Little Me

by Matt Lucas

  There is one caveat to this, however – Ting Tong, the Thai ladyboy. I thought we got the tone of those sketches wrong.

  There had been a few documentaries on TV about Thai brides and the downtrodden men who went abroad to find them. Often the marriages didn’t work, with unions taking place too quickly and expectations on both sides unmet.

  David and I had seen these shows and when we arrived after a few weeks off to begin work writing the third series, we discovered we had both come up with the same idea – to use the Western Man/Thai Bride relationship as the basis for a set of sketches.

  Somewhere along the way, however, we ended up producing something that was too rudimentary and insensitive. We hadn’t worked hard enough to create an interesting character in Ting Tong. My performance was crude and simplistic and hard to defend. I have a feeling that if we hadn’t spent all the time and money on those prosthetics we might have reviewed those sketches and cut them out of the show.

  We can’t change the past. But we can change the future. One of the things I’m asked often is whether we might do more Little Britain or Come Fly with Me.

  If we did, then I wouldn’t play Precious now, or Taaj. As it happens, in the case of Precious, I think we pretty much did the joke anyway, so although it was some people’s favourite, I’m not sure what else we’d have done with her. Taaj, on the other hand, has lots of life in him. I’d be very happy for me and David to bring Taaj back and have an Asian actor play him.

  An accusation levelled at us at the time, which I think was made an issue by people needing to fill column inches rather than being a genuine concern, was ‘class tourism’. The argument that we were posh boys specifically belittling working-class characters in our shows doesn’t hold up for me. Yes, Vicky and Lou and Andy are working class, but Marjorie and Carol Beer are resolutely middle class, and we had plenty of upper-class idiots in our show too, like Sir Bernard and the characters in the Bitty sketches.

  It only took one journalist to accuse us of ‘class tourism’ before every other interviewer asked us to defend ourselves against the charges. I had no idea how to respond, because to me it was such a manufactured concern. David pointed out more stridently that a ban on people writing about anyone other than those from their own social class would mean we’d never have had Shakespeare, Dickens, Mozart etc., so where does it end?

  Little Britain had its fans and its dissenters, but even after the press turned on it, it remained the highest-rating TV comedy in the UK.

  It was time to take it on the road.

  S – Southend, Sydney and Sunset Boulevard

  It was hard to believe that it had been eight years since David and I had done our last live show. Back then, in 1997, I had figured we would effectively be a live act, especially given how rude our material was, but in fact, because of Rock Profile and Little Britain, we had done very little live work together since.

  We had a wildly enthusiastic response from the audience in April 2004 when we performed a handful of sketches – Lou & Andy, Vicky Pollard, the Prime Minister & Sebastian, and Dafydd – at a benefit for the Teenage Cancer Trust at the Royal Albert Hall. It was Little Britain’s first live outing. Alan Partridge, Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais were all on the bill that night too. I really felt we’d arrived.

  Little Britain Live sold out within two hours of going on sale – over 250,000 tickets – before a single word had been written. Phil McIntyre produced the show, which was to open in the autumn of 2005. We met various potential directors and chose Jeremy Sams, who had been responsible for a recent production of Noises Off in the West End and on Broadway. I had seen it and could not remember an audience laughing so much at anything before or since. Jeremy understood perfectly the pace we needed to hit, and was generous too, coming up with great gags which we’d throw in. We couldn’t have wished for a better director.

  Despite knowing that we’d have tons of costume and make-up changes, David and I were keen to be onstage together as much as possible. We felt that was what the audience wanted to see.

  Jeremy helped us put it all together and figure out the right order for the scenes. He also conceived a fantastic set where whole rooms could slide on and offstage with ease. It looked high-tech and computerised, but in actual fact was completely mechanical, with stagehands in the wings manically placing furniture on tracks and pulling levers. Behind us was a huge screen, with projected backdrops. After each sketch Tom Baker’s voiceover would play and the projection would take the audience on a point-of-view journey across Britain to the next destination.

  Backstage there was organised chaos. The make-up and costume changes took place immediately behind the projected screen. I’d arrive and within seconds Jeremy Rent would become Marjorie Dawes. Sometimes we’d have to wear three costumes, one on top of the other, as there was only time to rip one off, not pull one on. We’d just have to stand still, arms out, while three or four costume and make-up assistants would transform us, while a sound guy fixed the microphone. It was like a Formula One pit stop.

  The show began in Portsmouth, the same town where we’d stormed it eight years earlier with Sir Bernard’s Grand Tour. We were very nervous, as we’d only had four days of technical rehearsals – one of the toughest weeks of my working life. There wasn’t enough time and the show was beginning to feel over-ambitious. Props didn’t work, parts of the set hadn’t arrived, costume and make-up changes were taking too long and the projected footage was still being created.

  Opening night. We went for an early Chinese meal nearby, too nervous to eat much, then returned to the theatre. Expectations were high and several of the newspapers had sent reviewers. There was to be no West End or Broadway-style preview period. We had a few technical problems that night, but we got away with it. The reviews – for the first time in a couple of years – were great.

  Over the next eighteen months we performed the show over 250 times, playing to over 800,000 people. It went into the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest comedy tour of all time. When we came to London we played the Hammersmith Apollo, and ended up doing more nights there than any other comedy act in its history.

  The strangest thing of all, though, was that we became the first British comedy tour to play arenas.

  Rob Newman and David Baddiel had done a night at Wembley Arena some years earlier to celebrate the end of their tour. Our producers Phil and Paul had suggested we do an arena show in Manchester ‘just as an experiment’. It was added on to the end of the first touring block, just before we broke for Christmas on 20 December 2005. We were very tired by then, as it was our ninth night performing in a row. During the days we would modify the show, even writing new stuff, and David, extraordinarily, would also train for his sensational swim across the English Channel.

  At the interval David and I came offstage utterly despondent.

  ‘No one’s laughing,’ we said. ‘It’s a disaster.’

  Phil and Paul were jubilant, however. ‘What? It’s a triumph!’

  We were baffled. We hadn’t been able to hear the audience the way we’d done in the smaller theatres – but in the vast auditorium it had been a completely different story, with the crowd in hysterics.

  And that’s how we ended up doing over forty arena dates.

  Suddenly we had to factor in big screens and cameras. It changed our timing – partly because it was taking a lot longer for the sound of the audience laughing to reach us (we added special microphones in the audience, relaying the laughter to us, via speakers on the stage) and partly because the audience were now primarily watching the screens. It meant we were doing a sort of hybrid of a live show and a TV show. Each of us needed to be onscreen at the time of a joke, or it didn’t get as big a laugh. I would have to wait to see the red light in the distance, out of the corner of my eye, denoting which camera was showing on the big screen at that moment and adjust my timing accordingly.

  But it worked. Although we hadn’t been on a stage for a long time, our years of live experienc
e paid off. Many people were expecting a cash-in, but actually I think the stage show was better than the TV show in many ways.

  Joining us on tour were Paul Putner and Samantha Power, and we’d find a local girl in each city to do a brief walk-on. That was it – apart from the poor folk who were dragged out of the crowd!

  David did his audience participation bit in the first half, as children’s entertainer Des Kaye – ‘Wicky Woo!’ During a game of ‘Hide the Sausage’ he would almost always wrestle the trousers off some poor lad. You could never get away with that today. In fact he didn’t always get away with it then. Sometimes David would get a clout for his troubles and I’d see him in the wings afterwards, nursing a sore ear.

  In the second half, in an age before ‘fat-shaming’ was considered the antisocial activity it is today, Marjorie would head into the audience to find someone willing to go through the very public ordeal of a FatFighters weigh-in. I learned quickly that it was often better to find a man, as the audience – and I – would feel guilty laughing at a woman in the same way.

  When the show came to London, Tony Head appeared as the PM, much to the audience’s delight. He was our little surprise, which helped lift the show as it reached a climax. Ruth Jones guested too, as Myfanwy.

  Some months earlier we’d made a special episode of Little Britain for Comic Relief – with guest appearances by George Michael, Robbie Williams and Sir Elton John. In a meeting I wondered aloud whether the BBC might permit us to sell the episode on DVD in shops ahead of its transmission on Red Nose Day. Within days HMV and Sainsbury’s had agreed to sell the DVD exclusively. In just a couple of weeks we sold over 600,000 copies and raised an additional £2 million for the charity.

  During the London leg of the Little Britain tour, we decided to do a special night in aid of Comic Relief. Some clangs coming up. Ready? Okay, here we go … Peter Kay, Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, Dawn French, Peter Serafinowicz, Patsy Kensit and Kate Thornton all joined in – and poor Jeremy Edwards lost his trousers and nearly his underpants, thanks to Des Kaye – but the highlight for me was the appearance of the real Dennis Waterman.

  We were nervous enough during the day, rehearsing so many people. It was a big ask of everybody. When Dennis arrived, we wondered how he’d be with us, given that we’d heard people did our bizarre high-pitched impression of him everywhere he went. I think he could see that we were a bit apprehensive – like a pair of naughty schoolboys – but he was delightful. When he appeared onstage during our sketch, it took a moment for the audience to figure out what was happening. He then got the biggest, most deserved cheer of the night. As he took centre stage and broke into ‘I Could Be So Good For You’, with full backing track, the audience went wild. David and I clapped and sang along behind him. My friend Alex Godfrey observed – correctly – that he’d never seen such a big grin on my face. I can confirm that it was and probably will always be the happiest moment of my career.

  During rehearsals for the Comic Relief gig, David had been very stressed. We tended to react differently to pressure. He would brood, while I’d go and eat my body weight in chocolate. If we had differences, we’d usually either think ‘I’ll let that one go’ or deal with it there and then, before it became an issue. I’ve heard stories of people throttling each other or walking out on tour, but we really only had two proper arguments in the whole eighteen months’ period, both before the show.

  One was in Oxford when I was getting a rash on my face because we had to kiss passionately (as Judy and Maggie) and he had stopped shaving every day. He took exception to the notion that I had said it was ‘painful’ rather than ‘uncomfortable’ – and we were suddenly hurling obscenities at each other. Another time we bickered in Canberra over nothing – we were near the end of the tour by then and were probably just fed up with each other. On both occasions we sorted it out within an hour, hugged and did the show. That was as dramatic as we got. I think it helped that we travelled separately, which meant we had our own space. We were supposed to have separate dressing rooms too, but if there was enough space we actually preferred to share. That way we could talk about how the show was going and figure out if we wanted to add or change anything.

  We found that audiences were warmer and more enthusiastic the further away we were from London. The only place we found impenetrable was Brighton. We had a few shows there and at a couple of them the audience seemed almost inconvenienced by our presence, as if they’d been expecting someone else and we’d stumbled in by mistake.

  When I got the tour schedule through, I had kept an eye out for one venue in particular: I had a score to settle. On 5 February 2006, over ten years after I was booed off in the early hours, I returned to the Edinburgh Playhouse. Compared to the enormous arenas we had somehow found ourselves playing, what had once felt like an imposing place now felt nice and cosy. We had a great show. Even better, Craig and Charlie Reid – aka The Proclaimers – came along with their families and their manager Kenny. I would clang 500 clangs!

  We had quite a few special visitors to our show, mainly in London. Sir Elton John and Kylie Minogue came; and one night we kept Kate Moss and Pete Doherty waiting in the bar because we were busy chatting to Sir Paul McCartney. David said afterwards that he had had a voice in his head throughout the show, which he could hear after every single line – ‘I wonder what Paul McCartney thought of that joke. I wonder what Paul McCartney thought of that joke. I wonder what Paul McCartney thought of that joke.’

  I haven’t bothered with the clangs, because I don’t know if any of the people I just mentioned are that big a deal.

  We really enjoyed our residency in London. The show was finely honed by then and also the Hammersmith Apollo is great for comedy. It’s big enough for it to feel like an event, but small enough for it to feel intimate.

  Every night at Hammersmith we had friends and family in, many of whom we’d barely seen as we’d been on the road for a year. Joe, a younger cousin of mine, who was studying at Haberdashers’ at the time, came along and told me afterwards that one of my old school teachers had seen the show a few days earlier.

  ‘Oh, she should have come backstage and said hello!’ I cried.

  ‘I told her that, but she said she thought it was a bit rude.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been rude at all,’ I replied. ‘I’d love to have seen her.’

  ‘No – she said the show was rude.’

  The day after we finished in London, Kevin and I had our civil partnership ceremony and then, a few weeks later, Little Britain Live headed off to Australia.

  My oldest friend Jeremy and his wife Lauren had emigrated there the year before, and Kevin and I were very happy to be able to spend time with them. I also got to appear in Kath & Kim as Sharon’s half-sister Karen. Kevin and I had met Jane Turner, Gina Riley and Gina’s husband Rick a couple of years earlier in London and had become good friends.

  David and I found it bizarre that we were so famous in a country we’d never visited before. The thing that struck me most about Australia was that it felt closer to home than Paris, despite the geographical distance. The Australian tour was a sell-out and we ended up playing to over 100,000 people.

  We also met up a couple of times with Billy Crystal, who was touring his ‘700 Sundays’ show around Australia at the same time. Kevin and I had seen it on Broadway a couple of years earlier. I thought it was the greatest comedy show I’d ever seen and I bombarded Billy with questions. I’m not sure what he made of our show – it had become increasingly vulgar as the tour went on – but he was very polite!

  We were also making a documentary about our Australian visit, and so we caught up with Dame Edna Everage. Barry Humphries had been a huge influence on both of us. We’d met him a few times before and always knew we were in the presence of greatness.

  We were treated royally by the Australians and it remains one of my favourite places in the world. We went to watch a Little Britain tribute drag show; we launched the Mardi Gras (with me in character a
s Dafydd); and we paid a visit to perhaps the most famous road in Australia – certainly the most famous in Erinsborough – Ramsay Street. I had watched Neighbours as a kid and so we jumped at the chance to lurk in the background at the Scarlet Bar as Lou and Andy, alongside Harold Bishop, Paul Robinson, Toadfish and co.

  Apart from our brief squabble in Canberra, David and I had a wonderful time in Australia. The only thing that truly upset us was that one of the audience members went backstage after the show one night and stole the Dennis Waterman wig! Aside from the fact that it cost several thousand pounds to make, it meant that the make-up team had to hastily improvise with another wig for the rest of the tour and the character didn’t look quite as he should. The person who stole the wig then got in contact, saying they would return it if they could have dinner with us, but we didn’t really fancy it, funnily enough.

  It wasn’t the first time something had gone missing backstage. Years earlier, during the Shooting Stars tour, my pink romper suit had been pinched by some drunken staff who worked for the sponsorship company. I had flipped out – it was only two weeks after my father had died – and threatened to destroy the large sponsorship logo that sat on the stage. The suit was returned. Another time Paul Putner and Tim Atack had their wallets pinched from the dressing room during a preview of our show at the Battersea Arts Centre. When the wig went missing, it wasn’t the cost or the inconvenience that freaked me out – both of those could be dealt with, ultimately. It was the sense that someone – anyone – could walk into our dressing room. Even when we recorded our Little Britain radio shows, I would bring my bag onstage with me!

  The tour finished in Perth. David, Kevin and I were rushed out of the venue and off to the airport, where we flew through the night to Tokyo, barely grabbing a wink of sleep. Little Britain was being released on TV and DVD in Japan and we had agreed to go on a promotional tour. We were fascinated by Tokyo, but we were exhausted from the tour and the lack of sleep. I had caught a cold on the plane and spent the day blowing my nose while talking to journalists, only discovering later that this is frowned upon in Japanese company.