DAVID WALLIAMS
Camp David
The Autobiography
MICHAEL JOSEPH
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
1 A Religious Start
2 The Demon and the Ogre
3 A Dutch Nudist Camp
4 The First Laugh
5 ‘Don’t do it!’
6 Theatrical Types
7 The White Rabbit
8 Kenny Everett on a Monorail
9 ‘Age cannot wither her’
10 ‘A couple of queers’
11 A Swimmer Who Dabbles in Comedy
12 Enter Daffyd
13 The Bongos
14 A Giant Egg
15 One Person Laughing
16 Learning to Love an Oddball
17 Hant & Dec
18 Mash ’n’ Peas
19 ‘An anal misogynist cul-de-sac’
20 ‘Asleep in yesterday’s suit’
21 A Surprise Guest Star
22 ‘An Old Pile of Rubbish’
23 Goblin or Hobgoblin?
24 ‘Pick up the phone, let’s fight’
25 A Poetic Soul
26 Two Words
27 The Comedy Pope
28 In Bed with Rob Brydon
29 4.48 a.m.
30 ‘Don’t fall in love here’
31 ‘Yeah, I know’
32 Tonight Is Forever
Illustrations
Permissions
Acknowledgements
For Lara.
How I wish I had met you sooner …
x
‘When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one.’
Alice in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Introduction
May I begin by offering my sincere apologies. If you have bought this book assuming it was a history of the President of the United States’ country retreat, sorry.
This is the autobiography of a camp British comedian, me.
I always vowed never to write about my life unless I was completely honest, and Camp David is a completely honest, perhaps too honest, account of my life. The book starts with my birth in 1971 and ends in December 2003, after the first series of Little Britain was broadcast on BBC2 in the autumn of that year. The part of my life you will know the least about is here in this book, in all its joy and sadness. From the moment Little Britain aired, my life was documented in tabloid newspapers. However, little did the press know of the extraordinary life I had lived before I became famous.
So here it is. For the first time ever. My story.
David Walliams
PS I am not the bald one in Little Britain. I am the taller, less funny one.
1
A Religious Start
‘Guess what me and your dad saw on the high street today,’ said my mum. She was breathless with excitement.
‘I don’t know,’ my eight-year-old self replied.
‘Guess!’ implored my dad.
‘I don’t know.’
My mum took a pause to add suspense.
‘A black man!’ she said.
I was as surprised as they were. A black man in Banstead in Surrey?
‘What was he doing?’ I asked.
‘Was he lost?’ asked my ten-year-old sister Julie.
My mum and dad searched each other’s faces for an answer.
‘He was just walking along the street, I suppose,’ said my mum.
‘Maybe shopping?’ added my dad, helpfully.
That was what growing up in Banstead in the 1970s was like for me. So spectacularly uneventful that seeing a black man in the street was a major incident.
I am told I was born in the early hours of 20 August 1971. At a maternity hospital in Wimbledon called St Teresa’s, which was run by an order of nuns. A religious start to a very irreligious life.
So eager was I to be born, I came out quickly and my dad missed my birth.
My father had two main obsessions. Bridges and tunnels. Peter Williams (he didn’t have a middle name because his parents couldn’t afford one) was an engineer for London Transport for the best part of fifty years. He loved looking at railway bridges and tunnels, and if we travelled on the train anywhere he would point out a bridge and say proudly, ‘I worked on the maintenance for that.’
Peter Williams was born in 1936 and so as a child lived through World War II. My father told me a story once that seemed to have little significance to him, but that had huge significance for me in trying to understand him. When he was boy, as Nazi rockets flew over his little terraced house in Balham, south London, his parents bought a rabbit. My dad, who could only have been six years old, naturally assumed it was a pet, named it and grew to love it. Peter cared for it, he fed it, he even mucked out its cage. Then one day he came home from school and saw the rabbit hanging dead outside the back door. In that lean time of rationing it had been food all along. My dad had loved, but the thing he loved was killed. In my opinion he never found it that easy to love again.
My mum Kathleen was a laboratory technician in a school, one of those shadowy and often dysfunctional figures that help the science teachers bring out and put away the equipment for experiments. At my secondary school we used to refer to the lab technician as Igor, after the hunchbacked assistant of Dr Frankenstein. Though I never saw my mother at work, I cannot believe the pupils at Sutton Grammar School, where she worked, called her Igor. If my dad could be cold, she couldn’t have been warmer. She has spent her whole life doing things for others. One evening a week she was a Brown Owl to generations of Brownies until she was forced to retire at sixty-five. A Banstead artist once painted her portrait. It was of her in the local community centre bent over the sink doing the washing-up.
Kathleen Ellis met Peter Williams in 1961, when she was sixteen. She married him at eighteen. She has two younger twin sisters, Sue and Janet, whose extremely close bond excluded her. A lot of my mum and dad’s courting took place at Tooting Bec Lido, so swimming must be in the blood. My dad even had a chipped front tooth from showing off as a youth, diving into a pool. Loving came much more naturally to my mum than my dad, and despite not breastfeeding me (which I would later correct with one of Little Britain’s most memorable sketches) she couldn’t have loved me or my sister or her husband any more.
We grew up in a quiet little close in Nork, the posh end of Banstead (not that it has a ghetto), in a nice detached house with a garden and crazy paving out the front, where my mum still lives. Both my parents were working class Londoners, my dad from Balham and my mum from Mitcham. They moved out into Surrey suburbia in the hope of becoming middle class. It felt like a safe place. We had a cat called Smokey and assorted hamsters that all have now very sadly died.
My life revolved around school, Cubs, watching situation comedies, especially Are You Being Served? and Hi-de-Hi! (Mollie Sugden and Ruth Madoc would later both feature in Little Britain) and eating my mum’s home-cooked food. There were no surprises: on Monday it was bubble ’n’ squeak, on Tuesday it was shepherd’s pie, on Wednesday it was bangers ’n’ mash, on Thursday it was macaroni cheese and on Friday it was fish ’n’ chips. Saturday lunch was Heinz tomato soup and a toasted cheese sandwich.
My mum and dad were always a conservative couple. They voted for Thatcher again and again; Dad took the Daily Telegraph and Mum the Daily Mail. It wasn’t just their politics that were conservative, their tastes were too. I would eagerly flick through their collection of vinyl records to find t
hat topless picture of Sinnita from the original cast recording of the David Essex musical Mutiny! But as I did I was always amazed that they had lived through the 1960s but didn’t own a single Beatles record. They really belonged to the ’50s – they favoured Frank Sinatra or the Everly Brothers over ’60s psychedelia – and in the 1950s they remained.
My mum and dad rarely went out, unless to another couple’s house for dinner on Saturday. Dad never met his friends alone, nor mum her’s. At breakfast the next morning after dinner at another house my mum would pass comment on the wife’s cooking: ‘Jeanette said the cheese soufflé was home-made, but I swear she bought it at Marks and Spencer’s.’
Right from an early age I listened, and what I heard I often found funny, even if it wasn’t intended to be. I was storing moments up for the future, though as a child I had no idea how or if I would ever use them. The funniest things I have ever witnessed happened around my family’s dining table. There was the time when over Sunday lunch my mum said, ‘There’s something crawling along the floor,’ and then leaned down to pick something small up and put it in her mouth.
‘What was that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I saw an earwig crawling across the floor, then I saw a pea on the floor and I ate that.’
Or the time when Mum had some sad news to impart to her elderly mother. ‘Have you heard,’ Mum said slowly and clearly, ‘that Winnie Wright has died?’
My grandmother looked at her for a long while, before replying, ‘I’ll eat whatever I’m given.’
The trouble with a detached stance is that it does put you outside things. Unfortunately I think this is inevitable for most comedians. We are on the outside looking in. So many of the comic characters I have played exhibit my parents’ mannerisms. I was observing all the time.
My dad was quite a remote figure during our childhood. As was typical of many men of his generation, he tended not to hug or kiss my sister or me or tell us that he loved us. On occasion anger would overwhelm my dad and I would be on the receiving end. I never felt good enough to be his son.
‘All I ever wanted was to make you proud,’ I wrote in the card for the wreath at his funeral in 2007.
My father and I only had a couple of days out together when it was just the two of us in the whole of my childhood. One was to watch a rugby match and the other a boat ride to see the Thames Barrier, which in his job he had some role in helping build. I remember them both clearly as they stood out so much from my everyday life. Sitting in the Vauxhall Viva eating ham sandwiches before watching the rugby match, I had no interest in which team won. Both times he was trying to reach out to me from father to son to share some interest he had. Sadly, both times I was uninterested.
Something my dad did share with me was his love of the films and Saturday morning serials he had seen as a boy, such as the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon series, which would be shown occasionally on BBC2 when I was growing up. That’s what I loved, fantasy. Sitting together in the living room watching films was probably the time I felt most at ease with him. But my dad was never quite able to give me his approval. That didn’t stop me trying. My mum sensed this tension and overcompensated, giving me all the love and more that he denied.
Mum had her issues when I was growing up too. She suffered from ‘nervous tension’, and remains obsessed with everything in the house being spotlessly clean. After you used the bathroom she would rush in to polish the spots of water off the mirror over the sink. Biscuit crumbs on the living-room carpet would be picked up one by one as they were dropped.
Two years before my arrival my sister Julie was born, just in time to see the moon landing live on television in 1969. If anyone from our family was going to enter show business it was destined to be Julie. She would delight, she would amuse; I would only appal. Julie would stand on the pouffe in the living room and recite Pam Ayres poems, especially ‘I wish I’d looked after me teeth’ (complete with accurate Bristolian accent) for my grannies and granddads. I didn’t know any Pam Ayres poems, but God I wanted to be on that pouffe so bad. I had to get on the pouffe. I had to have the attention. So aged three, I would push her off, climb on and say, ‘Pah, pah, pah …’ That was my version of a poem – ‘Pah, pah, pah.’ I suppose that success in show business can be as much to do with the need to perform than necessarily any discernible talent to do so. Julie performs to this day, as a teacher in a primary school, to probably the toughest audience of them all.
I have three cousins, all girls around my and my sister’s age. When we were all together at our grandparents’ house for a family member’s birthday we would put on a play. After the buffet lunch, all the grown-ups ushered into the living room and we children would announce that we were about to put on a performance. We would bound upstairs and raid our grandma’s wardrobe, and before we had decided what to do, would announce that the play was about to start. The adults would wait expectantly on the sofa and armchairs arranged in a semicircle with cups of tea waiting for the performance to begin.
One was entitled The Cat Burglar. Being the only boy I would normally be given a plum part, and this time I was playing the lead role, the cat burglar himself. So with my Nan’s tan tights on my head, we were ready. There were four scenes, in which my cousins Laura, Natalie and Sarah, and my sister Julie each pretended to be a rich lady putting on her jewels. I would creep up behind them silently and rob them. They would then notice that their jewels had gone and scream. This happened three times with little change, and the grown-ups applauded after each scene, probably in the hope it was now over. However, when I robbed the final lady of her pearl necklace, my eldest cousin Laura pulled the tights off to reveal my face and improvised the line, ‘My husband!’ This was a masterstroke. We children thought it was the most marvellous twist in the history of the theatre, though it didn’t bear close scrutiny. Why was the husband stealing jewels from his own wife? Sadly we will never know.
Julie desperately wanted a baby sister who she could dress up and parade around like a dolly. However, my gender was not a barrier to young Julie. To make things easier we even had a dressing-up box at home. It contained no male clothing, just a few old dresses, ladies’ hats and some bits of costume jewellery. Julie would dress me up in a combination of these items, most fetchingly the mauve bridesmaid dress and white fur hat ensemble, and I would be led up and down the road. Of course all this was a long, long time ago now. In fact the last time Julie dressed me up like this was way back in 2009.
Boom boom!
Yes there will be jokes in this book. The next one is in fact on page 176.
Julie and would cycle up and down our quiet little close on our bikes holding hands pretending to be the motorcycle cops in CHiPs – though in hindsight I don’t remember the cops holding hands on the TV series. However, like most siblings my sister and I fought. Of course over nothing, like who had the bigger half of the Mars Bar. Or who had cheated in the board game Operation. Many games would end with the board being thrown into the air. Julie would sometimes even roll around on her bed shouting, ‘David, David get off me! Stop hurting me!’ until either Mum or Dad came running up the stairs to whack me. One time this backfired when my dad ran upstairs to give me a slap only to find me in my room quietly doing my homework while Julie was rolling around and letting out mock screams of pain.
We didn’t go out as a family much – perhaps a visit to Bovington Tank Museum in half-term, a trip to Wisley Gardens (my parents were keen gardeners) or a ramble around Corfe Castle in the rain. Once a year we could take the train up to London to see a film at the Odeon, Leicester Square, usually a James Bond one. I had my first erection during The Spy Who Loved Me when Barbara Bach leaned over Roger Moore in a low-cut dress. Twenty-five years later I spotted my first love sitting next to my friend Stella McCartney in the audience for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert. I texted Stella, ‘Please can you introduce me to Barbara Bach? I had my first erection watching her in The Spy Who Loved Me … Dx’.
Stella texted back, ‘J
ust showed her that! Come over and I will introduce you.’
So I sat next to my first Bond girl for a few minutes as Sir Cliff Richard sang ‘Congratulations’. Barbara very gamely posed for a few pictures with me, and I retreated to my seat and texted Stella, ‘Thank you for the introduction. That really made my night.’
She replied, ‘So sweet, you were like a teenager!’
I hope Barbara’s husband Ringo Starr doesn’t read this.
After seeing the latest blockbuster in Leicester Square we children would have chicken and chips at an Italian restaurant on Gerrard Street called Peter Mario’s, which felt like the height of sophistication, then take the train home (my dad got cheap travel for his family as a perk of his job with London Transport). Holidays would be at Cliff House in Swanage, where the landlady Nora’s basset hound Caesar bit my mum on the arse. As I grew older, Julie and I liked performing together, singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’ over the child intercom at the guesthouse. We thought we were on the radio, beaming out to the nation, rather than just Nora and her husband Bert downstairs.
I learned to swim the hard way. Aged four I had a little tricycle (I have graduated to stabilizers now) and was circling a swimming pool when inevitably I fell in. I had no inflatable armbands, but instead of rushing to my aid, my parents assumed I would be able to swim unaided. Fortunately for me, they were right.
If I had to name the time in my life when I was happiest, I would say it was just before I was old enough to go to school. Mum would look after me at home. Just me and her. I was a complete mummy’s boy and still am. The two of us would sit and eat mince and mashed potatoes at lunchtime listening to the Jimmy Young show on Radio 2. Just hearing his voice takes me right back to those lunchtimes, just me and my mum. After my first day of school my mum asked me, ‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but I won’t be going back.’
Unfortunately there was no choice …
Camp David: The Autobiography Page 1