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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published 2012
Copyright © David Walliams, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover photography © Alasdair McLellan
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-14-197324-1
* In 2006 I was given a special recognition award for swimming the English Channel in record time and raising £1m for Sport Relief.
* The name of a pupil in the long-running BBC school drama Grange Hill.
* The corpulent schoolboy character from the stories by Charles Hamilton.
* Futurism was an artistic movement in early-twentieth-century Italy that celebrated technology, speed, youth and violence.
* Myfanwy Moore provided the name for Daffyd’s barmaid friend in Little Britain and would produce the first series before she left television to live in the country and have babies.
* The Raleigh Burner was a popular BMX bicycle at the time.
* Lindsay Kemp appeared in a few films too, most notably as the pub landlord Alder MacGregor in Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man (1973).
* Written by Carla Lane, this was the defining sitcom of the 1980s.
* Dorian Crook is an old friend of Bob Mortimer, a full-time air traffic controller and part-time comedian.
* The ‘Cheese Shop Sketch’ is one of the most famous pieces from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
* It was a song in the style of a children’s record, like ‘Right Said Fred’. I was on my knees with a sign round my neck which read I AM A ELF. Matt as Sir Bernard Chumley would sing about putting a book on a shelf, it falling off, and hitting me on the head. Every time he did so, he hit me on the head with a book. The song would break down in an explosion of revenge violence from me. It was the one of the funniest pieces in our live show at the time, and captures the spirit of juvenility and anarchy that pervaded our work at the time.
* One night Caroline and I babysat Craig and Steph Cash’s beautiful little sons Billy and Harry. Harry was very young and couldn’t pronounce ‘David’. Caroline never called me David again. To this day, she still calls me Dasid.
* A forty-five-minute special episode of Rock Profile.
* It was voted the best comedy sketch of all time by viewers of Channel 4 in 2005.
Camp David Page 28