Camp David: The Autobiography

by David Walliams

  Nick Hedges was a disciple of the avant-garde dancer and choreographer Lindsay Kemp, whose style was for all the performers to white up their face like clowns and move very slowly.* So that is what Nick made us do. It was a very original production, if you had never seen a Lindsay Kemp performance, which most people hadn’t.

  For some reason Nick had completely missed Matt’s towering talent for comedy at the auditions. Therefore Matt was assigned the role of Koken, which in Japanese theatre is the name for someone dressed from head to toe in black with even their face covered who moves the scenery around. As Matt didn’t have much to do in the play, he spent a lot of time watching the rest of us rehearse, and if there was one person who could always be guaranteed to laugh at some new piece of business I had added as Trinculo, it was him. Two years older at that age can make a big difference, and I think Matt was perhaps a tiny bit in awe of me. I was at Bristol University studying drama, had already performed at a comedy club with Jason, and most importantly been given the principal comic role in the play.

  One morning Andrew Denizi, who was playing Caliban, was very late for rehearsals – even later than he normally was. Nick was furious and contemplating recasting the role, even though we opened in a week. Although the NYT is an amateur dramatic company, professional standards are expected of you.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Matt. In his jeans and Arsenal T-shirt and spectacles.

  The cast looked around. Some smirked. Andrew was talented and popular and Matt was just … moving the scenery around.

  ‘OK,’ said Nick. ‘You can read the role of Caliban for this scene.’

  It was a part of the play involving me as Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban. Matt threw himself into it. Literally. He scuttled across the room, jumping up and down and barking like a dog. Matt wanted the role of Caliban for himself. He was better than moving the scenery around and he knew it. Now Matt had a chance to demonstrate to us all what he could do.

  In the tea break afterwards some of the cast muttered disparagingly about how he was trying to take the role away from Andrew, but I instantly respected Matt’s fearlessness and ambition. To step into another actor’s role like that with no rehearsal and completely go for it was extraordinary. I was impressed, even if Nick Hedges wasn’t, and sadly for Matt when Andrew finally arrived he kept the role of Caliban.

  The first night of The Tempest at the Place Theatre was full of National Youth Theatre members, who all laughed loudly at my scenes. As the days and weeks dragged on, like all NYT productions it failed to find an audience, and the laughter subsided. One afternoon the iconic newsreader Angela Rippon came to a matinee and fell asleep in the front row. The laughter never entirely stopped though, as there was always one person laughing, and that was Matt. The idea that either of us would one day become comedians was still completely fantastical; what bonded Matt and I was our love of comedy. We were both fans.

  At last I had found someone whose ecstasies paralleled my own. Both of us had an encyclopedic knowledge of comedy programmes and comedians. We loved Monty Python, the Carry On films, Laurel and Hardy, Blackadder, The Young Ones, Rowan Atkinson. However, there was one show we truly adored … Vic Reeves Big Night Out.

  Even though the second series had just played out on Channel 4, it was for most still waiting to be discovered. This was a series that not only your parents wouldn’t like, but your friends wouldn’t like either. It was seriously weird. And utterly shambolic. Often it was more performance art than comedy. Matt told me that he phoned Channel 4 after the first episode of the first series in1990 to complain that it wasn’t funny. Indeed, Big Night Out was so different to anything else that had ever been on television, it was a challenging watch, not least because it seemed an unrehearsed mess. However, after a few episodes you felt part of the club, and this was a club Matt and I were definitely fully paid-up members of. In the series Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer created a new way of being funny. They combined Pythonesque surrealism with old-fashioned light entertainment. It remains a towering achievement.

  Matt and I probably only sensed the historical importance of the show at the time. For the most part we would bore everyone else in the dressing room by endlessly reciting lines from the programme. What’s so important for our story about Big Night Out is that our love of it brought Matt and I together.

  A couple of years later Bob Mortimer would see Matt’s second gig as the ageing thespian Sir Bernard Chumley, declare him ‘the most angry man he had ever met’ and ask him to be the score master in a new comedy quiz show he and Vic were going to host. My journey would take a great deal longer.

  16

  Learning to Love an Oddball

  My virginity. In summer 1991 I turned twenty and was beginning to wonder whether I would ever be rid of it.

  Falling in love had never been a problem. As the years at Bristol passed, Katy Carmichael and I had become incredibly close friends. Katy was everything I wasn’t: beautiful, free-spirited, northern. She was from Liverpool, albeit a posh part, and seemed to have experienced absolutely everything by the time she reached university. Katy thought nothing of staying up all night dancing, had a long-standing boyfriend who sailed yachts, and even had a small recurring role in the sitcom Bread.*

  Dr Gunter Berghaus was a leather-trousered German professor in the Bristol Drama Department. His only sphere of interest was the avant-garde. Once in a tutorial in his office he told us that it was essential we read Theory of the Avant-garde by Peter Berger. The next week I told him, ‘I looked for it in the [vast] university library, and they didn’t have a copy. Nor did any of the bookshops.’

  Gunter stood up, his leather trousers squeaking as he did so, and reached for a book on his shelf. ‘This is actually the only copy in the United Kingdom,’ he purred, before putting it back on his shelf.

  Gunter prayed at the altar of the avant-garde. ‘Some years ago in Berlin,’ he claimed, ‘I performed a show for forty-eight hours where I was a wolf and all I did was howl and eat my own excrement.’

  So he decided we should put on a futurist cabaret.

  Even though this was most likely a terrible idea, Katy and I embraced it, as the show was at least a chance to be on stage. We decided we should do an act together, and perform an old song in French we had found about a woman who wanted to marry a millionaire. Katy wanted to come on brandishing a whip; I decided I should wear a rubber raincoat (borrowed from Dr Gunter in a rare moment of generosity) and during the song take the raincoat off to reveal a studded leather posing pouch underneath. Quite what this all meant was beyond us. It hardly mattered. Most importantly it appealed to me and Katy’s shared passion for exhibitionism. Despite my sexual confusion there was one certainty: this girl really turned me on. While rehearsing our routine one day, I became so aroused it was impossible for Katy not to notice. Being mature, she ignored it.

  The performance was a disaster, and most of the students disapproved of the whole enterprise as futurism had close links with fascism. The day after the last performance Gunter gathered us all into the rehearsal space to discuss the show, and watched smirking as we all started heatedly arguing with each other.

  ‘It’s what the futurists would have wanted!’ he concluded with a smile.

  Katy and I shared a bed when her flatmates were away and she didn’t want to be alone in her student flat. In 1991 we went to New York together and for no apparent reason photographed ourselves dressed as Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick next to some famous buildings. Yet still I hadn’t kissed her. The years of disappointment with girls had given me the feeling that there was something wrong with me that everybody else could see but I couldn’t.

  By 1992 we were in our final year, and one night Katy and I found ourselves on the sofa of the student house I was sharing with Jason, Myfanwy and Callum Greene (now a film producer for Sofia Coppola and Guillermo del Toro). After a while everyone else had gone to bed and Katy and I were alone.

  ‘I want to kiss you,’ I said. ‘I need to kiss you.
’

  Katy turned to face me and we kissed. Soon we hurried upstairs to my bedroom and my passion for her which had built up over years was over in seconds. Katy was kind though. She held me and smiled. We kissed and made love again. I had often wondered whether losing my virginity would be a transformative experience. Would the world appear different afterwards? Would the sun, the moon, the stars look even more beautiful? But this wasn’t just sex; this was also love, and for a brief moment the world really did seem different. However, Katy soon decided that she didn’t want me as her boyfriend.

  ‘You were an oddball,’ she would tell me later. ‘I had to learn to love you.’

  When we entered the final summer term there was tension between Katy and me. Ten weeks went by as we struggled to recover our friendship. It was not until the night of the final studiospace party that I saw that look in her eyes again. We danced and danced and she came back to my student house. Strange though this may seem, in the early hours of the morning I washed her feet. I partially filled the bath and lovingly bathed, soaped and dried her feet. Soon we were making love again, which went on until it was light.

  Katy and I stayed in Bristol after we graduated for as long as we could, never wanting the summer to end, but as autumn drew near we were faced with a question: how on earth were we going to make a living?

  I moved back home to Banstead. On the first night my mum came into my bedroom. ‘Pants and socks! Pants and socks!’ she announced.

  ‘I’ll give them to you in a minute.’

  ‘I need them now. I’m going to put the washing on.’

  As I heard the washing machine whirr downstairs, my mum came back into my room to tuck me in. She actually kissed me goodnight. It was sweet, but I had just turned twenty-one.

  ‘It’s lovely to have you home, son,’ she said.

  After staying up all night having sex with Katy, it was as if I was twelve again. Much as I loved my parents, I had to escape, but for now I had absolutely no means of doing so. Breaking into television seemed impossible. It was like a walled city. And I didn’t have a Trojan horse.

  After I failed an audition to be an actor/tour guide in the Museum of the Moving Image in London (just about the lowliest job you could have and still call yourself an actor), I exaggerated my CV and applied to join the actors’ union Equity. Equity has a rule that each member must have a unique name, so credits and royalty payments are not confused. My name was David Williams, but there was already an actor called David Williams. My namesake had been in many TV programmes from Play for Today to Brookside to Coronation Street. If I wanted to join Equity – which would help make me seem like a legitimate actor and not just another show-off who had just left university – I had to change my name.

  It had to be a spur-of-the-moment decision as I was sitting in the offices of Equity ready to hand over my fifty pounds membership fee.

  ‘So what do you want your professional name to be?’ asked the nice lady.

  Being young and foolish, I thought it would be great to have a funny name. Recently I had called my university friend Myf at her parents’ home. Her mum answered the phone and when I said who was calling, called up to her daughter, ‘It’s David Wall-iums on the phone!’

  A simple slip of the tongue, but when she reached the telephone, Myf couldn’t help laughing. So she called me David Wall-iums from that point onwards.

  ‘How about David Walliams?’ I suggested to the Equity lady.

  ‘Walliams?!’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes, there can’t be anyone else in the system called that.’

  ‘No, but just let me check. How are you spelling that?’

  ‘Erm, W, A, L, L, I, A, M, S.’

  ‘No, there definitely isn’t anyone else called that.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Welcome to Equity, David Walliams.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Right, where’s your fifty pounds?’

  So that is why I have a silly name. Still, it’s great for Google alerts.

  Jason and I regrouped in London and started doing open spots on the London comedy circuit. The listings magazine Time Out was the aspiring comedian’s bible. Jason and I would flick straight to the comedy pages and scour the columns for clubs that welcomed open spots – unpaid gigs. The hope was if it went well you would be invited back to the club and paid, most likely around twenty-five pounds – £12.50 each.

  Having stuck with the name Bunce ’n’ Burner we trailed across London playing to drunk people, angry people, and worst of all no people. The most notorious club in London was Up the Creek in Greenwich, run by the legendary compère Malcolm Hardee. Malcolm would get laughs by taking his penis out on stage. It was that kind of club. The object of any open spot or indeed experienced comedian at Up the Creek was to get to the end of the act without being booed or bottled off.

  Our act was very studenty.

  ‘I am going to bet that Mr Bunce cannot take a bite of this Mr Kipling Bramley Apple Pie without the crumbs falling onto the floor and spelling out the names of the top five French fashion houses … So what’s been happening in the news recently?’

  I remember one woman in the front row of a comedy club sigh audibly when I delivered that line and say, ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Well there’s been a lot of talk about whether magnetic crisps should be banned …’

  In hindsight it was the kind of act that might have ended in a lynching.

  Waiting upstairs at Up the Creek to go on, I gazed at the huge oil painting on the wall. It was a re-imagining of The Last Supper with Malcolm as Jesus, and comedians such as Jack Dee, Julian Clary and Vic Reeves as his disciples. I noticed a draught and looked across the room. Vic Reeves was standing there in a long black coat and black leather gloves, with his hair slicked back, looking impossibly handsome and glamorous. Completely star-struck I was unable to say anything. Jason was always more confident, bounced to his feet and approached the man who had just reinvented comedy.

  ‘Mr Reeves, my name is Jase and this is Dave. We do a double act together I think you’d like …’

  Quite presumptuous, as our routine was little more than a poor copy of his and Bob’s.

  Vic listened patiently as I looked on hopefully from the safety of the other side of the room. This was fate surely. Vic would see us perform, think we were hilarious and instantly put us on all of his TV programmes.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay for your act,’ apologized Vic. ‘I just popped in to see a friend.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Reeves, but please look out for us. Bunce ’n’ Burner.’

  ‘I will,’ he lied.

  When the first bottle hit, I was so glad Mr Reeves had to leave when he did. People came to Up the Creek especially to boo people off stage. We joined a long list of comedians who never did manage to finish a set. Jason and I barely finished a joke. If we had any.

  ‘Nice guys, but get some jokes!’ Mark Thomas told the audience after we had died at the Comedy Store. ‘I mean seriously, guys, just get some jokes.’

  We listened in the cramped damp dressing room as another comedian got laughs at our expense.

  The Comedy Café in east London was kinder to us. On Wednesday nights audience expectations were low as all the acts were open spots. If you won you came back next week and were paid. The same night that Jason and I performed, Matt premiered his ageing actor Sir Bernard Chumley. The Jimmy Savile impression was also in: ‘Dear Jim, please can you fix it for me to call you a cunt on live TV?’ There was lots of shouting, almost as if Sir Bernard had Tourette’s syndrome. The best moment was when Matt dislodged the lady’s wig he had been given as a child to reveal the baldness underneath. Despite Matt providing a startling few minutes, the audience that night didn’t like it. Strangely they did like the ultimately inferior Bunce ’n’ Burner, and Jason and I each looked forward to picking up £12.50 next Wednesday.

  In comedy it’s the audience that rule. You can never blame them for being wrong. Laughter is an inv
oluntary reflex after all.

  ‘Well done,’ said Matt, looking sheepish as the audience that had slow-clapped him were finishing their drinks.

  ‘Well done to you,’ I said. ‘I enjoyed it,’ I added. The writing was unfocused; Sir Bernard did not seem completely original (in 1989 Harry Enfield had written and performed a one-off special as ‘British acting legend Norbert Smith’), and yet and yet and yet … there was something truly glorious about Matt as a performer. Even in 1992 he had a power and intensity that was rare, especially as he was then still a teenager. Matt was a better performer than he was a writer. I was a better writer than I was a performer. In my opinion that’s why we ultimately needed each other to succeed on the scale we did.

  Jason and I limped on as Bunce ’n’ Burner. He secured us a few moments on regional television children’s programmes, but we weren’t good. Most importantly we didn’t really know what sort of act we were. Soon Jason and I had played all the clubs in Time Out for free and no one wanted to pay us to come back. So our double act ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

  Fortunately my friends from Bristol University Drama Department hadn’t forgotten me. Emboldened by his success as the presenter of the Channel 4 computer gameshow GamesMaster, Dominik Diamond secured a comedy pilot called Trash TV and invited me and Simon Pegg in to perform a few sketches in it. Sadly the title of the show proved prophetic, and nothing came of it. One sketch featured Simon Pegg and me playing Top Trumps as if we were chess masters, and as we recorded it we were told off by the floor manager for laughing because we found each other so funny.

  I did some running work on GamesMaster – literally running around bringing more important people tea, etc. The second series was filmed in a water treatment centre, which in the programme was supposed to be the inside of an oil rig. Sometimes the show would have celebrity guests, and one day a pre-hit Take That arrived to play video games and promote themselves to uninterested teenage boys. Dominik and I were weeing and chatting in the Portaloo outside.