Being cast as one of the lead characters, website designer Jake, felt momentous at the time.
When I told my mother, ‘Mum, I’ve been cast as one of the leads in a new BBC2 drama series …’
‘That will be good experience,’ she replied.
Experience? I thought. No, this is actually it. This is not experience. This is the thing! I am getting paid and everything!
It was a huge endorsement of my talents as a serious actor, and there had been endless auditions and workshops to land the role.
Andrew Sachs played my dad. This was a treat, as not only was he in one of my favourite comedy series of all time (he, of course, played Manuel in Fawlty Towers), he was more than happy to talk about it. Soon I was fielding questions from fellow comedians to him …
‘Andrew, my friend Graham Linehan would like to know how much the scripts were rewritten in the rehearsal room.’
‘Actually very little,’ purred Andrew in his soft warm tones, so instantly familiar from a thousand voiceovers. ‘John and Connie worked so long on the scripts that by the time us actors received them there was no need to change a word. There was three years, don’t forget, between the first series and the second.’
‘Thank you, I will tell him that.’
I even asked him about the film of Are You Being Served? to which his reply was, ‘Same performance. Different moustache!’
We filmed the first series of Attachments over the summer of 2000, and by the end the young and mostly sexy cast were doing shoots for newspapers and magazines. The Radio Times lined us up against a wall in an effort to make us instantly iconic. Some of the girls in the cast went out on shopping sprees and came back with designer handbags that must have cost thousands of pounds. Why not? We were stars already, weren’t we?
No.
Attachments flopped. Badly. It was both too late and too early in its depiction of an Internet start-up company. More importantly too much of the drama was derived from one of us looking at the screen and saying ‘The server’s crashed!’ which to the viewer at home doesn’t seem all that dramatic. Certainly no one had died. Fortunately I did not buy a designer handbag. The show made me the tiniest bit famous …
Sunday 20/05/2001
I was in the showbiz page of the People today; Sean O’Brian’s ‘Hot People’ column.
‘The other night I had that TV comedian DAVID BADDIEL and Attachments star DAVID WALLIAMS in my car …’
A nation asks who?
It continues … ‘Just a small cab ride from a party to their north London homes. Diamond geezers, the pair.’
The first and I hope last time I’ve been referred to as a ‘diamond geezer’.
Around this time I fell madly in love.
Nothing else mattered. I was completely overwhelmed by this girl. My heart danced every time I saw her. Her eyes killed me. Just the thought of her was enough to make me want to sing. I longed for the world to stop turning so I could be with her in a moment in time for ever.
She had a boyfriend.
I waited a year.
She split up from her boyfriend.
We were finally together.
This girl had a genuinely poetic soul. Like a heroine from an eighteenth-century romantic novel. When we watched the planes crash into the Twin Towers in New York over and over again on the news on 11 September 2001, she said to me, ‘It’s a day which makes you scared to fall in love.’
Friday 8/9/2000
She arrived at my flat at 1 p.m. and didn’t leave until 8 p.m. It was raining heavily outside so we only went out for a brief walk. The rest of the time we spent lying on my sofa or bed with our arms wrapped around each other. I kissed the small of her back, I kissed her stomach. ‘I feel so safe,’ I said. And I did, what could possibly go wrong with her arms around me? Then the kissing started, long lingering kisses. When I showed her to my door I kissed her again. I closed my eyes. It was so beautiful. I literally went weak at the knees.
‘You’re so gorgeous, I adore you,’ I said to her many times.
‘I love you, you’re lovely,’ she said to me.
I walked her to the station. I wanted to spend every moment I could with her. Our legs slinked together as we made our way up the road. I carried her bag. My other arm was around her. We’re good together.
Sunday 8/10/2000
‘You smile and I am rubbing my eyes at a dream come true,’ sings Neil Tennant on the Pet Shop Boys song ‘It Always Comes as a Surprise’. This morning I woke up in bed with my beautiful angel. We made love, went out to get the papers, showered together, had smoked salmon and poached eggs, made love again. ‘Being with you makes even the simplest things magical,’ I said. And it’s true.
Thursday 02/08/2001, Friday 03/08/2001, Saturday 04/08/2001
From Thursday evening to Saturday evening she never left my side. She came over for dinner at 8 p.m. on Thursday night and we were together for the next two days. Here are some snapshots of our time together:
her reading poetry alone to me on my sofa wearing only her knickers
us kissing passionately under a tree on Hampstead Heath where we were sheltering from the rain
us eating a picnic on the lawn of Kenwood House
me prancing around in my new velvet jacket for her amusement
It’s like I’ve been given this amazing reprieve. Another chance of happiness.
I loved her so much that when the relationship ended I was completely destroyed. So destroyed that there was very nearly no Little Britain …
26
Two Words
The first television series of Little Britain launched in the autumn of 2003, but the origins of the series go many years back. It may have had the longest period of development of any comedy show.
Even though our pilot of Sir Bernard Chumley’s Soirée failed to become a series on Radio 4, there was always the opportunity for us to go back to the station with another idea. Radio 4 was an important gateway to BBC television, as many series – from Hancock’s Half Hour to Goodness Gracious Me – had started there. However, Matt and I were reluctant to return as he felt insulted that Radio 4 had taken a year to say no to the Soirée pilot.
Years passed and a meeting was called with Matt and me to discuss making another pilot. Frustratingly Matt told the head of Radio 4, ‘I’m not doing a show with a laughter track. They’re old-fashioned, and no good comedy programmes have them any more. Look at The Day Today or Brass Eye.’
While it was true the laughter track had become seriously naff in the late 1990s, we were not, nor ever would be, Chris Morris. Moreover, sketch comedy is particularly hard to do without laughter. To me a series of sketches is not unlike a comedian telling a series of jokes, and not hearing laughter can be disconcerting.
Matt wouldn’t budge; everyone left the meeting frustrated, but eventually Radio 4 relented, and against my better judgement we made a pilot in a studio with no audience present. The only good thing was that Matt and I were finally writing sketches. Having started our career together performing a cabaret show, and having found cult success on digital television doing spoofs, we had written very few sketches. Sketches were what other people did. It was hard for us to imagine that we could compete with the great sketch shows of the day, most notably The Fast Show and The League of Gentlemen. The League’s sketches in particular were so perfectly written, some even worthy of Alan Bennett (‘The Cave Guide’ ), all Matt and I felt we could do was stand back and gaze in awe.
Perhaps the only link with Little Britain in this our second radio pilot was the character of Dennis Waterman, another of our non-impressions. Aside from that, there were historical sketches and spoofs. In need of a linking device, we enlisted the Brigadier Nicholas Courtney to read some lines as if Matt and I had taken him prisoner. I was even embarrassed recording them, they fell so flat.
The problem was Matt and I didn’t know who we were as us.
Ronnie Corbett later told me, ‘Ronnie B and I didn’t have any shti
ck. We weren’t like Eric and Ernie, who could bounce off each other so naturally as themselves. That’s why we did the news stories at the start and end of the show.’ It was the only way we felt we could be us.
Whether through awkwardness or shyness or whatever, Matt and I didn’t have any shtick either. It wasn’t a lack of chemistry – we had amazing chemistry when we were characters – we just felt ill at ease trying to be Morecambe and Wise, but then Morecambe and Wise never did characters. Later in our careers we were offered many hosting jobs together, award ceremonies such as the Brits and the BAFTAs. However, we knew we would be no good at it, so we turned them all down.
So Matt and I handed in this ragbag of sketches with a linking device that didn’t work, which we had recorded one rainy afternoon in a studio with no audience to laugh and bounce off. Radio 4 responded with just two words: ‘Lacks conviction.’
Matt was incensed. ‘I am never ever doing anything for Radio 4 ever again.’
However, I knew Radio 4 were right, even if the brevity of their response felt insulting. What we had produced could in no way take its place alongside the great sketch shows of the day. So we were adrift yet again.
Shooting Stars had run for three series between 1995 and 1997 but had now finished, as far as Matt knew at the time, for ever. He was becoming increasingly anxious about how his career, his earnings and his fame were all rapidly declining. I had experienced little success in any of these fields, but I was starting to wonder whether we were stronger together or apart. As I am sure he was too.
Then one day something magical happened. I put together two words that would change our lives for ever: little and Britain.
We still had one ally left in the BBC, Myfanwy Moore. She implored us to have one last try at writing a script for a sketch show pilot for television. By now we had been writing sketches for quite a while and had a number we believed in. They were disparate though. One involved revisiting Neville Chamberlain’s speech on the eve of the Second World War in which the piece of paper turned out to be blank and he had lied about the appeasement deal with Hitler. Another concerned the witch from Hansel and Gretel doing a site visit while her house made of sweets was still under construction and talking to the builders. Once again, though, we needed a concept. The League of Gentlemen was all set in one town; The Fast Show did what it said on the tin, the sketches came thick and fast; Goodness Gracious Me was a brilliant take on British Asian culture.
So we sat in Matt’s office for a couple of days trying to think of something that would bind our sketches together. The trick was to avoid inventing things that had already been invented while at the same time steering clear of ideas along the lines of ‘It’s all set in a giant space station’ – i.e. crap. Eventually an idea emerged.
‘How about a spoof documentary series where we look at life in modern Britain?’ I suggested.
‘No,’ said Matt.
‘Why?’
‘Well our Neville Chamberlain sketch is set in the past – that wouldn’t fit in.’
‘Yes, but it’s only one sketch.’
‘It’s a great sketch. We can’t lose it.’
‘OK, well try and think of something else then.’
‘I am trying,’ he snapped.
We sat in silence for quite a while. I have always found silence distinctly uncomfortable and after a while I broke it.
‘I really think the documentary idea could be a good one, Matt.’
Gradually I talked him round. Yes, we would have to lose a sketch, but it was only one, and if we were to do a successful sketch show series we would need at least a hundred. Then we found ourselves looking for a title, and of course many bad ones tumbled out until I said …
‘What was Eldorado originally going to be called – Little England? We could call it something like that. Little Britain?’ I thought for a moment. ‘No, I don’t like that.’
‘No,’ said Matt. ‘It’s good. Little Britain.’
We both said it out loud a few times to get used to it.
‘Little Britain …’
‘Little Britain …’
‘Little Britain …’
‘It hasn’t been used before for anything, has it?’ I asked. ‘It sounds familiar.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Matt. ‘The phrase is usually Little England or Little Englanders.’
‘And it’s a documentary-style series about life in Britain. We can shoot it all with a hand-held camera. It can be about all the people who live there. We could even have a narrator, like on a real documentary.’
‘OK, Little Britain it is.’
I have always been in awe of people who write TV comedy on their own, like David Renwick (One Foot in The Grave), John Sullivan (Only Fools and Horses) and Roy Clarke (Open All Hours). You have to have such finely tuned instincts about what is funny. When someone else is there, their response to your ideas is crucial. I had dismissed Little Britain as a title as soon as I had thought of it. Matt was right though: it was good. Teamwork.
Matt and I hurriedly wrote a pilot script. The concept helped focus our minds on what we should write. Every sketch had to take place in modern Britain, so there could be no spoofs or historical sketches. Everyone did spoofs anyway, and historical sketches could be too obscure and uninvolving for many. Now we had the chance to forge ahead with some kind of social satire, which had much more chance of resonating with a large TV audience.
Together we wrote the first Daffyd sketch for this script. Amazingly, neither Myfanwy nor Matt liked it.
‘I don’t think it’s very good,’ was his judgement on one of the characters that would make him a superstar.
However, it stayed in, and we presented the finished script to Jane Root, who was then the controller of BBC2. The rest is history.
Except it wasn’t. She turned it down.
So we had to grovel our way back to Radio 4. Now at last we had a strong concept. We rewrote the script for radio, adding characters as we went.
‘How about Tom Baker as the narrator?’ I suggested. I knew he would be terrific but I also wanted to meet him again. A few years previously I had queued up with a large group of Whovians – or gay men as they are more commonly known – at a bookshop on Oxford Street for him to sign his autobiography.
‘Could you sign it, Sir Tom Baker, please? As I think you should be made a sir,’ I creeped. He rolled his eyes, no doubt thinking Another mentalist before wordlessly signing my book.
‘Or Michael Sheard?’ suggested Matt.
‘Who?’
‘You know, Mr Bronson in Grange Hill.’
‘Oh yes, of course. He’d be good. Or Harold Pinter?’
‘Harold Pinter?’
‘Yes, he acts occasionally and he has a very mellifluous voice,’ I replied. Once again, this was really someone I wanted to meet, so in awe was I of his work. ‘OK, so let’s make a list. Tom Baker first choice?’
‘OK.’
‘Then Harold Pinter?’
What makes me laugh so much now is that we thought that the world’s greatest living playwright would have gone anywhere near a Radio 4 comedy sketch show and read out lines like, ‘But just who are Britain? Over the next twenteen weeks we aim to find out by following the lives of ordinary British folk. What do they? Who is them? And why?’ Or, ‘One thing that drags Britain down is fat people. They take up space. They’re rude. And in summer they smell.’ Or, ‘Britain’s national food dish is burger ’n’ chips, which has been enjoyed since medieval times. Along with nuggets, fillet ’o’ fish and toffeenutbobbin.’
I couldn’t imagine Harold Pinter reading those lines myself, even if he had yet to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
‘OK,’ said Matt. ‘And then Michael Sheard.’
In retrospect I would have loved to have added Peter Wyngarde to the list. He has the most superb voice. Wyngarde made his name in Department S and Jason King on British television in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He was then arrested for ‘gross indec
ency’ in a public lavatory at Gloucester bus station in 1975. He didn’t really resurface until 1980, when he played General Klytus in Flash Gordon, though his face was hidden behind a mask. I would have liked to have brought him back to the public’s attention. He had paid the price for being gay at a time when it was not accepted. He needed the break a lot more than Tom Baker.
Of course Tom Baker said yes, and we met him with our producer Ashley Blaker (an old school friend of Matt who was starting out on radio) at BBC Broadcasting House at Portland Place in London to record his links. Tom was early, as he often was, and I missed an amazing monologue from Tom that Matt and Ashley excitedly relayed to me as soon as he had gone.
‘He said,’ said Matt breathlessly, ‘“I don’t watch TV any more. Whenever I watch TV, I look at all the faces of the people and I think, He’s dead. She’s dead. I fucked her. He fucked me. He’s dead!”’
Tom’s not gay but he would say outrageous things like that just to make us laugh. He was prone to making extraordinary pronouncements like …
‘My dick has died on me.’
‘I cannot abide the smell of neglected quim.’
‘They wear their trousers back to front in Denmark. Have you never read Hamlet?’
‘Life was so much simpler in the days before penicillin.’
‘Rowan Atkinson only likes polishing his cars. That’s what gets his dick hard.’
‘I want to play Lady Bracknell from The Importance of Being Earnest in blackface with a gun.’
Listening to Tom talk was infinitely more entertaining than hearing him read the lines we had written, though suddenly he would become restless telling stories and hurry through the work so that he could disappear off into the streets of London. Tom told us that he had been offered a part in Yasmin Reza’s play Art, which would change its cast every three months over a decade-long run. He said, ‘I asked to meet them before taking the job. They said there was no need; the role was mine. I insisted. I went to meet them. And then they withdrew their offer.’
Camp David Page 21