by Matt Lucas
There would be periods of silence, periods of moping, periods of arguing over a word or comma, periods of being stumped on how to end a sketch. Every few weeks we’d gather with our producer Myfanwy and our script editor Mark Gatiss to read out the new stuff.
We rewrote and recast some of the sketches from the pilot and also relocated Marjorie back to the local church hall, as she had been in the radio show.
One set of characters that weren’t in the radio show or the pilot emerged quite late on in the process … Lou and Andy.
David had played a very surreal character in our Paramount sketches in the mid-nineties that we called Cockney Film Star. He looked like Lou Reed and spoke with a funny lisp – though there were never any references in the sketches to Lou Reed.
In 2002 we did some Rock Profile sketches for Ralf Little’s chat show on BBC Choice. We revisited Cockney Film Star – the way he looked and talked – but this time introduced him as Lou Reed, complete with references to his life and career.
Lodging with Lou was Andy Warhol – played by me, for some reason, as a childlike Scouser, the type of person who has to be looked after – and so dim that it was almost as if his great work was just a happy accident. There was an exchange between the two characters that went like this …
LOU: What do you want for your lunch?
ANDY: Chippy.
LOU: That’s fine, but if you have chips for your lunch then you can’t have chips for your tea.
ANDY: Yeah, I know.
LOU: So what do you want for your tea?
ANDY: Chippy.
And so on.
We thought it would be fun to develop the characters further for Little Britain and explore this strange relationship, but they weren’t Lou Reed and Andy Warhol anymore – they didn’t need to be – they were just Lou and Andy. David’s character looked the same, though we wanted to make Andy appear a bit more real-looking.
I had worn a long wig with receding hair and a big pair of specs in Rhys Thomas’s sitcom Fun at the Funeral Parlour and again while repeatedly and manically shouting the word ‘Peanuts’ on Shooting Stars. I loved how odd I looked, and thought the same combination would work nicely with Andy. The heavy prescription lenses magnified my eyes, which made me look more childlike, though it also meant I couldn’t see very well.
We decided Andy was in a wheelchair and Lou was caring for him. The sketches followed a routine of Andy always wanting something in particular, Lou warning him that he wouldn’t like it, Andy being resolute and then immediately regretting his choice.
They didn’t read as particularly funny on the page, but we knew we had something and they quickly became the set of characters that David and I were most excited about. At the first reading, the four of us were crying with laughter. It was just so stupid, the lengths Andy went to in sticking to his guns – despite Lou always offering him a more sensible option.
After the hysteria had died down, Mark and Myfanwy both wondered if we were essentially just laughing at the expense of someone who was disabled. I said that him being in a wheelchair made him more dependent, but didn’t mean that he was mentally disabled, and in my mind he never was – he was just someone who needed a bit of looking after. But Myfanwy felt strongly that, as much as we were all enjoying ourselves, it wasn’t something that we’d be able to defend if people took offence.
I can’t remember who suggested it. It might well have been Mark, actually, but we left that day having agreed that Andy could actually walk perfectly well, and that he was duping Lou. Suddenly this gave a whole new dimension to the sketches. Lou would leave some of the scenes before the end, and the viewers would see Andy up and about, doing ever more fantastical things.
Oddly, while it seemed clear why Andy might do this – laziness! – we never really spent too much time figuring out how this had come about. I’ve always liked the idea that Andy actually did have some kind of injury at some point, and that Lou had cared for him, but then he’d recovered and enjoyed the life of Riley so much that he’d neglected to mention he was now perfectly able.
When we filmed the sketch in the swimming pool – the most popular sketch we ever did – the plan was for Lou to exit to find some assistance and for Andy to jump off the diving board in his absence. We set the camera up and then I realised that Andy’s behaviour would be even more shameless if Lou remained in the foreground, engrossed in conversation, blissfully unaware of what Andy was up to in the background. Pantomime, basically – ‘He’s behind you!’
It worked perfectly, with the happy coincidence of me even landing with a big splash at the exact moment that Lou explains that Andy has ‘a fear of water’. Steve Furst, who joined us in the sketch, and with whom we worked several times over the years, nearly loses it at one point, but just manages to keep it together.
As soon as the director yelled ‘Cut!’, the crew applauded. Because it was all in one shot we were able to watch it back immediately. It had worked as we’d wanted it to, so we didn’t do another take. I felt particularly proud of myself that I’d managed to jump from such a great height. A moment later, as the crew were packing up, the pool reopened to the public and a little boy who could not have been older than five casually sauntered off the same board. I felt a bit less smug.
Despite Andy not being disabled, Myfanwy steeled herself for the inevitable barrage of viewer complaints. We didn’t receive any.
Little Britain premiered on BBC Three and within a couple of episodes I noticed that some newspapers were referring to it. A mention in Richard Littlejohn’s column first, I think, then a cartoon in The Sun with Tony Blair saying ‘No but yeah but …’ This was a big surprise to me. I didn’t think many people were watching the channel. In truth, they weren’t – but those who were were watching us.
Vicky Pollard was the one character people seemed to talk and write about the most. Sometimes you get lucky and just do the right thing at the right time. I wouldn’t call Sacha Baron Cohen lucky – I would call him the funniest man on the planet – but I would say that his timing with Ali G was also perfect. He expertly captured a social type that everyone was familiar with, but no one had pinpointed.
Everyone in Britain had seen someone like Vicky Pollard in their neighbourhood, but no one had nailed it. Catherine Tate did a pretty fantastic job with her character Lauren but, luckily for us, we got there first.
Reviews for the show were almost uniformly positive. Even Victor Lewis-Smith loved it. BBC Three had a big hit on their hands. By the time the series aired on BBC Two we were already a success. When the critics reviewed the first episode for its terrestrial transmission, they wrote about it warmly, having already got to know the characters over the course of the series.
The show received several awards and David and I went off to the BAFTAs, where we found ourselves nominated in competition with each other. We decided it was the first and last time such a situation was going to arise – at least on something we’d worked on together – and from that day onwards we were always nominated jointly.
The show won the first of three BAFTAs and we were the toast of the town.
By the way, I bet you every autobiography has a sentence like that at some point – ‘and we were the toast of the town’. Well, now it’s my turn. In fact, I’m going to say it again – ‘and we were the toast of the town’!
We were up for lots of awards, invited to every opening night. David was in the papers every day, linked to any single female beauty you could think of. I was happier away from the red carpet, at home with Kevin. David would sometimes go to the premiere of a big movie while Kev and I would wait and catch it at the O2 Centre on Finchley Road on a Sunday, kicking our shoes off and wolfing down a giant bag of Haribo Starmix.
I lived with Kevin in West Hampstead then and, whereas before I had been stopped occasionally in the street, now everybody seemed to want to shake my hand. Our mailbag got busier and David and I took on an assistant, who helped with the many autograph requests that were coming
through.
There was a new controller of BBC One – Lorraine Heggessey – who was a big fan of the show and had decided that, after it had screened on BBC Three, the second series should air on her channel. We got to work writing the second series, creating some new characters and retiring others to make way for them.
We gave Emily Howard a sidekick called Florence Rose – my mother’s two middle names. This gave Emily the role of teacher, with Florence as her pupil. Emily was often exasperated by Florence, whose thick moustache, she felt, sometimes gave the game away.
David and I had watched a documentary made by Martin Parr which had featured two Women’s Institute types who were judging a cake contest at a church fete. Despite the low stakes, they seemed to relish their power. I suggested we use them as a starting point and then we wrote a sketch in which, horrified, they would mark down various entrants upon discovering that they were a member of a minority.
As we wrote the second draft, David had an inspired idea – that one of the women was so disgusted on learning that she had sampled something made by someone black or Indian or gay – ‘No more lesbian jam!’ – that she would vomit uncontrollably.
When it came to filming the scenes, we knew that we wanted the vomit to be almost cartoon-like. We felt that this would be the only way to make it palatable – well, as palatable as it would ever be. The puke was made from porridge oats and vegetable soup. As we usually filmed in the hot summer (more daylight, less chance of rain), the heady cocktail, prepared in advance, was left sitting in large barrels, fermenting for hours. By the time it was finally used the smell was horrific. It was all we could do not to throw up for real.
Bitty was inspired by an experience David had recently had at a party where, to his surprise, someone was still breast-feeding their five-year-old. Taking what was already an extreme situation and making it even more so, we found it was a fun way to satirise the oddness of the upper classes with their seemingly impenetrable customs and rituals, as well as the meekness of the middle-class in-laws in their presence. We followed the story of Harvey’s engagement, with Samantha Power playing his fiancée and Geraldine James as Harvey’s mother. Samantha had appeared with us nearly a decade earlier on Paramount and had been a regular in the radio shows, so it was great to be working with her again.
I knew my mother would protest about the Bitty sketch – as she often did about the ruder stuff – so I made a point of watching her as she saw it for the first time, playing out on a big screen in front of the studio audience. When she told me off later, I said I had seen her laughing. ‘You can’t laugh and then complain,’ I said.
The starting point for Bubbles de Vere came from Rock Profile, in which I’d given a pretty ropey impression of Dame Shirley Bassey. It was a fun performance, though – grand, flamboyant, exhibitionist and absurd. What elevated it in Little Britain was the appearance of the character.
David had always been more of a fan of prosthetics than me. He loved how they transformed him, whereas I would feel buried beneath the layers of latex, convinced I was being both hammy and wooden at the same time. Often when I watched someone on TV in prosthetics I found it distracting. However, we began to embrace them as the show went on, not least because we played so many characters and were keen to keep them looking distinctive.
The face and body make-up for Bubbles took six hours to apply, so the shoot days – already long – were hard on me and on Lisa Cavalli-Green, our amazing make-up designer. The outfit was heavy and restrictive and it is the nature of foam that as soon as you put it on it starts deteriorating, so I was perpetually followed around by a bunch of anxious make-up artists, constantly re-gluing flapping cheeks and torn breasts! I’d be tired and grumpy from the weight and the heat, and by the third day the suit had absorbed so much sweat that it gained ten pounds.
When it came to the second series, our director Steve Bendelack was making a movie, so Matt Lipsey took over. Myfanwy became pregnant with twins so we also needed to find a new producer. We struck gold with Geoff Posner, about as experienced a comedy director and producer as you will find. He has worked with everyone from Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies through to Steve Coogan, Lenny Henry, Victoria Wood, French and Saunders, Harry Enfield and beyond.
When the second series premiered on BBC Three, we were gobsmacked to learn that 1.8 million people had tuned in to the first episode. That was more than had been watching at the same time on BBC Two. Channel Controller Stuart Murphy was delighted.
While the media charted our success and continued to write about us daily, there was a definite change of opinion among the critics who, across the board, slated the second series. I think this was partly a response to the fact that we were no longer a little comedy show – we had become a cultural phenomenon. Also the programme was repeated endlessly so it became over-familiar. But mainly, I think, it was because the second series was much cruder and bolder than the first. Even Dafydd’s outfits went from the sort of stuff you could actually buy in Old Compton Street to crazy costumes that had to be specially made.
By the time the third series was transmitted, we were bigger than ever, scoring over twelve million viewers for our opening episode on BBC One. The critics no longer concealed their disdain – which was all the greater because of their powerlessness to reduce the size of the audience. The public had taken the show to their hearts.
It wasn’t just the TV critics who poured their scorn on us. Headline-hungry columnists penned ‘Am I The Only Person Who HATES Little Britain?’ pieces, while a few pages later, the gossip columns led with photos of us doing mundane things – waiting for a cab or tying a shoelace.
The third series had an extra level of stress on top of that, as, behind the scenes, someone involved in the show was selling the schedule to one of the paparazzi. He knew exactly where we’d be, right down to which side of a building we’d be filming in front of. He also knew where we were being picked up from in the morning and dropped off in the evening.
During filming, he’d set up his camera right next to ours, as if he was part of the crew. It frustrated me because it meant that secrets from the show were being given away, or that images of characters appeared – shot while we were rehearsing – in which the make-up or costume was incomplete. The worst aspect, though, was that it made many of us paranoid about which trusted team member was leaking the information.
In the end we just had to let him film the rehearsal. Failure to do so meant he would have lingered distractingly next to the camera throughout filming and got his shots anyway. He showed his true class when he continued to snap us while we stood observing a minute’s silence for those who had lost their lives in the 7 July bombings a few days earlier. After the silence was over our producer Geoff confronted him, and he replied, ‘Don’t start, Geoff. I had a friend in that.’
Looking back, I’m as certain as can be that I’ve figured out who it was who was giving away the schedule. I’ll keep that to myself, though.
In one way – for me at least – the third series was easier. We had at last acquired a special cooling vest, which I could wear underneath the Bubbles outfit, and which would have made Heath Robinson proud. It was a T-shirt with thin tubing sewn into it, which had a nozzle on the end that could be attached to a box with icy water in it. A car battery would power the water and make it pass through the tubing. The noise of the makeshift invention meant that it couldn’t be used during a take, but during filming breaks it would be deployed frequently. It not only made me more comfortable, but it also meant that the make-up survived for longer as I didn’t get so hot.
In the years since Little Britain, one of the things we’ve been accused of – and the same thing has happened with Come Fly with Me – is racism. I was unprepared for this. The conceit of both shows was a) to reflect contemporary British life and b) that the two of us played as many characters as possible, and as many different types as possible – fat, thin, tall, short, straight, gay, male, female, young, old. David and I saw
playing different races simply as part of that. For instance, we never thought Marjorie was funny because a man was playing a woman.
There had been a time a few decades earlier when some white comics thought the very act of playing someone black was funny in itself, and then there was a time when that rightly fell by the wayside and hardly anybody played anything other than their own race. But we made Little Britain and Come Fly with Me in a small window of time when many considered it acceptable once more to play people of all colours.
When Vic and Bob played Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye, they darkened their skin. Harry Enfield did the same when he played Nelson Mandela. Chris Morris did it in The Day Today. Eddie Murphy played an old white Jewish man in Coming to America and Lenny Henry played Steve Martin. It was a different era.
I understand the response that some modern audiences have to this aspect of our work. Of course I wouldn’t have turned up in Coronation Street playing someone of another race, but within the world of our show, where we wanted to reflect the multi-culture of Britain – and in the context of what our contemporaries of all races were doing or had recently done – it didn’t feel aggressive or divisive and I don’t remember it being taken that way either, at the time.
Britain felt very very different – even seven years ago – to the way it feels now, in this jittery post-Brexit referendum era. Ditto the US, with Donald Trump and the rise of the Alt-Right. Racial tensions existed, of course, but they hadn’t risen to the surface the way they have done of late. Labour were in government. We didn’t see those horrendous YouTube clips of drunken racists abusing immigrants on the bus that seem to have become the norm these days. And we didn’t have newspapers giving column inches to nasty opportunists like Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins, spouting their repulsive anti-Muslim polemic.