If proof were ever needed that David Walliams has hit the comedy big time, it came not so long ago while he and Matt Lucas were on their 2006 Little Britain Live tour. “After one performance, Kate Moss and Pete Doherty came backstage, but so did Sir Paul McCartney,” Walliams says. “We had to keep Kate and Pete waiting while we were talking to Sir Paul. And I’m sorry, but I do still get excited about that sort of thing. There is still a big wow factor involved in my own success.”
The kind of success that he’s talking about includes the ability to fill stadiums to capacity, to name his price on an upcoming HBO version of Little Britain in the US, and to turn his hand, if he so chooses, to serious acting roles, like his recent performance in Stephen Poliakoff’s highbrow TV drama Capturing Mary. On the home front, too, he seems conspicuously to enjoy all the trappings of the high life. He lives in Noel Gallagher’s old house, Supernova Heights in Primrose Hill, and has dated a bevy of celebrity mag princesses. He drives a soft-top Mercedes sports car, and is a stalwart of the London party scene. A far cry, indeed, he admits, from the often down-at-heel and slightly tragic types that are his forte on Little Britain. For while in the show he plays carer Lou, all shell suit and dodgy dentistry, or Anne, the madwoman in a winceyette nightie, in real life you’re more likely to find him posing on the pages of Esquire in a Savile Row suit, hair slicked back, something that looks suspiciously like a sense of absurdity at his own situation playing behind his eyes and twitching at the corners of his mouth.
“There is part of me that does wonder, ‘How on earth did I get here?’” he says. The answer is through sheer determination. Walliams is not just a party animal; he has a reputation for strenuous, even obsessively hard work – whether creating sketches and characters for Little Britain or training, as he did in 2006, for a successful cross-Channel swim. His trainer back then, modern pentathlete Greg Whyte, says he has never encountered a similar level of dedication in anyone, including the Olympians he has trained. “An incredibly tenacious and single-minded individual, he didn’t miss a single training session in nine months.”
Not surprisingly, then, when I meet him today on the set of his latest project – a BBC Four drama in which he stars as the iconic comedian Frankie Howerd – he is displaying the same commitment all over again. Even when no one has called for action on today’s scene, a recreation of the famous speech given by Howerd at the Oxford Union in 1990, Walliams can be spotted running through an inventory of Howerd’s facial tics and physical mannerisms. He plants the palms of his hands on his lumbar region in the manner of Lurcio in Up Pompeii, raises his eyebrows and puffs out his cheeks in an “Ooh missus” gesture. By the time the camera rolls on the scene, the resemblance is uncanny.
“Looking back, I suppose I was just unhappy for personal reasons, and if you’re unhappy for a long period of time, you stop being unhappy and start being depressed. You get to the point where you just can’t see the future,” he explains. “And that was where I was. But plenty of people have suffered from depression, including Frankie Howerd himself.”
Howerd’s depression – both its origins and the controversial LSD therapy he received in the Sixties – form the cornerstone of the revealing BBC Four drama. From the same stable as 2006’s Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa! and last year’s Fear of Fanny, about Fanny Craddock, it is one of a season of four new dramas that will examine the private woes of public icons of the Sixties and Seventies. The Curse of Steptoe has Phil Davis and Jason Isaacs playing Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett, two actors who loathed each other but were yoked together by their success for all eternity. Hancock and Joan, starring Ken Stott and Maxine Peake, will tell the tale of Tony Hancock’s affair with Joan Le Mesurier. Hughie Green, Most Sincerely, with Trevor Eve, explores the double life of the avuncular host of the hugely successful TV shows Opportunity Knocks and Double Your Money.
Each presents a no-holds-barred insight into its subject. Howerd, for example, is depicted as a toupee-wearing, conflicted but predatory homosexual, given to crippling self-doubt. Not, then, the most flattering portrait. Yet, according to Walliams, the drama attempts to understand and explain rather than to expose. “Hopefully, we’re shedding some light on what made Frankie tick and on why, along with the great high points in his career, there was also at times so much vulnerability and pathos, and many low points.”
In comedy terms, Walliams, after all, sees himself as a direct descendant of funnymen like Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams. He owes them a debt of honour. “There is a long heritage of camp comedy in Britain – we’re a culture that has always loved pantomime dames, for example. Matt and I are from the same tradition of camp British comedians; we have always found that kind of thing funny.
“If anything, Frankie played down his gayness. In fact, if you had to pick one image of him it would probably be as Lurcio in Up Pompeii, surrounded by all these busty women. Preparing to play him, I was watching tapes of the Oxford Union show that we’re filming here today, and he talks about having an affair with an older woman. And part of you thinks, ‘Ooh no. I don’t think so.’ But the other part sort of believes him. He could almost pass, you know.”
Walliams, who on screen is often easily camp enough to pass as gay, could almost be accused of playing down his straightness, his sexuality having been the subject of a “gay-o-meter” in The Sun. Snapped at Nobu with a beautiful starlet? The gay-o-meter flips to solidly straight. Seen shopping in Prada in Bond Street? He’s back in the pink. “When they find out that I get fellated by Rafe Spall in this, the gay-o-meter will go fuchsia,” he jokes, referring to his co-star in the production. “I also get to share a bath with him and we touch each other’s penises, which was a thrill for us both. Although afterwards there was a lot of talking about girls and studying Nuts and Zoo magazines. A lot of reasserting our heterosexuality.”
For Walliams, a bit of ambiguity is useful professionally. “It allows me to go off in different directions, because I’m not fixed on one thing.” For Howerd, on and off stage, ambiguity about his sexuality was vital – both because he was ashamed of it, and because homosexual acts were illegal for much of his life. There was another, deeper reason for Howerd’s shame, however. This was revealed to the drama’s writer, Peter Harness, during conversations with Howerd’s partner of 37 years, Dennis Heymer (played here by Spall).
Heymer, who has never spoken on the record before, supplied unique insights into Howerd’s life, including shocking revelations that, during his childhood, he had been sexually abused by his father. Walliams himself visited Heymer at the couple’s house in Somerset. “Dennis told me that when they had sex, Frankie would always cry when he had an orgasm. Just imagine going through that. I think he just associated sexual pleasure with shame and pain and sexual abuse, although, of course, I’m only guessing.”
Walliams clearly feels deeply for his subject. Howerd has been a hero since, at the age of 14, he was taken by his parents, Kathleen and Peter, to see a performance of the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Three years later, in 1988, Walliams waited outside the Secombe Theatre in Sutton for his autograph. “I was asked recently how long I’d been preparing to play Frankie and I said, ‘Ooh, about 20 years.’ I know that I wouldn’t have wanted to see anybody else playing Frankie.”
Raised in Banstead, a suburban village in Surrey, Walliams’s background seems conventional enough. He comes from a loving and supportive family – today, on set, his mum has arrived, as she does on all her son’s projects, with a cake for the cast and crew. Still, Walliams describes his childhood self as a bit of a loner. Matt Lucas has described Walliams as “a premier-division shagger of beautiful women”. Indeed, Walliams likes women and women like him right back: just take a straw poll of all your female friends if you don’t believe me. “Personally, I’d much rather be around women than around men. Women are just better, nicer, more interesting. They are more caring and emotional. They talk about things that are important rather than talking about football… I love women,” he says.
“I was quite a solitary kid,” he admits. “Quite happy to sit in my room listening to the records of Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson. Even then I was trying to learn from them.” When they first met at the National Youth Theatre, Walliams and Matt Lucas cemented their relationship over impressions of their comedy heroes, especially Frankie Howerd. Oddly, they were due to be filming their HBO Little Britain series when the Howerd role came up. Had it not been for the US writers’ strike, Walliams would have been unavailable. Now, however, the US series is back on track. “It’s going to be interesting to see if American audiences find it funny,” says Walliams. He and Lucas intend to retain the essentially British humour of Little Britain. “It would be a big mistake to change it.”
Still, they are introducing some new characters, including Madonna’s PA, and giving an American slant to some of the old favourites. Vicky Pollard, for example, will be sent to Brat Camp, and Sebastian becomes Prime Minister and develops a crush on the US president. Walliams’s assertion that, in real life, he is closer to Sebastian than any other Little Britain character has occasionally been wheeled out as evidence of his own latent gayness. “But it isn’t his homosexuality that I relate to at all,” Walliams explains. “It’s the unrequited love.”
His own parents, he says, were together for 47 years, up until his father’s devastating death from cancer shortly before the filming of Rather You Than Me. “How do you find the kind of enduring love that my parents had?” he ponders. “At this moment, I haven’t a clue.” None of the high-profile beauties that he has dated have turned out to be the one. Now, aged 36, he is thinking that the next big adventure should, perhaps, be fatherhood. “But I don’t think I could be further away from becoming a father than I am right now. I haven’t got a girlfriend for a start and you need that, don’t you?”
Still, there are advantages to being single. “I get to take my mum to awards ceremonies and, recently, to the final of Strictly Come Dancing. I don’t know who was more excited about meeting Bruce Forsyth, her or me. Mind you, I’ve suddenly started to think, ‘Am I going to end up like Kenneth Williams, going on holiday with my mum?’ Maybe my friend Barbara Windsor could come, too.” Walliams chuckles to himself. And despite what the last comment will do for his positioning on the gay-o-meter, he seems to like the idea. “Yes, Mum and Barbara and me. How lovely,” he says quite seriously. Titter ye not, as Frankie Howerd would say.
Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me will be broadcast on BBC Four on Wednesday, April 9
Further reading: Scriptwriters reject the 'Curse of Comedy'
