by Matt Lucas
During that first summer in the National Youth Theatre, I did a twoweek induction course. A year later, in 1991, I was part of the NYT production of The Tempest – as a magician’s assistant.
Now it should be said that this was not your normal production of The Tempest. The director had studied under Lindsay Kemp and had made some unconventional creative decisions. There would be a chorus of fifteen Ariels and a homoerotic subplot between Prospero and Ferdinand (that disgusted my father so much he walked out after twenty minutes).
‘Magician’s assistant’ sounds fun. The reality was that we were stagehands, bringing props on and offstage. The show had Japanese influences and we were dressed head to toe in black, koken-style. Even our faces were concealed by black fencing masks. The background was black too, so the idea was that when we carried the props (which were luminous), you wouldn’t really be able to see us. It would look as if they were moving by themselves.
The director had been charming at my audition, but in rehearsals – while he flirted with his actors incessantly – he made no attempt to hide his disregard for us stagehands, bullying and berating us at every turn. The bright spot was that David Williams – that guy who did the Frankie Howerd impression the year before – was playing Trinculo. In each rehearsal he would come up with bits of comedy business and I would cry with laughter. I had no doubt he was going to be a huge star one day.
David and I bonded over a shared love of comedy, both old – Morecambe and Wise, Laurel and Hardy – and new – Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. The despotic director was also a Vic and Bob fan and set up a TV in the rehearsal rooms so that he and David could watch Vic Reeves Big Night Out videos during lunch breaks. I’d tag along with a couple of others and we’d all laugh together, then rehearsals would resume and the director would be screaming blue murder at us again.
During the run, when I wasn’t rushing around bringing props on and offstage, I would watch David from the wings every night. He spoke the Shakespearean text so naturally. I loved his routine and wished it was me playing Stefano opposite him. I only had one real ambition at seventeen – to meet Vic and Bob in person. I added a second to my list – ‘to perform with David Williams’.
As I mentioned earlier, David had begun doing open spots on the circuit with his friend Jason Bradbury. I told him about Sir Bernard and how I hoped to do some gigs at some point too. He hadn’t seen me do much more than carry a broom and repeat my naff Jimmy Savile impression over and over, but nevertheless he humoured me, as I spoke about my ambitions.
On the last night of the run, one of the bigwigs in the NYT arranged for us to have a party at the exclusive Browns nightclub in Covent Garden. I had heard of the club’s reputation for attracting A-listers and I wasn’t disappointed. At one end of the bar sat Michael Thomas and David Rocastle, who both then played for my beloved Arsenal (and yes, of course I went over to speak to them). At the other end, was MC Hammer and his entourage. That night I swapped addresses with David Williams. I was pretty sure he was just being polite. I really didn’t imagine I would hear from him.
To my surprise, a few weeks later, I received a friendly postcard suggesting we get together for a cuppa. Over the next few years David and I developed a firm friendship, going to comedy shows and taking in arthouse films and plays. David ate far more healthily than I did, and so we’d meet at an organic café called Food For Thought in Soho and sit on uncomfortable wicker chairs munching on flapjacks and drinking peppermint tea, talking about our favourite comedy routines.
Sometimes I’d also go and watch him and Jason perform. Getting to know David and Jason changed everything because it meant I actually had friends who were comedians. That was the bridge for me. Watching them onstage gave me heart that, if they could somehow gain access to the circuit, perhaps I could do the same.
A year later I put my money where my mouth was, and started to gig as Sir Bernard. David and Jason would come along to my gigs, just as I had been to see them.
Two years after that, in 1994, Dorian Crook took his stand-up act to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and invited me to do a guest spot in the middle of the show.
Some of my friends came to visit, including David. He and Jason had given up the comedy club circuit – Jason having decided he wanted to focus on TV presenting work. David had been appearing on kids’ TV and writing for Ant and Dec – or PJ and Duncan, as they were still known.
One evening David and I were sitting in the busy bar at the Pleasance when we both realised we had had the same thought – that next year it might be fun to come to Edinburgh and do a show together.
London, 1995. There were ten people in the audience at the first preview of Sir Bernard Chumley is Dead … and Friends! at the Jacksons Lane Theatre in Highgate. Four of them had rung the venue a few minutes prior to curtain up to ask whether we might delay starting the show as they were watching EastEnders. We agreed.
The show went surprisingly well, given our inexperience. My usual stand-up set formed the backbone of the show, though David had made it a great deal better by thoughtfully adding some actual jokes to it. It made sense to focus on Sir Bernard, as he was becoming an established name on the circuit. David would play my sidekick – a psychopathic stage manager called Tony Rodgers, who had recently escaped from prison – and a few other characters.
Tony was a terrible misogynist and would tell awful sexist gags, following them with his catchphrase ‘Nice one, lads, sorry, women!’ It remains, to this day, my favourite of all our catchphrases.
‘What’s the difference between a radical feminist and a bin-liner? A bin-liner gets taken out once a week! Nice one lads, sorry women!’
We noticed that we could get a laugh out of the actual joke, then another laugh at how out of touch the character supposedly was for telling it. This is something that Alan Partridge did, that Ricky Gervais would go on to do in The Office and that we did throughout Little Britain and Come Fly with Me, with offensive characters like Marjorie Dawes and Omar Baba – hopefully you laughed both with and at them.
Tony and Sir Bernard spent much of the show berating my course mate from university, Tim Atack. Tim was a brilliant musician and I thought he’d be a perfect foil for us. He had a rock band and mentioned once that he sometimes liked to shock audiences by casually wearing a dress onstage. With this information, David and I created a character for him – Miss Dorothy Cant. Tim sat at his keyboard behind us, with his long ginger hair and bushy beard, in a slinky black number, gallantly weathering a constant tirade of abuse.
Tony and Sir Bernard would also reprimand Alison Bell, the fictional lesbian stage manager who was supposedly at the back of the auditorium getting lots of the lighting and sound cues wrong.
‘I suggest you spend a little more time thinking about the show and a little less time thinking about Sandi Toksvig!’ Tony would bark.
We were a little surprised in that first preview when the actual stage manager starting responding, over the sound system, in character. As the show was in full swing we just had to go with it.
That night we also introduced David’s po-faced performance artist character Simon Geiger and appeared – for the first and last time – as a Christian male stripper act called ResErection. The less said, the better.
The following week we had a couple more previews, this time in a smaller room at the same venue. We had a larger audience and had hastily rewritten some of the parts of the show that didn’t work. The gag rate was higher but the show was still unhinged. We didn’t just make a mess on the stage during the performance; we also started the show with the stage already not very tidy, sometimes with plates of half-eaten food left out as if no one had quite bothered to clear them away. We enjoyed going into the auditorium before the show and leaving screwed-up flyers, empty crisps packets and cigarette stubs – just general mess. Sometimes we would arrive and find a twenty-foot-tall steel tower on wheels – the type that stagehands might climb to change a lamp – and we’d just leave it unhelpfully in the mi
ddle of the stage for the whole show. We loved the idea that the audience was watching a sad, neglected bottom-of-the-bill act.
As well as Sir Bernard and Tony Rodgers, David also played Erik Estrada, a stunt porn actor from Bristol, whose private parts would appear onscreen in place of those of the stars.
‘Now you may not know my face, but you will recognise my hot, veiny, throbbing penis,’ was his opening line.
I had one other character in the show – Lindsay De Paul, an ageing Northern copper who spoke slowly and sternly, telling a long, convoluted morality tale about a teenage offender on his beat.
‘Young black lad – young lad, black – and he’s got a gun.’
Pause.
‘Young black lad – with a gun.’
A further pause, to let it sink in. Then …
‘Black lad – with a gun – and he’s young too.’
Another pause, to add weight, as Lindsay eyed the audience.
‘Young black lad with a gun. He’s young, he’s got a gun AND he’s black! Aye, I didn’t tell you he were black! That changes everything, doesn’t it?’
The routine rambled on without making much of a point, other than that the copper was a silly old racist. Sometimes the audience waited politely for the next character to come on, other times they cackled like mad at the idiocy of it, the repetition, the pointlessness.
As well as all this, we would improvise, sing cover versions and perform a couple of original numbers we’d written, humiliate audience members and even get a couple onstage to play musical chairs – though the game would drag on and on, as neither Sir Bernard nor Tony realised that there was the same number of chairs as contestants.
At the end of the show Sir Bernard would pompously declare the evening a great success and bring the director onto the stage. The director (played by David) proceeded to give Sir Bernard some notes on various lines he’d got wrong and things that needed improvement, before inviting the audience to join him and Sir Bernard for a bite to eat after the show – ‘some nachos and burritos and guacamole and shit’.
We’d ask for a show of hands to see who was going to come along, and of course not everyone would put their hands up, so then we’d get very offended and interrogate people as to what else they had ‘going on that’s so bloody important’. We would moan and whinge, until we were sitting in sulky silence. Any audience members who then laughed would receive a burning glare or a stern rebuke from us, which would only make them laugh more. They were disgraced, like naughty children.
We played with the silence for a while, as if all was lost, until Chris slowly started to sing the Nik Kershaw song ‘I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’, to rouse Sir Bernard and the rest of the audience and rescue the night, before we took our bows.
We took the show to the Edinburgh Festival. We had a midnight slot in the Wildman Room at the prestigious Assembly Rooms venue and played to small audiences on the first couple of nights. Then we had a night off and I remembered something the comedian Boothby Graffoe had apparently done, where he’d put a sign reading ‘SOLD OUT’ on the door even though he hadn’t, and after that ticket sales had risen. I went down to the Assembly Rooms and did the same thing – even though we weren’t even performing that night – and the following evening, and from then on, we played to big crowds. As anyone who has put on a show at the overpopulated Edinburgh Festival will tell you, you need to pull any trick you can to fill the room.
We were delighted to perform to large audiences but our late start time meant that there were always a few people in the audience who were steaming drunk. Our style became more abrasive, more robust, louder, scarier as we realised we needed to claim and dominate the space from the start. We were rarely stumped by a heckle, because we’d simply shout abuse at whoever dared to interrupt us. I had good practice at this – Sir Bernard was used to screaming at hecklers.
Sometimes people needed to use the toilet, but such was the design of the room that the only way to get there was to walk across the stage. We’d bully and humiliate anyone who left and then stop the show and interrogate them on their return – had they flushed the chain? Had they washed their hands? Was it number ones or number twos?
We were back in Edinburgh the following year, in 1996, with Sir Bernard Chumley’s Gangshow. We returned to the Wildman Room, though this time at the slightly earlier slot of 10.30 p.m. Content-wise, it was more of the same. We brought back some characters and introduced new ones. We sold out without any fuss – thanks in part to our success the year before, but also because Shooting Stars was now on air – though not all of the critics were charmed. Ben Thompson, writing in The Independent, had championed Sir Bernard previously, but didn’t enjoy our latest offering, praising Harry Hill at the beginning of his review before adding …
Matt Lucas – known and loved by millions as George Dawes, Shooting Stars’ Great Big Baby – emerged cooing and blinking into the crazy, mixed-up, post-Vic & Bob world at about the same time as Hill, but while the latter’s talent continues to ripen, the former’s currently seems in danger of dying on the vine. Sir Bernard Chumley’s Gangshow (Assembly) finds Lucas and his equally gifted sidekick David Walliams skateboarding headlong up an anal/misogynist cul-de-sac. Their relentless scabrosity has torn free from its satirical moorings and is now floating freely in the lower reaches of self-hatred.
I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with what Thompson said, and many others have echoed him over the years, though we did also receive a five-star review in The Scotsman for the same show. It became clear, however, that we were starting to polarise people.
The next year, 1997, saw a third series of Shooting Stars and Sir Bernard’s Grand Tour, an amalgamation of the best of our previous two shows, with some new bits added – for which David, Tim and I went round the country in a minibus.
We were joined by Paul Putner, who I had met on Ivor Dembina’s comedy course five years earlier. Paul was planted in the audience. About half an hour in, he would identify himself as the manager of the theatre and explain that the language we were using was unacceptable. He did this so naturally that he would often get abuse from other audience members, angry at him for interrupting the show. Eventually Sir Bernard and co. were deemed to have gone too far, and Paul explained he would have to close the show down. At his instruction, the lights and sound went off and, now in darkness, the audience would hear a violent struggle taking place. Eventually the lights came back on to reveal me with my trousers down, wrestling – not with Paul, but with David, who was on his knees, in front of me. One night we got an even bigger laugh than usual, and it took me a few seconds to realise that this was because I was wearing boxer shorts – rather than my usual Y-fronts – and my penis had slipped right out. Whenever I recounted this story, Walliams used to enjoy adding that it had slightly brushed his lips, though I can confirm this is not true!
We enjoyed the challenge of taking the show on the road, away from the parochial, arty confines of London and the Edinburgh Fringe.
One night we played the Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth. When we arrived, our faces dropped. It felt more like a rock venue than a theatre, with a large bar dominating the room. Grumbling, we set up our props, wondering how on earth we were going to win over the crowd, who had begun to pile in to this cavernous venue.
The show began and, as we had predicted, the audience were indeed restless and distracted. People were chatting at the bar, and walking around. They wanted George Dawes – they didn’t expect this. Even those who were paying attention seemed to be stony-faced.
We knew we had a good show. We didn’t give up. We dug our heels in, did our best to engage with the crowd. We managed to get them going after about twenty minutes and ended up doing the best show of the whole tour. Afterwards, as we walked through the bar, carrying our props back to the minibus, those who had stayed behind for a drink cheered and applauded us.
David and I had been working together for two years. Just like I had done with my stand-up, we divided a
udiences. But that night was something different. Whereas before we had either delighted or disgusted audiences from the off, in Portsmouth we found ourselves in what seemed like an impossible situation and turned it into a triumph. I decided that night – if we kept going – that one day we were going to be the biggest act in the country.
Who wouldn’t be proud of a son dressed like this?
G – Gay
We drove round and round and round. We shouldn’t even have been there. I can’t think why the gates to my secondary school were open in the early hours of that Saturday morning in the summer of 1993, but they were, and my best friend Jeremy – then nineteen years old, like me – had already driven the pair of us all over north-west London for most of the night while I tried to say the words. I was petrified. I knew that once I’d said them, I couldn’t unsay them, and I didn’t know what the consequences would be. As we left the school behind us, I took a deep breath and told him, in the most excruciatingly contrived, self-conscious way possible.
‘Well, what I’m trying to say is … I guess if it was a choice between Michelle Pfeiffer and River Phoenix, I wouldn’t mind either way.’ I felt the blood drain from my face.
‘You what?’ said Jeremy. He wasn’t outraged. He was confused.
‘I like … both.’
‘You’re bisexual?’
‘I think so.’
‘Oh blimey, I thought it was going to be something awful.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Why would I mind?’
I didn’t have an answer prepared for that.
‘You know my girlfriend’s bisexual?’
I didn’t, actually.
‘Yeah. And Greg. And Ian’s gay, well that’s pretty obvious. And you’ve met his friend David, right?’
Jeremy then went on to list various friends and acquaintances who were gay or bisexual and my relief turned to silent disappointment, partly with myself for having wallowed in pointless fear, shame and self-hatred for so long, and partly with everyone else on this endless list for stealing my thunder.