Camp David

by David Walliams

  ‘Hello, my name is David, and I’m feeling down today.’

  ‘Hi, I’m Chris, and I’m feeling a bit more positive than yesterday.’

  Round the circle we went, until it was the turn of a small wiry-looking lady in her fifties.

  ‘Someone came up to me and touched me in the dinner queue today and I have said a million times before I cannot abide being touched so I thought I would complain to the staff nurse so I went all the way up the stairs but she was not at her station so I went back down again …’

  On and on she went. It was as if she was never going to stop.

  ‘… but who did I see only Geoffrey well Geoffrey is a nuisance at the best of times then lo and behold as he is talking to me his elbow brushes past me well that was the final straw –’

  The therapist tried to butt in: ‘Thank you.’

  ‘– and then I discover that the tomato soup is cream of tomato not just plain tomato and of course they didn’t say that not that I am allergic to dairy but it does not agree with me one bit just ask my sister –’

  ‘THANK YOU!’

  ‘– she herself is a slave to her bowels but then I enquired about badminton lessons …’

  I glanced around the room looking for someone to share a smile with. This lady was quite mad. It was tragic but also funny. Critics of comedy always want to erroneously divide up the tragic and the comic into two distinct lists. That way they can have a roll of subjects they deem unsuitable for comedy, be it Derek and Clive shouting, ‘I’ve got fucking cancer!’ or Chris Morris making a Brass Eye special about the media’s reaction to paedophilia. But life can be tragic and funny at the same time.

  I didn’t fall in love at the Priory even though there were one or two beautiful and emotionally damaged girls there who I became strongly attracted to; I took Dr Collins’ advice and stayed away from them.

  One night at dinner I asked the man whose skin was grey to join a group of us on a table. He was wearing his pyjamas and dressing gown. I couldn’t bear to see him sitting alone in the big room.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ he replied with tears in his eyes. ‘That is so so kind of you.’

  The man was so moved by this simple act that I wanted to cry too. Depression seemed to have utterly destroyed him. Most of the time we never saw him. Most likely he didn’t have the energy to go to the classes. Instead he would lie on his bed day in, day out. His room was next to mine, and I would pass it and see his grey feet at the end of the bed if the door was open. Just thinking about him now makes me want to cry.

  The most useful sessions at the Priory were with Dr Collins. I saw him daily. A fresh pair of ears and eyes was very helpful, and every day he would tinker with my medication, which I collected from the on-site pharmacy instantly. That way he could ensure that the sleeping pills could help me sleep without making me into a zombie for the rest of the day. And the antidepressants started working. It wasn’t that they made me feel happy; the feeling was more akin to being able to shrug off the bad thoughts. Soon my brain wasn’t repeating and repeating and repeating the same thought with quite so much frequency.

  I can’t change the past. The past means she can never love me. I can’t change the past. The past means she can never love me. I can’t change the past …

  Without health insurance I couldn’t afford to stay long, and when a week was up I left with a paper bag full of antidepressants and sleeping pills and a follow-up appointment to see Dr Collins. My knight in shining armour Rob Brydon picked me up from the hospital, much like his minicab driver character Keith Barrett in Marion & Geoff. His fiancée (now wife) Claire Holland cooked us all a lovely meal (she even does a starter), and I took my pills and went to sleep in one of the children’s bedrooms under a Spiderman duvet. Rob really is the best friend I could ever have hoped for. Naturally caring, brilliantly funny, and having suffered unhappiness himself, he could really help me through an incredibly difficult time. I will always love him. Even if he has more hair now than he did then.

  My parents found the whole thing baffling. A psychiatric hospital? Dad assumed that after my stay in the Priory I was now free of depression.

  ‘So you’re feeling fine now?’ he said.

  It was easier to say yes so I did.

  Now I had to go back to work. Matt and Little Britain were waiting.

  31

  ‘Yeah, I know’

  Some days I just couldn’t wake up. The sleeping pills needed to be so strong I slept through my alarm. A few times Matt woke me up knocking on the door of my flat. For someone who had valued punctuality from a very young age I was deeply disappointed in myself for not being ready for work in the morning. At home my father had two clocks in the kitchen, one of which was visible from the hall. That was set seven minutes fast, so he could shout at us children for making him late for his train to work, even though we hadn’t. Even after my father died in 2007 my mother still might turn up forty minutes early for something. Timekeeping was drilled into us all so much.

  My mind was dulled by all the sleeping pills, and the shrug-it-off feeling that the antidepressants induced affected everything, not just the negative thoughts. Therefore it was hard for me to feel that enthusiastic about the writing. Fortunately we had already done a great deal of good work, and soon we would be filming.

  The League of Gentlemen’s Mark Gatiss was our script editor. Matt and I admired his work greatly, and we trusted his instincts implicitly. Mark often had great ideas too. For example he suggested killing Mollie Sugden at the end of the sketches about a woman who claimed to be her bridesmaid. Another one he virtually wrote for us off the top of his head was the one-off in which a lady goes into a charity shop and asks if anyone had died in the clothes she’s buying, then chooses a pair of pyjamas a man had definitely died in. It wouldn’t have been out of place in the League’s TV series. One morning we read through a sketch Matt and I had great faith in that in the end only made it as a deleted scene on our DVD. This involved a cure for cancer being found at the offices of Cancer Research and everyone who worked there being disappointed. Just after we read it Mark received a call from his sister.

  ‘My mother has just been diagnosed with cancer,’ he told us.

  ‘Oh my God, I am so sorry,’ I said.

  Matt and I instantly felt distinctly uncomfortable that we had been trying to make people laugh about the disease that was soon to take his mother’s life.

  ‘The sketch must stay,’ said Mark. The mark of a true comedian. He believed that you should be able to joke about anything. I so respected him for that.

  Mark encouraged us to be as edgy as possible. At the time we had no idea that Little Britain would one day be on BBC1 and watched by ten million people. The first series was made for BBC3, with a repeat on BBC2. However, as Matt and I moved into darker territory, egged on by Mark, there was a voice of caution. Myfanwy Moore.

  In the early days of BBC3 Ralf Little (Anthony from The Royle Family) was so popular he had his own chat show. Matt and I were asked to do some Rock Profile sketches based on the MTV series Cribs, in which stars showed you around their homes. The best of these sketches was one in which Lou Reed’s lodger was Andy Warhol. I performed Lou Reed with the lisp I had used for the cockney film star in Spoofovision, really only because they had the same look. It was an in-joke that only Matt and I understood, but we enjoyed it so we left it in. Matt’s years of working with Reeves and Mortimer had made him trust his subconscious imagination, so with his encouragement I wasn’t too frightened of committing to something unexplained or unexplainable. I generally preferred to be more logical, but I couldn’t do an impression of Lou Reed even if anyone wanted to hear one, so I was pleased to go along with the idea.

  Matt had the most magnificent take on Andy Warhol. He was a scouser, appeared to be not all there and said little more than ‘Yeah, I know.’ We wrote some dialogue that amused us both greatly:

  ‘What do you want for your tea?’ I asked as Lou.

  ‘Chips,
’ Matt replied as Andy.

  ‘Well you’re having chips for your lunch.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘You can’t have chips for your lunch and your tea.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘So what do you want for your tea?’

  ‘Chips.’

  So it went on. The relationship between the characters was one we instantly felt we wanted to pursue. Obviously we didn’t want to pursue a spoof, albeit a bizarre one, in Little Britain. Neither Lou Reed nor Andy Warhol (who died in 1987) fitted into a series depicting life in contemporary Britain. But we kept the first names and the relationship of carer with someone who needed care. In the script read-through sessions we started improvising the characters and realized there were many situations where we could use them. But even though we had a strong idea of how they should look and sound we still didn’t really know who they were. Brothers? Father and son? Nurse and patient?

  ‘Matt’s character should be in a wheelchair!’ I announced.

  It was such a shocking idea, almost everyone laughed. But I could see out of the corner of my eye that Myfanwy Moore was not amused.

  ‘We can’t have an able-bodied actor play someone in a wheelchair,’ she said. As an employee of the BBC Myf knew there were taste and decency guidelines that had to be adhered to.

  ‘What about Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot?’ I asked unhelpfully.

  ‘That’s totally different,’ she replied.

  There was silence for a while, as the idea of having Andy in a wheelchair that Lou had to push drifted off into the universe, never to be seen again.

  ‘What if he doesn’t need the wheelchair?’ said Myf. ‘He isn’t really disabled.’

  At first nobody was convinced. Groucho Marx once told a reporter, ‘All comedy comes from pain. To illustrate, consider this … You can take a young man and dress him up as an old woman. Put him in a wheelchair. Push him down a hill where he runs into a brick wall. That’s funny. But you take a real old lady, put her in a wheelchair, push her down the same hill into the same brick wall … and that’s comedy.’

  As comedians we wanted to be as hard-edged as possible.

  ‘It’s a bit of a cop-out,’ said Mark.

  ‘It could be funny though,’ said Myf. ‘Matt could get out of the wheelchair behind your back.’

  ‘In a kind of “He’s behind you” at the panto kind of way?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Myf.

  So we started thinking up scenarios in which we could do this joke. The more we thought about it, the funnier it became. The most elaborate idea was where Matt ran up to the top of a diving board tower and jumped off. In an effort not to offend BBC licence payers, Myf had given us the germ of our most famous sketch ever.*

  Steve Bendelack was the director of all The League of Gentlemen TV series and had directed me in the forgotten Dawn French and Stephen Tompkinson BBC1 comedy drama Ted and Alice. Some directors are craftsmen, others are artists. Steve is an artist. He encouraged Matt and me to think visually about the series. We had developed a sense of costume and make-up. Our favourite game was sitting on the top deck of a bus travelling through London and pointing out people who we deemed to have ‘the look’. This meant they looked more like a comedy character than a real person. However, neither of us had any sense of an overall aesthetic for our work.

  Steve Bendelack – Bendybum, as Caroline Aherne called him – had given The League of Gentlemen such a unique look and feel, it was arguably the most distinctive sketch show series since Monty Python’s Flying Circus thirty years before. Steve wanted to make Little Britain different from The League of Gentlemen and so did we. We really needed it to be as different as possible as our concept was similar to theirs. It was wise for us to avoid comparison with an established and brilliant series.

  Martin Parr is a visionary British photographer who had recently had a retrospective exhibition at the Barbican. In his photographs Martin Parr celebrates the mundane. He makes his subjects, such as a group of poor holidaymakers on a litter-strewn beach, look somehow iconic. Through his lens the ordinary becomes extraordinary. We wanted our characters, however ugly or grotesque, to be iconic too. Neil Tennant once told me that the mark of a great pop band was ‘if you could draw cartoons of all the members and recognize them. The Beatles, the Spice Girls, Blur. Look at Julian Opie’s cover for Blur’s greatest hits.’

  That set me thinking that our characters should be as instantly recognizable as cartoon characters. Think of the colour-themed costumes – Vicky Pollard was never out of pink whether it was a tracksuit top or a bikini. The make-up reflected this too: each character’s look had to be markedly different from the rest. However, much of Little Britain was set in the real world, so the characters needed to sit within a recognizable reality. Martin Parr held his camera back most of the time, documenting people who were larger than life.

  ‘That’s what I’ll do,’ said Steve over dinner just before we started shooting. ‘Hold the camera back. Observe.’

  There was still the difficult question of the title sequence. These can be really difficult to get right. How do you define a new show in the first thirty seconds and grab the audience’s attention? For the pilot we used some stock footage, having neither the time nor the money to shoot something original.

  Many Martin Parr photographs depict people standing awkwardly outside their home or car, and his work dominated conversation that evening.

  ‘We could have still portraits,’ said Steve.

  ‘People and places,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Matt.

  ‘That’s what Little Britain is about – people and places.’

  ‘So have Marjorie outside the community centre?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, and Sebastian outside Number 10 Downing Street and —’

  ‘And I can shoot it all on 35-mil film!’ said Steve. ‘I can shoot it fast and then slow it down afterwards …’

  Suddenly it felt like we really had a show. We had defined Little Britain. Now all we had to do was film it.

  Just before we started I went out on a date. Louisa McCarthy, a great friend from National Youth Theatre days, set me up with one of her friends who I had fancied for years. However, I just wasn’t ready to go near another woman for the foreseeable future. I couldn’t even try and kiss her, I was so terrified of rejection. A kiss was impossible. And love was unthinkable.

  All I had was work. That’s all I had to live for. So I threw myself into it. Having a comedy series on BBC2 was my dream. Most of the series that I had loved – Not the Nine O’Clock News, The Young Ones, The Day Today, The Smell of Reeves & Mortimer, I’m Alan Partridge – had been on the channel. It was where comedy fans traditionally went to see the programmes they would love but not everyone would like. Up to this point pretty much everything I had done on television had felt disposable. The odd episode of Rock Profile was good, but a spoof of anything is limited. Now we had a chance to create a proper legacy for ourselves.

  The first Little Britain sketch for the series we shot was the one in which Emily has to go to hospital to have an X-ray. I was pleased this one had me in the funny role. I was often (and probably still am) perceived as Matt’s sidekick. He had proved himself to be supremely funny in Shooting Stars, and most people didn’t see me as his equal. I don’t either, and never will. That doesn’t bother me. To me Matt is one of the all-time greats, and will one day take his place alongside the likes of Ronnie Barker, John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson. But since I had been struck down by depression I was not feeling funny. On the South Bank Show Barry Humphries said, ‘You have to feel funny to be funny,’ and I was feeling desperately sad.

  However, on that first morning the crew very dutifully laughed. The quasi-French pronunciation of ‘testicle’ seemed to resonate with people, and we were off. The shoot was done on a very tight budget, so much so that neither Matt nor I had anywhere to change. It’s quite normal on a TV programme for the actors to have small (or if they are
stars, large) trailers to get dressed or wait or learn their lines in, but we needed every penny to be seen on screen.

  Soon into the shoot though something absolutely disastrous happened. We very nearly became the series famous for killing two old ladies …

  Tuesday 6/5/2003

  Evie Garrett, the lady who plays Nan, launched herself so hard at the lady playing her sister, when she kissed her they fell over and had to be taken to hospital. And all because I’d written a lesbian love scene for them. I felt so responsible.

  The relationship between Matt and myself was mostly harmonious, but at times became strained.

  Tuesday 13/5/2003

  Today I got angry. I hate being angry. Me and Matt were being filmed for the behind-the-scenes documentary and he did what I always knew he would do, claimed to have come up with ideas he hadn’t.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember, David,’ he said, ‘this person at the National Youth Theatre called Shadwell …’

  He was the basis for Daffyd. Of course I remembered. I came up with the idea. Matt didn’t even believe in it at first. I was upset and took him into a corridor.

  ‘I honestly don’t remember who came up with it,’ he protested.

  ‘If I said I’d invented Vicky Pollard or Marjorie Dawes you’d be rightfully pissed off.’

  We agreed to use ‘we’ from now on.

  Again it was ultimately a constructive falling-out, but by pure chance the next day I received some terrible news from my Attachments co-star Sally Rogers.

  Wednesday 14/5/2003

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ said Sally on the phone. ‘Shadwell killed himself a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Of course his real name was Paul. Apparently he did it in the manner of Virginia Woolf – walked into a river with stones in his pockets. I thought you should know.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It made me desperately sad that another person I knew had lost their battle with depression.