Little Me

by Matt Lucas

  Little Britain had rules. All of the sketches were fourth wall, in that the characters never knew that they were on camera. This meant no monologues down the lens and no talking directly to the audience. Also there were no parodies or songs or animation. The only aspect of the show that was different was the framing device, because there was a narrator who could be heard speaking directly to the audience. We liked the idea that he or she would be able to provide information for the viewer before each sketch had begun, allowing us to start the sketch at the latest possible point, without loads of boring set-up.

  We thought the Little Britain script was probably the best thing we’d written, but we just couldn’t convince BBC Two Controller Jane Root to invest in us at that level. In fact, we couldn’t even get a meeting with her. I only knew what she looked like because I’d seen a photo of her in The Guardian.

  A chance meeting in the street was to change everything. Not with the elusive Jane Root – yet – but with my old school friend Ashley Blaker. We hadn’t seen each other for a few years. He told me that he’d recently been taken on by the BBC as a trainee radio comedy producer.

  He wondered if we had anything we might like to develop with him. I spoke with David and he was understandably reticent. Radio seemed like a closed shop to us. However, we saw little harm in dusting off the Little Britain script and modifying it for radio. After all, most of the work had already been done. We had a few new ideas, so we penned some more sketches and we made the narrator more pompous and provocative, more of a character. He would provide the listener with useful information, but it was often governed by his old-fashioned, bigoted or just plain unhinged attitudes. While there was a sense of reality about the sketch characters, the narrator himself was simply not to be trusted.

  As for who would provide the narration, we had a wish list. There were only three names on it, if I recall correctly. Tom Baker was first choice. Second choice was Michael Sheard, who had played the terrifying Mr Bronson in Grange Hill. In third place was Harold Pinter. We thought Pinter was about the longest of shots imaginable, but it amused us to have his name on the list. We approached Tom first, assuming he’d be too busy, expensive or picky. To our delight he said yes.

  Tom was everything we hoped he’d be, times ten. Friendly, garrulous, eccentric, mystical, ungovernable, maybe even slightly delirious. He was also magnificent. Maybe for him it was just a nice change from the daily grind of dreary commercial voiceovers, but for us it was magical. He lent his iconic voice to our material and gave it authority.

  With the voiceover in the can, we gathered at the Drill Hall in London – now RADA Studios – on 20 January 2000 to rehearse and record the pilot, alongside Paul Putner, Samantha Power and Jean Ainslie. We’d worked with Samantha in our Paramount series and seen Jean in The Day Today. As the audience took their seats, we waited anxiously at the back of the room, by the stairs.

  I turned to Ashley … ‘This needs to work tonight. This is the last roll of the dice.’

  Well, luckily for us it did.

  In that pilot alone, we featured Emily Howard, Jason (who falls for his friend’s nan), Dafydd Thomas, our take on Dennis Waterman and Marjorie Dawes.

  Marjorie had already appeared on Shooting Stars, but not as a weight-loss course instructor. This new incarnation of the character was much more demonic and there was never any mention of her son George, who didn’t feel like he’d come from the same universe as Little Britain.

  Dennis, in a way, was unusual because it felt more like something we would have done in the Paramount series or on Rock Profile. It was another of our ‘unimpressions’. We took a tiny grain of truth – that the real Dennis Waterman sometimes sings the theme tune to shows he’s in – and turned it into his obsession. In actual fact the real Dennis didn’t even write the Minder theme, but it amused us no end to imagine he refused to accept jobs unless he could ‘write da feemtoon, sing da feemtoon’. This obsession turned him into a child (or at least someone who spoke like a child) and turned his agent Jeremy almost into the role of a pleading parent, trying to reason with their kid.

  Emily Howard was David’s idea. He once told an interviewer he’d like to live the last ten years of his life as a woman and I’m not entirely sure he was joking. When I first met David he’d think nothing of going out for the night in a skirt, black lipstick, fingernails painted and a clip in his hair, often with his then-girlfriend Katy on his arm. He revelled in the shock he created. I thought he was nuts.

  Emily was a straight male transvestite who wanted to pass herself off not as a woman, but as a lady. The fun for us was that she thought that to do so she had to subscribe to outmoded Edwardian ideals of femininity, like the dainty heroine of a Barbara Cartland novel – ideals that were barely even attainable for women, let alone burly men. It was as much about her being out of her time, as out of her gender.

  Sometimes I receive complaints on Twitter about Emily from members of the transgender community, who say that the sketches led to them being teased and alienated. Initially I was surprised. In our minds we saw a clear distinction between our character – a man who wears women’s clothing for gratification – and someone who was born into the body of the wrong gender. We wouldn’t have made jokes about the latter, but we considered the former fair game. It makes me sad to think that what we thought of as harmless might have had a negative impact on people who were already suffering. I think there are lot of characters and themes we’d approach very differently if we were doing the show now, and I’m sure Emily would be one of them.

  Dafydd was inspired by a very sweet guy we’d both come across in the National Youth Theatre. David recalled how this man had just come out (as bisexual, actually) and was convinced he was the only one in the group. He often lamented feeling so isolated, but seemed to enjoy it at the same time, because it made him special and different. Walliams realised this was a great starting point for a sketch. As ever, I marvelled at – and benefited from – his ability to pinpoint a defining characteristic and guide us as we turned it into almost a living person.

  And when it came to Dafydd, I could at once empathise with the dichotomy of the gay man when he comes out – you want recognition, respect, understanding and of course companionship, but as soon as you have those things you no longer feel like a martyr, you’re no longer the keeper of the all-powerful secret. You gain so much when you come out, but, to your surprise, you do also lose something as well.

  Dafydd’s coming out turns his small Welsh village upside down – but not in the way he has anticipated. No one bats an eyelid. Instead of bigotry he finds an absurd matter-of-factness from even the blokiest of blokes. In fact, it seems as if the whole town has been at it themselves all along.

  The sketch in which teenager Jason falls in love with his best friend’s nan was actually something we’d written in an afternoon for a TV pilot for Paul Kaye. David had worked with Paul on BBC Two’s The Sunday Show – which saw Paul’s alter ego Dennis Pennis terrorise celebs as they strode unwittingly up the red carpet – and Paul and I had become firm football friends, often going to Arsenal games together.

  We were excited to give the sketch to Paul, but when the production company told us that the few hundred pounds we were getting paid for the sketch meant they retained complete ownership of the idea, we paused before signing the contract. We’d heard how Harry Enfield’s character Tim Nice-But-Dim had been written originally by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, and that the writers had an option not only to write further instalments of the character but to get a piece of the action if Tim Nice-But-Dim ever appeared in, say, a film or as part of a tour or on a T-shirt etc. In short, they kept a share of the IP – the intellectual property. We were more than happy to accept a nominal fee for writing the Jason and Nan sketch, but when we asked what we might get in return if the sketch ended up spinning off into sequels or into an advert, there were no guarantees or obligations. Even though Paul was a friend of ours, would have been perfect in the sketch and I’m sure
had not the slightest idea at all about the business deal being proposed to us, we felt we had no option but to take the sketch back.

  And I’m glad we did. Jason and Nan were naughty in a way that would come to define Little Britain.

  Vicky Pollard was inspired in part by one of the vox pops in a short film I had made at university with some of my course mates. We had been put into groups of four and set the task of producing a six-minute documentary. I came up with a simple idea, called ‘How Are You?’, which involved putting the question to passers-by in Bristol’s Broadmead shopping centre. It was the natural response of almost everyone to say ‘Fine, thank you’, but then we’d delve a little deeper – asking if they’d answered truthfully, if not why not etc.

  One of the contributors was a young lad, who replied in a sweet but bumbling manner. When I showed the film to David, we started to impersonate him and his thick West Country accent until it escalated to the point where he had become the least articulate person in Britain. Along the way he became a she – one of those petrifying teenage girls who stare you out at the bus stop – and, working backwards, we reasoned that Vicky’s staggering inarticulacy was the result of her buying time as she tried to conjure up an excuse for whatever misdemeanour she had committed on that particular day.

  Often when we created characters, David would start at the beginning and I would start at the end. By which I mean he would think of the central comic conceit first, summed up in just a line sometimes, and I was able to help flesh it out, give it nuance, make it distinctive.

  An example of this was his idea for a character, Mr Mann, who goes into a shop to buy something incredibly specific without even knowing if such a thing even exists. He suggested someone looking for ‘a pirate memory game called Yo Ho Ho, suitable for ages six to twelve’.

  As we began writing and rehearsing the scene, I started to add the strange, archaic, parochial Northern tone. The sketch evolved and we began to mess around with long pauses. When we transferred to TV, we figured that if we didn’t ever see Margaret (the woman who Roy the shopkeeper shouts upstairs to), we could continue to release ever more unlikely nuggets of information about her. For instance, we learn several sketches in that she is not able to help look for something because ‘I haven’t got any arms or legs’. This got us a big laugh – not only because it was a surprise, and because the information was delivered in such a matter-of-fact way, but also because we didn’t actually have to see the horrible reality of it!

  Whereas David would usually arrive with a line for a sketch that we’d then flesh out, often my ideas for a character or sketch came from just a phrase someone might say or even an odd vocal mannerism, and then we’d work backwards to figure out how and why someone might say that.

  I remember suggesting a situation where a government adviser was relaying the results of the latest inane round of market research back to the prime minister. We came up with various faddish ideas of what people might have said when questioned. One of them was ‘People would like to see you in shorts more’. David immediately seized on that, and we worked back until he figured out that actually this might have more comic mileage if these weren’t real market research results but instead just a ruse by a smitten aide to try and get the PM into a skimpier outfit for his own pleasure. Thus Sebastian was born. Any similarity he might have had to Peter Mandelson, then a close ally and trusted adviser to the real prime minister, may or may not have been coincidental.

  But occasionally I had the clarity myself to sum up a character in a single line before we put pen to paper. One example was smooth-talking Kenny Craig. ‘A hypnotist who uses his powers offstage but for very small gain,’ I wrote. The example I gave was of him being at the counter at McDonald’s – ‘In a moment I will ask for six chicken McNuggets. You will place nine chicken McNuggets in the box.’

  Incidentally, though we were confident Kenny would work in the radio show, there was uncertainty about Sebastian and the PM. David was a bigger fan of the sketches than I was, but neither of us was wholly sure that they’d get laughs. We wrote them quite late in the process, but wanted them to appear across the series, which meant that even though we’d never performed the characters before, we’d have to record three Sebastian sketches in a night. We were nervous enough about the response to ask our producer Ashley to leave the outside broadcast truck where he’d be listening and come into the theatre and give us a hand signal if he still wanted us to record the third sketch. However, the audience laughed so wildly at the first two that he didn’t need to bother.

  The first series of Little Britain was a success, in the way that a Radio 4 show can be. Which means you don’t really hear much from anyone at the top – or even the middle – but that they let you come back and make some more.

  The Drill Hall wasn’t available, so this time we recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre in Portland Place. When I listened to the episodes back afterwards, I was a bit disappointed, as the sound was flatter, slicker and somewhat muted. The studio was purpose-built for radio, but to me it sounded over-processed and – because so many other shows record there – the same as everyone else’s show. The Drill Hall definitely had more of a live feel.

  In the second radio series we introduced the character that became Ray McCooney, the Scottish hotelier. Here he was just a chef, but he had the same distinct brogue and infuriating manner. We had a lot of fun writing that character, coming up with weird riddles and ridiculous olde-worlde sayings.

  From the radio pilot onwards, we made no secret of our ambitions to transfer to television and often started sentences with ‘When we do this on TV …’ as if it was a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t. Despite the success of the radio show, we still couldn’t command an audience with Jane Root.

  We did, however, manage to attract the attentions of Stuart Murphy, who had recently taken over the reins at the soon-to-be-launched BBC Three. The channel was going to be aimed at viewers in their teens and twenties. It was going to have lots of money invested in it and a great deal of promotion. Stuart wanted to commission us to make a pilot of Little Britain.

  It might sound crazy now, but we were resistant. BBC Three was going to be a cable channel. We’d already made shows for Paramount and UK Play and were worried that if we made Little Britain for yet another new cable channel we’d be blowing our big chance to reach the wider audience we felt this show deserved. It was said that some BBC Three programmes might get a transmission on BBC Two or even BBC One, but there was no assurance.

  We met with Stuart, whose enthusiasm and support was rousing. He said we should go big, and have cameras swooping over the landscape. We liked the sound of that. He also wondered if we might have a funky music soundtrack running beneath the sketches. I could see why – the BBC audience was going to be young, and Dom Joly had had music embedded in Trigger Happy TV to great effect, but we said we thought that it might distract the audience and he said that was fine. We appreciated his support – he had strong ideas but wasn’t using his position to force them on us. He was just a fan of the show and wanted to pitch in and get the thing made.

  We were very flattered by Stuart’s interest, but we were adamant that if we made Little Britain for TV, we needed a proper budget and a guaranteed slot on a mainstream channel. Stuart told us that if we made a pilot for him, he’d show it on BBC Three’s launch night – which was being simultaneously broadcast on BBC Two.

  Meanwhile Graham Linehan, who had co-written Father Ted and Big Train, had become a big champion of the radio shows and offered to produce and direct the TV pilot. Graham was a big, bold, brilliant shock to the system.

  We had promised Stuart and anyone else who would listen that we were not simply going to make a radio show on TV. We would do our best to defy the programme’s radio origins and make it as enjoyable to watch as it had been to listen to. For me, that meant costume and make-up, and fancy camera work. As for everything else, I still believed that if a sketch had been successful on radio, we had effectively earn
ed the right to pretty much just stand it on its feet and point a camera at it.

  However, from day one, Graham was insistent that this was not just a lazy approach, it was also missing a real opportunity. He set about reworking everything. I was resistant at first. I was being over-reverential towards the material. For Graham it held less of a mystique. Often he just wanted to use it as a launch pad to see what else we could do.

  There were tensions in the room, and within a day or two David and Myfanwy – who was producing – made it clear to me that Graham wasn’t obliged to spend his time on our pilot. If I didn’t toe the line, he’d be gone.

  My unwillingness to explore wasn’t to do with ego – I was just genuinely fearful of changing something that we knew already worked. However, I didn’t want to lose Graham’s brilliance, not to mention his passion and positivity. Also, of course, I didn’t want to jeopardise the pilot. Who knows whether Stuart might have pulled the plug if Graham left?

  I took a deep breath and joined Graham, David and Myfanwy on the trip. And what a trip it was. Over the next few weeks we experimented and played around with the material, and wrote some brand new stuff too.

  The first thing Graham wanted to do was to get rid of Marjorie. He felt that she was too similar to The League of Gentlemen’s ‘Pauline’ character. We saw his point – a woman bullying a room full of people – but we really liked the character. It had been one of the most popular sketches in the radio series and we argued that none of the jokes were the same as Pauline’s. The compromise was that Marjorie would remain, but we’d change the setting to make the sketch appear – cosmetically, at least – less similar. Thus the scene in the pilot takes place in Marjorie’s sitting room.