One night Matt came off stage furious that the audience hadn’t laughed much, and listed the jokes that hadn’t received the response he felt they deserved.
‘Clive Dunn? Russ Abbott? Nothing! Cunt cunt cunt? Nothing!’
It wasn’t meant to be funny, but it really made me laugh.
Sometimes Matt would announce after a show, ‘Right, I’ve got notes for all of you.’
Despite that fact that I had co-written the show, Matt could often treat me as an employee, allowing me no more status than Tim and Paul. Though of course it was Matt’s creation Sir Bernard Chumley who hosted the show, and Matt (or George Dawes as most people who recognized him called Matt at that time) who was the draw. As a result, confusion reigned (within me at least) as to the equality of our partnership.
At the end of the show there was a three-way struggle between Matt, Paul and me that led to a blackout. In the darkness I would drop to my knees with Matt bending over trying to strangle me. Paul would bend over behind him and Matt’s trousers would come down. The lights would then snap back on and it would look like we were having some kind of gay orgy. We would then turn to the audience and say, ‘How embarrassing!’
This was a great finish to the evening, a visual joke that could have been from a bedroom farce which meant the audience would go out on a high. However on Thursday 30 October 2007 the audience at the Swindon Arts Centre got more than they paid for. As I wrote in my diary at the time, ‘There was a surprise guest star in the show tonight. Matt’s penis. It poked out of his boxer shorts and said hello during the trousers down sequence. Needless to say it received the biggest laugh of the night. As I was on my knees right in front of Matt’s crotch it came dangerously close to touching my face.’
My diary entries at the time give a flavour of the six-week tour …
Sunday 19/10/1997
On the way to Hull we shared a very dreary and expensive lunch at the Little Chef. Why do they call their fish and chips ‘Good O’ Fish ’n’ Chips’? Photographs of plates of food illustrated the menu; England at its crappiest. We half-filled the Hull Truck Theatre but thankfully the audience really went for it. I slipped over quite badly getting on stage as Tony Rogers and when everyone laughed I said, ‘I don’t find it very funny.’ A line I had improvised on the occasion of a similar accident ten years before in a school reading competition.
Saturday 25/10/1997
An 11.30 a.m pick-up in the A-Team van bound for Liverpool. Yes, we are travelling everywhere in the back of a black Transit van. The Neptune Theatre tonight. A 500-capacity sell-out and the scallies loved it. I felt really in control of my performance and rather triumphant as the lights dimmed for the curtain call. Katy’s parents Peter and Sue came to see me perform. I greeted them backstage in my underpants as all actors do. After having split up from their daughter I was glad they had seen me on top form. I was feeling pretty anxious for most of the day because to fail in front of them only for that to be reported back to Katy would have been humiliating. After some altercation about where we would eat dinner, Paul said he didn’t like Chinese. Aside from fish and chips, Matt only likes Chinese – we went to a Chinese and had an enjoyable meal. The promoter Mike Leigh and I went off for a walk afterwards but it became clear his motivation was to chase some skirt. Liverpool on Saturday night is something to behold. Blokes in lime-green polo shirts with girls in plastic dresses and knee-high boots tucking into burgers and chips at 2 in the morning, not a coat in sight. Needless to say, no skirt was chased. I voted to retire early and my thoughts were nostalgic ones for a place where the girl I loved came from. I am now lying in the most average hotel in the world – The Gladstone. I would call it the most hoteliest hotel. Right now I am toying with the idea of crossing out the Leviticus verse in the Gideons Bible about homosexuality …
‘18:22 Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.
‘20:13 If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.’
I just did. And I feel all the better for it.
Years later I refused to take the Bible with me on Desert Island Discs, which provoked a flood of letters from Christians urging me to turn towards the Lord. I would always write back.
Dear Sir/Madam,
Thank you so much for your kind letter and the gift of a Bible. I have read it and am pleased to tell you I am now a committed Christian.
Yours Sincerely,
David Walliams
Sunday 26/10/1997
We arrived in Oldham at 4.30 p.m. and the omens weren’t good, cold deserted streets and the set of the play Dead Funny still standing on the stage. But 403 punters came and as Matt said to me afterwards, ‘Tonight the audience saw as good a show as they’ll ever see.’
I may have thought it, but I would never say it. But Matt was right to be confident, as he is such a special performer.
I took some of the scenery down with me with my fall on stage at the end after the our self-penned ‘Elf Song’,* which obviously delighted the crowd. Matt was mobbed in the bar afterwards, and in that way people can, when they have had a few pints they turned a bit hostile towards him with comments like ‘Ooh, he’s a bit abrupt’ – and we left.
Tuesday 4/11/1997
Tonight felt like work. Which is what it was. We were playing York Arts Centre, which is an absolute pit. We had to almost build a theatre or at least take a ‘Let’s do this show right here in the barn’ type attitude. Thank God what we wrote was good because we really needed those big guaranteed laughs to carry us through. A couple of obsessive Shooting Stars fans fawned over Matt and even me afterwards. One was quite badly disfigured, and without wanting to fall into sentimentality her smile and joy at having her photo taken with Matt made the whole night seem worthwhile.
Friday 7/11/1997
The show in King’s Lynn tonight was a success, though some bits went over their heads. One bizarre individual was so overexcited at the start of the evening I had to say, ‘Please try and remember you’re not in the show.’
Monday 10/11/1997
Another day on the road. A long journey to the Chester Gateway Theatre The show was a sell-out and a huge success and proved a brief respite from another four hours in the van. This time Matt was in a real mood about the Belfast gig this coming Saturday. He decided to pull it without talking to any of us and threw himself into a sulk when I said I’d prefer to honour the booking. He ignored everyone and got out of the van without saying goodbye.
Friday 14/11/1997
Eight hours in the van. The M1 was closed. Travellers and police had caused a blockage on an A road. We left my house at noon and arrived at the Newcastle Theatre at 8.30 p.m. half an hour after the show was supposed to go up. We went up at 9 and all was going well for me as Tony Rogers at the start of the evening’s entertainment until I managed to pick some psychopath out of the audience. He took his trousers and pants off on stage. Sure I asked him to, but I didn’t think he’d do it! An important lesson with audience participation was learned. They don’t always do what you want.
Saturday 15/11/1997
A terrifying plane ride took us to Belfast. The show went up at about 11.15 p.m. and we came down at 1 a.m. The audience were really rowdy at first, but by the end were so drunk and tired they couldn’t really laugh any more. I had accounted for their rowdiness but not their eventual apathy. Matt came into my hotel room after the performance. I told him he needed a rest and should go on holiday. ‘I’ve got no one to go with,’ he said. Which made me sad. We talked way into the night, just as we had when we first became friends.
Sunday 23/11/1997
The last show of the tour. Bristol Old Vic Theatre. Sell-out. The last time I was there I lost the love of my life so I found the journey quite unsettling. Walking into the building, I remembered more than I wanted to. I arrived on stage lacking concentration but fortunately no one seemed to notice. We were a
hit tonight. We’ve made a lot of people laugh over the last six weeks. That’s something to be proud of.
Every night we would pull someone out of the audience to play musical chairs with Sir Bernard Chumley. My task was to find a ‘volunteer’. I spotted a young man with funny glasses sitting in the second row and pulled him up. When I got him onto the stage I realized he suffered from cerebral palsy. The game involved running round and round these chairs. I had a split-second decision to make. Do I return this man to his seat or not? I decided it was an equal opportunities show and there was no reason why he shouldn’t be part of it. Although the audience was tense, our volunteer loved it. The sequence would end with the audience member posing for a Polaroid picture with Sir Bernard. As the camera flashed Sir Bernard would hold up a sign behind the unsuspecting man, which read simply TWAT. This night Matt was too embarrassed to hold up the sign. He was right: the audience may have lynched us.
Looking back, the most important aspect of this tour is that Matt and I really bonded. We spent hours in the back of a van together. We had to put up the set ourselves. We had to deal with drunks, hecklers, overenthusiastic fans, poor ticket sales, terrible food, even Matt’s penis very nearly falling into my mouth live on stage. We shared success. And we shared failure. And we nearly shared bodily fluids. Little did we know there was much more failure to come.
The next year Matt and I were invited to appear at the prestigious comedy festival in Montreal, Just for Laughs. The dream is that you perform there; an executive from a major American network sees you, and you are given your own TV series. Of course, like at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, this rarely happens. Another British act performing that year was Michael Pennington aka Johnny Vegas. At one cabaret night Johnny hauled a man in a suit out of the audience and asked him what he did,
‘I am a vice-president at CBS,’ was the reply.
‘Give me a series,’ implored Johnny, before mock-whispering, ‘I’ll give you a blow-job.’
Despite this offer, like us, Johnny Vegas failed to land a US deal.
The lovely Graham Norton was also performing, and having met him in Edinburgh Matt and I had lunch with him. In the warmth of the afternoon sun the conversation turned to sexuality. Having had my sexual awakening as a boy with other boys, a confusion had swirled within me.
‘Look,’ said Graham, his lovely Irish lilt dancing on his words, ‘I could enjoy sex with a man or a woman – it’s all the same really. Sexuality is more about the emotional than the physical side of things. What really matters is whose arms you want around you.’
‘A woman’s,’ I answered without hesitation.
‘Well, you’re not gay then,’ said Graham.
And I never worried about it again.
22
‘An Old Pile of Rubbish’
While we were touring Matt and I were also developing a tiny TV series which would be a flop of epic proportions, Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes. It seemed like the perfect vehicle for us.
Not being deemed ready by the BBC for a full series of six half-hours, we were offered a series of six ten-minute episodes. Bizarrely our agent’s brother gave us the title. From that we wrote a series of convoluted adventures involving Sir Bernard Chumley and the psychotic stage manager Tony Rogers. We hoped we would recapture the magic of those Edinburgh shows, but somehow we completely failed. Our writing at the time just wasn’t good enough, and our ideas still woefully immature. The conceit of the series was that Sir Bernard had an ulterior motive in making the series – he was hunting for a golden potato. Hidden at a stately home, this was a prize offered by a crisp company to promote their brand. Someone should have stopped us. Unfortunately for us they didn’t.
The script editor was the legendary comedy writer Barry Cryer, though I actually never met him. That’s because I was struck down with hepatitis and hospitalized.
For three or four delirious days I had been unable to leave my one-room flat. Drinking just the tiniest sip of water would make me throw up. I hobbled to the doctor’s, the stoicism my parents had taught me preventing me telling the receptionist how ill I was. Dr Bostock took one look at my yellow skin and bloodshot eyes and said, ‘You have hepatitis. You need to go immediately to Coppett’s Wood Isolation Hospital. This is an emergency.’
It was a hospital for infectious diseases and looked like a World War II POW camp. As soon as I arrived I was injected to stop the vomiting and put on a drip. There I had to stay for ten days. Despite the hospital being in an obscure corner of north London, I had many visitors.
‘I have never seen anyone sent so many bunches of flowers,’ said one nurse. That made me feel a little better. My parents took three days to come and visit me, which, considering this was the most serious physical illness of my life and potentially fatal, was a surprise. My mum would have wanted to come immediately, but my father must have made her wait.
One day towards the end of my stay a big black nurse came into my room, not unlike Precious Little in Come Fly With Me. I could hear the squeak of her food trolley coming up the corridor and then stop outside my door.
‘Good morning! Good morning to you!’ she exclaimed in a thick Jamaican accent. ‘What you want for breakfast?’
‘What have you got?’ I asked from my sickbed.
‘Everything!’ she pronounced joyously.
‘Everything?’ I asked.
‘Everything!’
I hadn’t eaten a proper meal for a week and was starting to get my appetite back. ‘Two poached eggs, bacon, mushroom, baked beans. Brown sauce on the side.’
‘Just toast or cereal.’
‘Oh sorry, I’ll have some Rice Krispies then.’
‘Cornflakes only.’
‘I’ll have cornflakes then.’
It still makes me laugh how she said ‘Everything,’ almost singing it as if in a gospel choir. And how if I had just asked for cornflakes in the first place, the illusion would have remained intact.
The first person I saw when I left hospital was Matt, as we had to start writing together as soon as possible. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Oh I’ve been ill.’ Quite an extraordinary sentence to say to somebody who has been lying in an isolation ward in a hospital for a week with a drip in his arm. I was still painfully thin and my skin yellowish in colour.
Matt had a cold. Whatever he had, he always had it worse than you.
Against his better judgement, Edgar Wright agreed to direct Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes. On the first day of filming I remember arriving early and seeing all the vans and trailers that come with any TV programme or film.
Saturday 17/10/1998
SBSH shoot day one. I couldn’t sleep of course. So anxious. Only compounded when we arrived at the location to see all those lorries and people there for us. Weird. ‘They are all here for us,’ I said to Matt. ‘We better be good.’
An actor we had met on the set of the film Plunkett and Macleane, David Foxxe, played a different part in each episode. We both instantly adored Foxxey, not least when he had an argument with an airline stewardess on the plane home from the Czech Republic and told her, ‘Less of the personality, dear.’ He was the living embodiment of the camp old actor, a real life Sir Bernard Chumley.
Despite being directed by Jake Scott (the son of Ridley Scott), and starring Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller, both fresh from Trainspotting, Plunkett and Macleane was a flop. Our roles were too small for it to matter. The abiding memory I have of the film is seeing Liv Tyler skipping through the Czech countryside wearing a long white dress, like an angel who had fallen from heaven. Years later I danced with her at Elton John’s sixtieth birthday in New York, and was so overwhelmed by quite how lovely she was, I had to stop.
We asked Tom Baker to play a bishop in one episode of Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes, but he turned us down. Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadier in Dr Who, accepted a part – as a policeman. He was a brilliantly entertaining man. When asked how he liked his coffee he replied, ‘Shirley Basse
y. A little bit of black, a little bit of white.’
Nicholas was not at all precious about being known only for playing the Brigadier. In fact he was full of stories with punchlines like, ‘So the director asked us all, “Has anybody got any questions?” And Jo Grant, who was sat on my lap said, “Yes. Why has the Brigadier got his hand up my jumper?”’
When he needed the toilet, he announced, ‘The Brig needs a shit.’
Our writing for SBSH was childish. For instance we were convinced that re-enacting a scene from Jim’ll Fix It when some Cubs ate their packed lunches on a roller coaster would be hilarious.
Wednesday 21/10/1998
I spent the day dressed as a Cub at Chessington World of Adventures. Strangely, it wasn’t that much fun. I worried too much about everything and I could sense that the episode was turning into Chucklevision. Matt seemed keen for that to happen and I started to become very tense.
After the two-week shoot finished, Matt turned to me in the car home and said, ‘That’s as long as I ever want to film for in one go.’
‘Then we’ll never make a proper series then,’ I replied, flabbergasted. ‘Because to make six half-hours that’s at least six weeks shooting.’
When Matt said things like that, I wondered if we really did have a future together. My parents had drilled a very strong work ethic into me, but it wasn’t shared. And of course, Matt was overweight, suffered from asthma, and presumably had a lot less energy.
Watching Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes now (we refused to put it as an extra on one of our Little Britain DVDs but unfortunately it is on YouTube), I’m horrified at quite how dreadful I am in it. I try so desperately to pull as many faces and include so many mannerisms as Tony Rogers, my performance is painful to watch. However, Matt is really rather good, and had already learned how to act for the camera.
Camp David: The Autobiography Page 17
