Camp David

by David Walliams

  I shifted on my seat some more; this involved Ray McCooney, a character I played.

  ‘Well we can have another look at that …’ I said.

  ‘You have to cut it,’ she said.

  Jon Plowman, then head of comedy at the BBC, leaped in to save us from more embarrassment: ‘Look, Jane, I really believe in this show. I’ve got a good feeling about this one. It’s going to be good. It can be big.’

  Jane looked at us all, then muttered something and walked off.

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Matt. In the large open-plan office neither of us had heard her.

  ‘She said go away and make it,’ said Jon.

  ‘Did she?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So we’ve got the series?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jon.

  ‘Was that it?’ asked Matt. We were expecting a little more fanfare than a mumbled aside.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jon

  ‘Then let’s get out of here before she changes her mind,’ I said.

  28

  In Bed with Rob Brydon

  The night Little Britain was commissioned for BBC2 I celebrated my birthday in a bar on Shaftsbury Avenue. My girlfriend hobbled in on crutches. She had kicked the wall while we were having an argument over the phone a couple of days before and broken her toe. This was a relationship with constant drama.

  Sunday 18/8/200

  When I spoke to her this morning she was on her way to the casualty department of her local hospital. During last night’s argument she had kicked the wall and had broken a bone in her foot. So I made a cheese, ham and pickle sandwich for her and made my way down to the hospital to care for her. She thought I was coming down to tell her I didn’t love her any more, but of course I was there to tell her I loved her more than ever. Nothing can stop this tidal wave of love I have for her.

  Every couple of days our relationship would go into meltdown. She would break up with me twice a week, sometimes leaving my flat shouting and screaming at me. I loved her so much, I was lost. I couldn’t get enough of her. Her mind and her body electrified me. Despite her broken toe, this was one of the happy times, though it was not to last.

  Before the writing for the TV series of Little Britain started, I had to shoot a comedy drama called Cruise of the Gods. For a programme that few have seen, it has been written about a great deal. Russell Brand, James Corden and Rob Brydon all devoted chapters to it in their autobiographies. So here is mine.

  Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon were the stars. I was a huge fan of Steve Coogan’s work. I had been to recordings at the BBC as a fan of Knowing Me, Knowing You and I’m Alan Partridge, and enjoyed watching him work from afar. To me Steve Coogan is the Peter Sellers of our generation. Like Matt, Steve combines technical brilliance with a real sense of anarchy. Unlike Matt, he liked to drive sports cars, take drugs and shag birds. That gave him an old-fashioned aura of stardom in the mostly unglamorous world of comedy. However, Steve was a mass of contradictions.

  Wednesday 12/12/2001

  ‘Do you wanna come back to my hotel suite?’ said Steve Coogan.

  It was 1.30 a.m. in the Century bar in Soho. The Baby Cow Christmas party was coming to an end. I looked to Graham and Edgar’s faces and like mine theirs were filled with excited anticipation. However, the vision I conjured up of cocaine and lap dancers was soon replaced by the dull reality of Steve Coogan reciting Monty Python records. It was a bit like being trapped by Nigel from accounts.

  Rob Brydon I had met briefly in the cafe at the Curzon Soho Cinema with Julia Davis. At the time he was writing Human Remains with her. He was very unfriendly that day. I had never seen him do anything on television before, and when I asked him, ‘Do you do comedy too?’

  ‘YES!’ was his rather hostile reply.

  Rob stood there in moody silence as I caught up with Julia, who I had acted with in Coming Soon. In fact he made me feel so unwelcome that I had to leave after a few brief exchanges. He seemed jealous of my friendship with her. Little did I know then that Rob would become one of my absolute best friends. Soon after Marion & Geoff made him a star, I met him again by chance in a bar on Shaftesbury Avenue in London. Rob was a little drunk and this time happy and relaxed. We were not competing for the attention of Julia Davis, and I joined him for a drink.

  ‘I liked your Tom Jones on Rock Profile,’ Rob said. This was merely a pretext for him to do his Tom Jones, which was of course infinitely superior.

  ‘You’ve got to do the cough. Huh! You see the cough. Tom always coughs. HUH!’ he continued.

  Rob swiflty moved on to his peerless Ronnie Corbett impression. That night neither of us could have known we would soon be sharing a bed on a cruise liner.

  The character I played in Cruise of the Gods could have been written for me. Jeff ‘Lurky’ Monks was the head of the fan club of a second-rate sci-fi programme that Steve and Rob’s characters had starred in decades before. Mostly I had to lurk behind them in a creepy manner. Amazingly it was Steve himself who had suggested me for the role. Tim Firth (Calendar Girls) wrote the script, and Steve and Peter Baynham (one of the Partridge writers) did a polish.

  ‘I said to Pete, “How about David Walliams as the super-fan?”’ he later told me. ‘And Pete said, “Great, he’d be perfect.”’

  I couldn’t believe either of them knew who I was, but even if Rock Profile had not been seen by a mass audience, people in the industry had watched it, and I was very occasionally recognized.

  Sunday 7/10/2001

  6.55 p.m. and back on the train to Manchester to film the BBC1 comedy drama Ted and Alice. A big group of drunk hairdressers who’d been taking part in a Toni and Guy competition shrieked their way back north. One of them recognized me.

  ‘You’re Elton John’s boyfriend!’ he squealed.

  ‘Not the real one,’ I answered.

  He asked for my autograph, and of course I obliged. However, this turned out to be something of a curse because for the rest of the journey all the other hairdressers shouted across the aisle at me.

  ‘Who are you?!’

  ‘Daniel what?’

  And best of all, ‘Have you ever been in Emmerdale?’

  And a man who worked in a phone shop gave me preferential treatment …

  Friday 28/09/2001

  Scene: Carphone Warehouse

  Me: My screen keeps crashing.

  Assistant: I’m afraid that’s gonna take at least fourteen days to repair.

  Manager: I can get an engineer downstairs to repair it for you. Come back in an hour.

  Me: Thank you.

  I came back and received my phone repaired with no charge.

  Me: I must say this is a great service.

  Manager: To be honest I’ve seen you on Rock Profile and I think it’s brilliant.

  Me: Thank you.

  I left the shop pondering first how even a tiny morsel of celebrity is well worth having and second why can’t they repair everyone’s phone in an hour?

  Having auditioned and won the role in Cruise of the Gods, I saw in the Guardian a photograph of people queuing up outside the Royal Albert Hall for the last night of the Proms. One man was quite fat, and wore glasses, a polo shirt tucked into tight shorts and sandals with socks. I knew that was what Jeff should look like. The tight shorts were the key. To have someone lurking behind you in too-tight shorts would be deeply unsettling.

  Wednesday 18/09/2002

  Entering Soho House for the read-through of Cruise of the Gods was pretty daunting. I made some conversation with James Corden and Niall Buggy but was glad when we sat down to read. ‘Do we read it out loud?’ I quipped before we started. Rob and Steve laughed loudly, and it was their approval I valued most highly as we read. The script read well – I had lots of funny things to say and do.

  Thursday 19/09/2002

  In the morning I rehearsed Cruise of the Gods. I left on a real high, still unable to comprehend

  That I’m in a show with Steve Coogan.

&nb
sp; That I’d been making Rob Brydon laugh.

  That we were filming this in Greece.

  That I am not struggling at all with the material.

  In short I was flying.

  Yes, a baby-faced James Corden was in the cast too, as my assistant. Once we’d had the conversation about the Channel 4 boy band spoof that Matt and I had created but been dismissed from which James ended up starring in – not that he was in any way responsible for anything but it was the elephant in the room – we became close friends too. I was totally bowled over by his acting ability. His character Russell was a more serious role than the others. James played the quiet fan who turned out to be the son of Andy van Allen (Rob Brydon). James had already worked with two giant talents of British cinema, Shane Meadows and Mike Leigh, when I first collaborated with him, and his assurance as an actor showed. As a person he was a lot less assured. On the coach to the cruise ship on which we were filming he passed around photographs of his girlfriend.

  ‘Shelley is really pretty, isn’t she? Isn’t she?’

  I thought it was strange that he needed us to tell him. I thought his size must have made him insecure, and he dearly wanted us all to know that although he was seriously overweight (he was really heavy then) he still had an attractive girlfriend.

  A still-using Russell Brand joined the cast in a small role as one of the fans. This is what he wrote about me in My Booky Wook … ‘I didn’t like David at first … He had a certain charm, but there was inevitably something of a clash between his effete head-boy and my subversive truant.’

  I hated him. He talked and talked and never listened. Utter bollocks. In place of true wisdom he relied on the words of others.

  ‘Have you never read Descartes?’ he would say.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, Descartes said …’ Etc., etc., etc.

  I doubted he had really read Descartes. It felt like he was spouting the York Notes version of the French philosopher.

  There were real people having a holiday on the cruise ship – elderly couples who had no doubt saved up for years to make as many trips to the hot buffet as possible. Eating themselves to death as they celebrated their golden wedding anniversaries. At dinner the arrival of dessert was applauded. The lights were dimmed for ‘The March of the Baked Alaskas’, and the whole dining room burst into applause. None of these people wanted a film crew getting in the way of their holiday. And they certainly didn’t want to see a drugged-up loon like Russell Brand at dinner in trousers hanging so low that you could see his bum cleavage.

  One night though I glimpsed his genius. My God could he spin a yarn. When we stopped in Istanbul Russell left the boat alone at the dead of night to look for a prostitute. In a city where you could hear the calls to prayer from the mosques five times a day. Of course it ended in disaster. Russell paid a thousand euros to be threatened by some Arab heavies and then have a deeply frustrating encounter with a tearful girl who spoke no English. However, he told the story as if it was the greatest adventure of his life.

  ‘Then the poor dejected wench, her eyes stung red by her own river of tears, refused to divest herself of her vestments …’

  Rob, James and I crowded around and listened to this story, and I thought how like Tom Sawyer he was. In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tom is made to whitewash a fence but convinces the other boys that it’s fun, and they trade marbles, apples and all kind of treasures for the privilege of doing his work. Russell had that power. However, this escapade, combined with taking drugs onto the boat – and of course the bum cleavage – meant he was sent back to London and his part was taken by an extra. Soon after Russell became sober, we developed a very close and lasting friendship. I love him.

  ‘I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me …’ says Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece In a Lonely Place.

  My girlfriend split up with me over the phone a few days into the trip. Although we didn’t live together, she had keys to my flat and had come in and read my diary from cover to cover. I had kept one since 1997. In the years before I had met her I had done some things I was ashamed of. The night with the BA air hostess was the first of numerous meaningless encounters. I thought sex could take away my sadness. However, it just made it worse. And I sank lower and lower into despair. I had become a sex addict.

  I started seeing a psychotherapist and kept the diary really as a record of this struggle with my shame. Despite our problems, I loved this girl so much, beyond anything I had ever experienced before. Jack Nicholson says to Helen Hunt in As Good As it Gets, ‘You make me want to be a better man.’ That’s what I felt about her. With her by my side I thought I could put so much of the unhappiness of the past behind me. She was young, beautiful, intelligent and, compared to me, innocent. Deep in my heart I felt her love for me was some sort of redemption. In my head she took away all my ugliness, shame and despair.

  I asked the psychotherapist – the brilliant Bruce Lloyd, who Caroline had recommended – in his office overlooking the Oval cricket ground, ‘Should I tell her about my past?’

  ‘No, no, no. That is the past. It’s dead. You have to move on from that. Maybe one day, if you were getting married. But even then you wouldn’t have to. We all have our own shame; that’s yours. You need to move on and be happy …’

  I had taken his advice, but now this girl had found out my secrets for herself. No doubt she had been looking for answers to why I was often so sad. What she read deeply upset her. My past hurt her so much that she could never love me. All the ugliness and shame and despair returned a hundredfold.

  The next day the liner docked at the Greek island of Mykonos. I walked to the top of a cliff and looked down at the rocks below. I thought how easy it would be to hurl my body down and be rid of this torment that had blighted so much of my life. This girl had confirmed what I had always thought about myself: that I was a bad person. It seemed liked the inevitable end to my story. I sat on top of the cliff and called my friend Edgar Wright. I didn’t tell him I was planning to kill myself, but I talked to him about what had had happened with my now ex-girlfriend. Like most of my friends he hadn’t approved of the relationship. There had been more unhappiness than happiness in my time with her, and most weeks I was miserable about things having gone wrong between us. Edgar’s anger at her gave me some small sense of perspective, and I walked down the cliff back to the ship.

  Rob Brydon turned out to be something of a rock. When the liner hit a rock leaving the Greek island of Patmos and we were moved to another ship, the members of the cast were asked to share cabins. Rob and I chose to share with each other. The twin beds were right next to each other.

  The maid asked, ‘Shall I move the beds apart?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I joked.

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Rob. The maid moved the beds about an inch apart. The cabin wasn’t big enough to move them much further. The best thing was that I wasn’t alone; I was with my new best friend. He helped me get through the night. I felt safe with him there.

  Friday 18/10/2002

  Today we boarded the Olympic Explorer, the sister ship of the Voyager. Because of a shortage of room, Rob and I are now sharing a cabin.

  I instantly loved sharing with Rob. And so relieved he was there. I couldn’t face being alone at the moment, with everything that’s happened. It took me back to being about ten and having a friend to stay over. And in that tradition we put the light out and talked into the early hours with the constant preface ‘Are you still awake?’

  Rob had recently gone through an agonizing divorce and was struggling with the pain of no longer living under the same roof as his three young children. We were completely and utterly honest with each other. I told him everything about my past, and we tried to help each other as much as we could. However, we laughed together too. I couldn’t sleep, so when he got up in the night to pee, as older men have to, I would wait until I could hear the water being pass
ed into the bowl and moan, ‘Oooh, my Rob.’

  That never failed to give us both hysterics.

  As the last drops tinkled out I would sigh, ‘Ooooooohhhhhh.’

  Like some of the best jokes, you’re not sure why they are funny, but you laugh anyway. Other times we behaved like an old married couple and I would bring him a gin and tonic while he was in the bath. Yes, I have seen Rob Bryden’s penis.

  When you hate yourself as I did, playing someone else can be an escape. So I put all my energies into my work and delivered a strong performance. Certainly one that impressed the master, Steve Coogan, whose company was producing the programme.

  Wednesday 23/10/2002

  ‘Steve’s been saying nice things about you,’ said Caroline Hickman, Steve’s fianceé.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes, I heard him talking to Henry Normal. He said he’d been writing up your part because you were so good.’

  As if that wasn’t good enough, Steve approached me in the make-up room.

  ‘I just watched the scene you did with James where you were running down the corridor,’ he said. ‘Very funny, very detailed.’

  I shrugged it off, but inside I was dancing.

  Later I was shooting a scene with Rob and Steve, and thought, Can work get any better than this?

  After dinner the talk turned to the new Partridge series. Steve has acted out so much of it on this trip I now think I have seen most of it.

  ‘You should have been in Partridge,’ he said to me.

  ‘I love acting. I love being someone else,’ I told Niall Buggy, a member of the cast. Niall was much older, more experienced and ultimately a hugely superior actor to me. What’s more, he had worked with many theatrical legends.

  ‘The best actors reveal something of themselves when they act,’ he said.

  I hadn’t thought of that. Playing comedy characters is so often about externalizing something, demonstrating the absurdities of other people. However, I never forgot what Niall said, even though I wasn’t ready to reveal anything intimate about myself on stage or film any time soon.