by Matt Lucas
One of the stand-out sketches from the pilot was our take on Dennis Waterman. It might have been Graham’s idea – I don’t remember now – but we decided to shrink Dennis, literally making him the size of a child onscreen. We knew that we could use CGI to achieve the effect but we were adamant that the sketches would be more fun if we used more innocent, old-fashioned techniques. Two replica sets were built – one in each size – and the action cuts between the two. The props were made twice and often we’d defy the rules of ratio in pursuit of the biggest laugh.
When it came to making the series, my favourite Dennis moment is when he is terrified by a mouse – which is actually played by a man in a purposefully ropey costume. As if to play up the shameless stupidity of the moment, the mouse actor simply opens the door and walks out of the office.
Incidentally, it might amuse you to learn that the animal handler who brought along the real mouse that day flinched and shuddered as she placed it on the desk. When I asked if she was all right, she told me she was terrified of mice. To which I thought, well, if you’re terrified of mice, there are literally tens of thousands of jobs in the world which don’t in any way involve handling mice. Just putting it out there …
Also, please notice, if you will, the correct use of the word ‘literally’ in the above paragraph. Yes, believe it or not, I have opted to use the word ‘literally’ to actually mean ‘literally’, rather than ‘figuratively’. A novel move, you will agree. Millennials – take note.
In the radio show I had played the prime minister in the Sebastian sketches. When we were casting the TV pilot, we all agreed that we would need someone far dishier and more authoritative (and, I like to think, older) to play the prime minister opposite Sebastian. We decided to look for a ‘Tony Head-type’. For some reason, it wasn’t until we were quite far along in the casting process that some bright spark actually suggested we approach the man himself. We doubted he’d be either available or interested, as he was then happily ensconced in Hollywood, playing Rupert Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but by chance we caught him during the show’s hiatus and he liked the script enough to say yes.
We didn’t actually meet him until he’d already accepted our offer. Lucky for us, then, that he was not only perfect in the role, but also warm and friendly and a great team player. The farcical nature of the sketches meant that they continually evolved during rehearsals, sometimes even being rewritten on the day of filming. Tony was either at ease with this, or he simply didn’t let on! Either way, we could not have found a better prime minister. He made him Blair-like, without ever doing a distracting impersonation. He understood exactly what was needed, and knew how to make the character authoritative yet strangely vulnerable, and always real.
For TV we had to decide what our teenage delinquent Vicky Pollard would look like. We’d seen the cover of an issue of Time Out magazine some years earlier that had featured two feisty teenage girls from Brighton, all pigtails, snarls and too much eyeliner, glaring provocatively at the camera. I’d shown this page to David and we’d kept it, rather optimistically, for reference should it ever come in handy.
In a costume-hire store we came across a bright pink Kappa top. It amused us to think that this was what Vicky would wear in court – which was the setting for the pilot sketch. It didn’t occur to us that she would wear this as frequently as she did, but we never found anything else that seemed to work as well. Ditto Marjorie Dawes, with her royal blue jacket and purple culottes. Incidentally, years later I was at the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas when a man approached me with an angry look on his face. He told me he was head of Kappa in the UK and that the company blamed the fact that Vicky wore a Kappa top for a sharp downturn in the brand’s fortunes! As I write this, a decade or so later, I’m delighted to see Kappa has been reborn.
On the night of the BBC Three launch we went to Television Centre and were interviewed by Johnny Vaughan. The following day we had a few reviews and it was generally well received – no raves, but no drubbings either. Stuart called and said he’d love us to do a series. BBC Three would put up half the money …
Which brings us back to 20 August 2002 and that glass-walled office, where Jane Root continued to stare into the distance. We watched patiently.
We were used to being patient. It had taken eight patient years of patient slog and patient graft just to get into the BBC Two Controller’s office.
‘We’ve got Tom Baker,’ I proffered.
‘Yes, and Tony Head,’ David added.
‘Well, that just means I can’t put it on after Manchild.’
And then, again, silence.
Jon Plowman turned to her. ‘Jane, I urge you to commission this show.’
The assistant reappeared at the door. Jane really would be late for the opera if she didn’t leave now. Root sighed and mumbled a few words. And with that, we were ushered out.
And I really wasn’t sure if Little Britain had just been commissioned or not.
I turned to David. ‘Did she just say yes?’
‘Um … I think so.’
‘She did,’ said Jon.
‘You sure?’
‘Yup,’ he replied.
David and I turned to each other. ‘YAHOOOOOOO!!!’ we screamed, as we ran along the corridors of TV Centre, hugging and kissing strangers in our path. ‘We’re gonna be the biggest fucking stars on the planet!!!’
No, of course we didn’t. We just got in the lift and went down.
Words by
Matt Lucas
Music by
Matt Lucas and Alicia Witt
Middle of the Book
Music Arranged,
Performed and Produced by
Kevan Frost
Vocals Performed by
Matt Lucas
To hear the song please visit middleofthebook.com
N – Nearest and Dearest
My dad John was born in 1944 and my mum Diana a year later. Dad grew up in East Finchley and Mum not far away in Golders Green. He was with a group of lads that gatecrashed her birthday party. They started dating and before long they were engaged. They married in 1968 and moved a few miles further out to the north-west London suburb of Stanmore. You’ll find it at the top of the Jubilee line.
Dad’s father Harry had been a respected figure in the community. He was a successful accountant and once stood as a Labour candidate. My father was expected to follow him into the business, but chose instead to forge his own path, starting up a company that traded in aluminium.
Mum worked for the BBC World Service. She’d been George Melly’s secretary at one point. On one occasion she interviewed her father Maurice Williams, one of Britain’s most celebrated philatelists and, with his brother Leon Norman Williams, a prolific writer and a regular face on TV.
When they married, Dad felt it was no longer appropriate for his wife to make the long journey into town every day, so she quit and took a part-time job at a travel agent’s instead.
In 1971 my older brother Howard was born, and then I came along in 1974. Home life was typical, middle-class, English and Jewish. Our parents would go out once or twice a week in the evening to see friends – they had many – but otherwise Howard and I would sit in front of the TV, then Dad would come home from work and we’d squeal with laughter at a Laurel and Hardy or Harold Lloyd short together while Mum cooked, and then we’d all eat together.
At night the landing light would be left on and the door ajar, as my brother and I lay in our bunks, squinting at Roald Dahl and Ponder and William when we should have been asleep. It was no surprise that we both soon had to wear glasses.
Howard enjoyed the benefits of being the older one. He had the top bunk and would tell me he had sweets for me, so I’d climb up to see him repeatedly, only to find it was a wind-up. At school he’d protect me; at home he’d terrorise me – the usual brotherly stuff. When we played in the garden on a see-saw (which went round and round as well as up and down), Howard would swing it round at speed, and as his leg
s were longer than mine I was at his mercy, growing dizzy. He’d stop suddenly, then stand on his seat so that I was suspended in the air. When he was ready he’d step off and I’d come crashing down helplessly to the ground with a thud. The most elaborate prank he played on me involved a letter he’d faked from Matthew Corbett, which left me sitting patiently on the stairs in my best clothes, waiting all afternoon for Sooty, Sweep and Soo to arrive and take me out for the day.
At weekends we’d see our grandmothers – both now widowed. My dad’s mother Fay was far less strict than Mum’s mother Margot, who doted on us but made clear her disapproval if we were ill-mannered or not paying attention.
In the school holidays we went to Golders Hill Park or were taken into central London to see the sights, visit exhibitions, even to attend classical music concerts. Fun tended to have an element of education attached. We went to the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Imperial War Museum and many more. My favourite was MOMI, the short-lived but rather wonderful Museum of the Moving Image, situated on the South Bank. They had actors there who would wander around in character, interacting with the public. One, in Soviet military uniform, attempted to usher us onto a train carriage which was screening an Eisenstein film. Grandma pulled me away tightly – ‘We are not being ordered around by a Russian!’
We’d swim whenever we could. At Harrow Leisure Centre we’d enjoy the outdoor pool in the summer, or the two indoor ones. My head was always turned by the line of arcade machines that formed a path towards the changing rooms, but they were usually occupied by older, more confident boys. If I was lucky enough to get a go, they’d chew gum next to me impatiently, rolling their eyes and swearing quietly as they endured the short wait it took for me to lose my pennies.
There were three pools at Copthall: a main pool, a kids’ pool and a diving pool. An oft-repeated rumour went round that someone had belly-flopped from the top board and their stomach had split open and they’d died instantly – but that didn’t stop us.
Sometimes Dad would take me and Howard to watch Arsenal. My father had flipped over the handlebars of his pushbike when he was fourteen, causing serious injury. The surgeon who operated on him also happened to be surgeon to the Arsenal team. My father spent the best part of a year recuperating and was very kindly given Arsenal tickets while he did so. He passed his love of the club on to Howard, who passed it on to me. I was excited when we made the trip to Highbury every few months to see a game, though it would be a few years until I found myself able to follow it. As a youngster I thought the matches themselves crushingly dull and impenetrable, but the sense of occasion, of being part of something, and of being with my family appealed to me greatly. I couldn’t wait to get dressed up in my red and white top, scarf and hat, and chant with the others.
When I was seven we holidayed in Corsica with some family friends. The mums cooed over the royal wedding of Charles and Diana on TV, which bored us kids and our dads rigid. Mum would talk of little else for weeks and even bought a souvenir videocassette case to house the tape she had recorded the wedding on. Dad had set the video, because Mum could never work out how to do it.
I thought the video recorder was extraordinary. I’d first come across one in 1979 when some family friends went away for a couple of weeks and let us borrow theirs. I sat in the lounge and watched The Wizard of Oz, nearly wetting myself in terror. I was desperate for the loo, but didn’t realise the film could be paused. I also assumed if I walked in front of the TV while it was playing, my image would be superimposed onto the film, ruining the tape forever.
A year later we hired our own video recorder. It came with a free copy of that most ghoulish of disaster movies, The Poseidon Adventure. I watched it endlessly, gradually becoming immune to the suffering of the characters, their fate already clear.
Childhood seemed to involve having the same books read to me and watching the same TV shows and films over and over again. It never bothered me that I knew what was going to happen. Like many children I found reassurance and comfort in familiarity. When we rented films from the local video shop, I’d usually watch them twice in twenty-four hours, and more often than not I’d already seen the damn thing in the cinema anyway.
At Christmas I would commandeer the video recorder, buying the Radio Times and TV Times at the earliest possible opportunity, highlighting what I would be watching and what I would be taping. It was a military operation, with charts drawn up and clear notices stuck on the recorder – ‘MATT IS RECORDING! DO NOT TOUCH!’ For my birthday each year I’d ask for blank videocassettes.
I’ve already mentioned my parents’ separation. It was during the school holidays in 1984 that Howard and I were sat down and given the news. Dad said he would move out shortly, but wouldn’t go far, and said he would still come and see us often. He confessed he’d been sleeping downstairs in the living room for a while, putting his bedding away each morning before we woke up.
I was gobsmacked. I had heard of couples splitting up, and of rows and shouting, but there hadn’t been any of that, to my knowledge. They told us that we weren’t to blame and that we would not be affected by the split. The former might have been true, but the latter was a naive, unsustainable promise, given the anger and recriminations that were soon to rise to the surface.
Once separated, battle lines were drawn. Our parents generally maintained a frosty civility when they came into contact, but when not in each other’s presence, neither of them hid from my brother or me their disdain for and frustration with each other. If I was with my dad, sentences would often angrily begin with ‘Thanks to your mother …’, and she was the same towards my father.
My parents had been very sociable and had had a seemingly endless supply of friends – mainly other Jewish couples of a similar age. In the separation, many of them were also divided, like belongings. Sometimes one parent would express disappointment over the loss of a particular friend or relative, whom he or she felt had unfairly taken the side of the other.
Divorce was not common back then. I only knew one friend, Jeremy, whose parents had been through it. He said it would be all right, that I’d get used to it. Meanwhile I harboured hopes that the separation would be temporary and that things might one day get back to normal. However, my hopes failed to materialise. The relationship had broken down irretrievably. My mother had fallen in love with someone else.
After Dad left, our house went on the market, so it became the norm to have people come to view it. One Saturday he mentioned to me and Howard that a lady called Andie was coming to look at the house, and it so happened that she was a friend of his. He said she also went to our synagogue and we should be nice to her. Of course she was already a good deal more than a friend, but this was a clever, less pressured way of introducing us. He told us later she had been the only woman he had dated, following the end of his marriage. He said he had gone to a singles group – where everyone had looked glum, except for her. She was smiling.
She didn’t actually have all that much to smile about. Only a year or two earlier she had lost her husband to a terrible illness. She had two kids, Darren and Barbra, a little older than my brother and me. The first time we met them, at their house, I groaned – and so did Darren. I knew him from Hebrew classes. He was one of the kids who’d teased me for not having any hair, so much so that his parents had been called in to see the headmaster. However, all former rivalries were instantly forgotten and we got along famously – despite his love of Tottenham Hotspur. I was always happy to spend time with Barbra as well. She thought I was cute as a button. She always made a fuss of me and we’d sit on her bed, listening to Duran Duran, George Michael and Phil Collins, playing with her kittens and chatting about our favourite TV shows.
Dad had been planning to buy a small house, but before long he moved in with Andie, Barbra and Darren instead; and soon he and Andie got married. Andie was gregarious, outspoken, an extrovert, always busy, often cooking. She could be strict with us too. While Howard and I were pleas
ed that our father had met someone else, our mother and grandmother were quite strict already and there was an interminable amount of being told what to do from our teachers at school, so neither of us particularly wanted to have yet another figure of authority in our lives. Once we were a little older, we got along better with her. We were less brattish, and she was able to relax and not feel any obligation to be parental. A relief all round!
My father set up a new business as a high-end cab driver. He got hold of a second-hand Mercedes, worked tirelessly and built up contracts with regular customers. He would frequently drive Lord and Lady Caledon, whom he was very fond of. He also regularly drove the singer Lynsey de Paul and she once sent him to deliver a bouquet of flowers for a friend. He knocked on the door and out came Freddie Mercury, in a dressing gown. My two favourite men just met each other, I remember thinking to myself, though I scolded him too for not returning with an autograph.
I loved hearing of the celebs he’d driven – the Pet Shop Boys, TV-am weather girl Wincey Willis, Trevor McDonald, Jools Holland, Michael Fish. He arrived early once at the home of Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee, who kindly invited him in for breakfast. He drove Roy Orbison, who he had been a huge fan of, and also – most surreal of all – spent a weekend chauffeuring the Afrikaner white supremacist Eugène Terre’Blanche, who expressed gratitude that my father could voice vastly opposing political views without resorting to abuse.
One job sticks in my mind most of all. One day my father mentioned that he was now regularly driving one of the boys in my year to school. I was surprised that news hadn’t already got back to me. The boy in question knew that it was my dad who was driving him and he never mentioned it to me or – as far as I know – to anyone else. I was grateful for this. Other boys at Haberdashers’ would have sneered at me if they knew that my father drove one of the other boys to school for a living. The main thing I felt, however, was envy. I wished I could spend as much time with my dad as this boy.