Little Me

by Matt Lucas

  Look at me. Like everyone else, I’ve become preoccupied by the meat, when everyone knows the glory of the roast dinner is that it is a compendium of many different foods. Bored of the carrot? Here’s a sprout. Not a sprout man? Have some cauliflower. The possibilities are endless.

  I’m not sure if I care all that much for the heavily buttered vegetable, which is something I’ve noticed has been creeping into the roast in recent years. Yes, a small knob on a steaming pile of peas is quite nice, but these carrots that slide all over the plate are unwelcome. Ditto these purple carrots. Let’s not get carried away.

  Parsnips sometimes make an appearance in a Sunday roast, I’ve noticed. Now I would normally reserve the parsnip exclusively for the Christmas roast, but others are keener and serve them regularly. I’d say they are fine as long as you accept them for what they are – a sweet diversion – but on occasion, early on in a roast, I might in good faith bite into some parsnip under the impression that it’s going to be a roast potato. Then there are problems, because nothing compares to a roast potato, especially a crunchy one smothered in gravy. However, if you approach a parsnip with the knowledge that it is a merely a parsnip, then it can provide a nice sabbatical from some of the more senior elements of the plate.

  To elaborate on my earlier point, roast potatoes in gravy are godly. They really are of God. Thinking about it, maybe that’s why we have them on a Sunday. And I don’t say that lightly. I’ve no desire to offend anyone on religious grounds, but I’m going to stick my neck out on this one because, let’s face it, life is essentially pretty arduous, all things considered, so anything that brightens the day should be celebrated. And crispy, fluffy, garlicky, slightly oniony roast potatoes are definitely up there with the very best that life has to offer. Sex is nice too, but you know what I mean.

  I’ve no idea quite why roast potatoes are so good. There’s something fun about mashed potato. Fried potatoes we’ve covered, though we haven’t mentioned the glorious sautéed potato, but then you don’t come across them very often, do you? No one ever says, ‘But, Joan, we’ve already had sautéed potatoes twice this week’.

  Jacket potatoes are another cause for celebration, if served with lashings of melting butter – so much butter, in fact, that the potato in question is now sky-high in fat and calories and you might as well have ordered the chips.

  As for boiled potatoes, what a waste! You must promise me we will never ever speak of boiled potatoes again.

  BTW, the Americans do not have a clue how to make roast potatoes. It might be to do with the types of potato that grow there. Or they might just be too busy eating French fries and hash browns and mashed potato. They love mashed potato there. I get that. Like I say, there’s something fun about mashed potato. I think it’s because you can sculpt with it.

  And of course we haven’t even got to Yorkshire pudding yet.

  The Yorkshire pud is not only the finest thing to have come out of Yorkshire (with apologies to Michael Parkinson), it is also clearly the most delicious (apologies again to Michael Parkinson). Beating stuffing hands down, this edible spongy cushion of blandness – if done right – is the highlight of any roast.

  ‘If I ruled the world,’ sang Harry Secombe, ‘every day would be the first day of spring.’ Well, if I, Matt Lucas, ruled the world, before I even unpacked I would give Yorkshire pudding a knighthood.

  ‘Arise, Sir Pudding of Yorkshire.’

  You’d see photos in the newspaper of a giant Yorkshire pudding posing happily outside the palace with his wife and kids, and then you’d see the photos again two years later, when – disgraced and stripped of its title – it gets sent to prison for tax evasion.

  In short, I could eat Yorkshire pudding every day. In fact, lose the word ‘could’ from that sentence and you have a pretty accurate impression of how I live my life.

  At number 4 – we’re hotting up now – it’s spaghetti Bolognese.

  No veal ragout or none of that poncey nonsense, though. Minced beef, onions, mushrooms, maybe carrots. Proper English Bolognese.

  And tons of spaghetti. Way more, in fact, than you would ever dare to put in any other pasta dish.

  I think that might be partly why I like spag bol, to be honest. It’s because you can somehow just eat loads of it and no one bats an eyelid. The key is to boil far too much spaghetti – ‘Oh, I didn’t realise how much I’d put in, it really expands, doesn’t it?’ – and then you sort of have to finish it, or someone will mention all the starving children in the world and make you feel bad.

  It’s the same with barbecues. You’d never go to a restaurant and order three chicken legs, four sausages and two and a half burgers, but somehow when it’s a barbecue, you don’t think twice.

  At number 3, down one place, it’s crisps and their kind.

  Now before you think, ‘Hold on. Of all the foods in the world – the oysters, the steaks, the sushi, the dim sum – and this pillock declares crisps as his number three?’, just stop and remember how violated you felt the last time someone stuck their hand into your bag of Ready Salted without asking.

  Right. May I continue now?

  Thank you.

  We have family friends who used to run a sandwich stall and, as a child, whenever I went to their house I was filled with wonder – Golden Wonder, in fact – for at the top of the stairs was a stack of maybe twenty boxes of crisps, straight from the wholesaler. You know, the same ones you see in the newsagent, with a hole punched out of the middle and fortyeight little bags inside.

  I would stop and gaze unsubtly at the vast assortment in front of me, before my similarly-sized friend Paul-Simon – the youngest son of the family – would say, ‘Oh, you can have a pack, if you like.’

  And I did. Every time. And I made sure to make several trips past those boxes. I don’t muck about, me.

  This was back in the days of Smith’s Crisps, of KP and Golden Wonder. Before Walkers greedily gobbled up the British market. Not knocking Walkers, by the way. There is a lightness and a flavoursome tang to the Walkers crisp that few of their rivals could offer. I found Golden Wonder crisps a bit greasy, in truth. But still, there’s room for all of us on this planet, no?

  How I love the crunch of the crisp, the snap, the grind, the final moment of sogginess and then the swallow. And then, without a pause, straight back into the bag for another, almost as if each crisp is merely an hors d’oeuvre for the next. Afterwards the tip of the tongue makes its journey inside each tooth in search of residue. Sometimes a finger is required to help prise out the final stubborn lump.

  I’ve loved crisps ever since I can remember. After swimming lessons on a Saturday morning, I would linger by the machine in the hope that Dad would give me 9p for a bag of Salt ’n’ Shake.

  When we went to visit Auntie Katie in Amersham – not a real aunt but my grandmother’s closest friend, from Berlin – we would always be given a bag each of Hula Hoops – or Hooly Wops, as she called them. We’d stick a hoop on each finger before devouring the lot.

  Yes, I know a Hula Hoop isn’t strictly a crisp. That is why I also include ‘their kind’ – which means all of those other yummy snacks that gather impishly in the crisps aisle. Your Quavers, your Roysters, your POM-BEARs.

  Speaking of which, where have Frisps gone?

  And Tubes. Tubes were nice. They were like a Square Crisp that had curled up and gone to sleep.

  And the good thing about all of these snacks is that you can call up the Chinese restaurant, order your takeaway, eat three or four packets while you wait for the food to arrive and still not spoil your appetite.

  Actually I don’t know if that is a good thing, come to think of it.

  Crisps and their kind are great. They just are. Not Monster Munch Pickled Onion crisps, which are obnoxious, the stench lingering about the fingers for decades after the bag has been scoffed. And not salt ’n’ vinegar either, because they hurt my mouth. And not prawn cocktail or Worcester sauce. And not cheese ’n’ onion for reasons I have a
lready made clear. But everything else.

  All right. Basically roast chicken, beef and plain.

  In at number 2, it’s matzo ball soup.

  If you’re an Ashkenazi Jew or you live in New York, I doubt this entry will need any explanation. For those of you who are scratching your little gentile heads in confusion, matzo or matzah ball soup is basically chicken soup with dumplings in it. Not quite the same dumplings they have in those scrummy M&S chicken casseroles. You know, the ones that every other supermarket is now doing an inferior copy of. But not far off.

  This kind of dumpling – the matzo ball (or kneidel as it is called in Yiddish, just to confuse you further) – is made from a mixture of matzo meal, eggs, water and, usually, chicken fat.

  Oh blimey – you don’t know what matzo meal is?

  Okay, so when the Israelites left Egypt they were in a bit of a rush. They didn’t have time for their bread dough to rise, so they baked it and ate it unleavened. And they called this bread matzo. I don’t know why. But they did. And because of this, during the Passover, when the Jews remember their freedom from slavery, they eat this unleavened matzo bread.

  If you’ve never tried it, it looks and tastes a bit like Jacob’s Cream Crackers.

  No, I’m not keen either. Plugs you right up. It’s like having a cork.

  Aaaaaanyway, when you’ve fashioned these dumplings, made from the matzo meal, you boil them and add them to chicken soup and they are very very nice indeed. And you can throw in some noodles, chicken, carrot, swede, even a little boiled onion if you like.

  If you live in New York City, you probably know at least half a dozen places in your neighbourhood that serve it. If you live in the UK, it’s a lot harder to find anywhere that does, so why not do what I do and go to my mum’s house on a Friday night? She makes a lovely matzo ball soup. I’ll WhatsApp you the address.

  And at number 1 – yes, you’ve guessed it – it’s Chocolate.

  Where do I begin?

  Chocolate is like eating a smile. One mouthful of it makes my face feel tingly. It is a tonic. It is my friend.

  I’m so enamoured of chocolate that, when I’m in a newsagent, I do sometimes find it quite hard to decide which bar to buy. My base bar – my starting-off point – is a Twix. I know where I am with a Twix. I’m not wildly keen on the variations – the white chocolate ones or the dark chocolate – because I don’t really think they’re necessary. They had a chocolate orange Twix for a while that was monstrous. Just get me a Twix. It’s fine. I’ll never complain about a Twix.

  Ooh, here’s a bit of celeb gossip for you. David Walliams likes Maltesers a lot. When we toured we had them in the rider (that’s the list of items that each venue is requested to prepare and have waiting for you in the dressing room). I remember being a little worried at the beginning of the tour – not that we might get fat; I was already fat, as you know – that we might get a little bored of Maltesers every night. Well, I certainly didn’t. And I discovered all sorts of ways of eating them. There’s your bog-standard chomp, when you just shove it in and eat it. Then there’s the slow nibble, where you peck off all the chocolate and then enjoy the light honeycomb ball in its own right. My favourite, however, is to put it in my mouth and suck it. The chocolate goes first and then the honeycomb melts – slowly, initially, and then it disappears in a flash.

  I rarely go for a Mars bar, funnily enough. It is – alongside the Twix, the KitKat, the Dairy Milk and perhaps a Snickers – definitely one of your base bars, but I find them a bit too sweet. If I do have a Mars, I like it straight from the fridge, but I won’t often buy one.

  Milky Ways changed a few years ago, didn’t they, when the filling went from brown to white, but I have to say, it was for the better. Double Deckers, on the other hand, have never recovered since they made the inside more chewy. I would not have done that. I still eat them, though, obviously.

  The Snickers v. Topic debate is something that I’ve given a lot of thought to over the years. The Snickers is longer, obviously, but I counter that the Topic is slightly taller. They both have much to commend them. Really, it’s down to the consumer. Do you want hazelnut or are you going to stay with the safe old peanut? If it’s the former, you’re Team Topic.

  Revels are a charm, apart from the coffee one, obviously. If you eat a coffee one, it’s so horrible you have to have another Revel immediately to take the taste away.

  Celebrations are nice, especially at Christmas. The order in which Celebrations are eaten are as follows:

  The Malteser one

  Twix

  Snickers

  Galaxy Caramel

  Galaxy

  Milky Way

  Mars

  And you just leave the Bounty bars and then eventually someone will have them.

  Here’s some other chocolate-related observations …

  Thorntons’ chocolate is too sweet.

  Nestlé chocolate is nice but sometimes a bit powdery. And the Caramac is too sweet for grown-ups – even me. I had two recently when filming Doctor Who and I struggled to get through them both. I did try and palm one off on Peter Capaldi, but he wasn’t going anywhere near it.

  M&S chocolate-covered popcorn is whatever comes after delicious. Doublicious?

  Kinder and Lindt are like sweet, elderly foreign aunts who visit occasionally. Always nice to reacquaint yourself with, but you don’t want them to stay too long.

  Oh, while I’m on the subject of the foreign stuff, Cadbury’s in South Africa do a bar called Tempo, which is nicer than anything we have in the UK. I know this because whenever I visit a country outside the UK, I always try and find a supermarket so that I can inspect the local chocolate. And often they have the same bars as we do in the UK, but they taste a bit different because they use different preservatives in the milk or something. This kind of stuff really excites me, so you can clearly tell how much I’ve got going on in my life.

  Overall, one of the great things about chocolate, though, is that, while the expensive stuff is usually very nice, often the cheap stuff is also pretty good. Which makes sense, given that chocolate in the form of a bar was created as a way of giving it to the masses, who couldn’t afford the expensive drink.

  And that, my friends, in a candy-coated nutshell, is my favourite food: chocolate. From the humble Crunchie to the unimaginably decadent Ferrero Rocher, I fear it will be the death of me. I mean it.

  But what a way to go.

  TL;DR – I have the eating age of a nine-year-old.

  * Also they should bring back Zoom lollies. In fact, I will do a free advert for Zoom lollies if they bring them back. That’s how much I miss them. And I don’t normally even like banana-flavoured things, but the Zoom was divine.

  Filming the video for Fat Les’s Vindaloo, 1998

  F – Frankie and Jimmy

  Tufnell House Halls of Residence, Tufnell Park, London. August 1990.

  ‘He’s over there. Go and ask him,’ said Jim, a friendly lad from Newcastle, as he led me over.

  ‘Hi. Sorry. Can you do it for me?’

  Frankie rolled his eyes and sighed. Then he suddenly became animated. ‘Ooh, no, missus. What? No, stop. Nay, nay and thrice nay. Titter ye not!’

  ‘That’s amazing.’

  Frankie nodded. I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know already.

  ‘Matt does Jimmy Savile,’ said Jim.

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve heard about you. Go on then,’ said Frankie.

  I did my impression. Frankie smiled wearily. It was a fair likeness, whereas Frankie’s was uncanny.

  He had a presence about him, did Frankie – an air of assurance – and I didn’t get the sense that he particularly wanted to engage in further conversation with me, so I thanked him and went to the bar, ordering my usual Snakebite.

  A couple of days later I bumped into him again and made him do the voice once more. Groaning, he obliged. A day later I saw him again. This time he said no. He said it was all anybody wanted him to do and he’d had
enough now. Also he said his name wasn’t Frankie, it was David.

  I was staying at the halls of residence with lots of other young aspiring actors, all of us members of the National Youth Theatre. I was thrilled to be there. Unlike the National Youth Music Theatre (who I had been to Edinburgh with when I was thirteen), the National Youth Theatre focused on plays, rather than musicals. Now I was sixteen and I was an ac-tor. I decided I would play Hamlet, Lear, maybe even all Three Witches at once. There would be no stopping me.

  For the moment, however, I was better known as Jimmy.

  Actually I met Jimmy Savile a few times. In 1982, when I was eight, I went to watch Jim’ll Fix It being recorded, thanks to a family friend who did the lighting on the show. Savile walked around the audience during a recording break and behind the back row, where we were sitting. He cracked some gags and patted my head. I went to see the show being recorded again a few years later. This time I was one of the lucky kids who were allowed to sit on the side of the stage, and was delighted when I spotted myself during the end credits, waving.

  I was on a train on the way back from Newcastle another time in 1997 with some comedians in the smoking carriage. Suddenly we were choking on cigar smoke, waves of it, and we started to joke loudly that Jimmy Savile must be onboard. A few minutes later I walked past and saw that he was indeed sitting behind us, wearing his sunglasses.

  I went to say hello and he actually recognised me from Shooting Stars. We chatted for the next half-hour, with him telling me how he had spent eleven consecutive New Year’s Eves with Margaret and Denis Thatcher, and how he had Prince Charles and the Queen Mother’s phone numbers.

  He asked me what I was up to and I said I was heading home to write an article for The Guardian. He told me I should come up with ten ‘life questions’ and send them to him. He would answer them and they could form the basis of the article.

  ‘How would I reach you?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s easy,’ he said. ‘Sir Jimmy Savile, Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Aylesbury.’

  I never did send those questions off. I felt that if I did, The Guardian would expect an ironic, mocking piece. I thought Jimmy was just a sweet old man and I didn’t want to do that to him.