changed. The appetite now is for less controversial stuff. I don't mind. You have to respect people's feelings, and you're stupid if you try to give them lots of things they don't want. Come Fly With Me still has edge – even if we wrote a children's cartoon it would still have an edge. But it's not as scatological as Little Britain. There are no F-words or vomiting or peeing."

However, Come Fly With Me does underline the enduring fruitfulness of the partnership between Lucas and Walliams. "In any creative process you can't be in agreement all the time – or else what's the point of having two of you?" Walliams says. "You have to push each other in different directions sometimes. But we've worked together for 16 years. That's a very long working relationship in showbiz, and it's been a success because we get on so well.

"It's important to be really close. It would be weird if we weren't. I see Matt more than I see anyone else, even my Mum. We're together for 12 hours every single day. It's vital that we get on, and we really do. Matt and I spark off each other very well. If one of us said: 'Shall we do another TV series?' I can't imagine the other replying: 'No thanks, I've had enough now. I'm going to live on a farm. I want to feed chickens.'"

Come Fly With Me begins on BBC1 at 10pm on Christmas Day