David Walliams: A troubled laydees’ man in need of comic relief

He also spoke movingly about working with the theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking on a sketch for this Friday’s Comic Relief, a take-off of Little Britain’s Lou and Andy in which Hawking, who has motor neurone disease, assumes Matt Lucas’s role as the devious disabled man always out to hoodwink Walliams’s Lou, his gullible carer. “I loved getting script notes and I thought: how often do you get script notes from a genius like that? I was blown away and was actually very moved by the end of it. I felt like crying because I was so grateful he’d done it,” Walliams said.

Still wearing his wedding ring, Walliams then boarded a private helicopter to fly around the country — stopping at Bristol, Cardiff, Newcastle and Edinburgh – to talk to children on World Book Day. He has sold more than 4m children’s books since The Boy in the Dress (which was made into a television film broadcast last year on Christmas Day) was published in 2008. Demon Dentist, the comic’s 2013 fiction, was No 1 in The Sunday Times bestseller list last weekend. Auditions are also under way for a new series of Britain’s Got Talent, which he has judged since 2012.

So this is a bittersweet moment for Walliams, 43, who is enjoying a professional high while his private life has hit the buffers. No outsider knows what has happened between him and Stone, 31, but the wilder theories have it that he was jealous of the Dutch model’s sexy Calvin Klein photoshoot with Justin Bieber — in which she posed with the singer in sexually provocative positions, drawing threats from Bieber fans — and that she hated the campness of his stage persona.

A friend said: “David hopes it is a blip and they can get the marriage back on track, especially with a child involved.” Another confessed to being “stunned”. But the split did not come as a surprise to everyone. There had been problems for some time, another associate said: “I was aware of the schism around six weeks ago. He didn’t broadcast it but his friends were made aware that they were in a difficult place, that the marriage was in trouble. He is very sad about it but has been putting on a professional front.”

How Walliams will cope is hard to imagine. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs he talked poignantly about depression and bipolar disorder. “I can’t stand being alone,” he said. “I hate it. I have a pathological fear of being on my own. When I am with my own thoughts I start to unravel myself and I start to think really dark, self-destructive thoughts.” He chose a gun as his luxury for the fantasy island so he could shoot himself if it all got too much.

The convention among those who analyse comic talent is that it generally stems from the loss of a parent very young, an experience of being bullied or a mental health issue. Walliams ticks two of those boxes: he was bullied at school for being overweight. He once recalled the nightmare of the annual cross-country run. “By the time I got in, all the other kids would have got changed and be waiting for me. They would applaud the fat boys crossing the line in a slightly sarcastic way,” he said, mimicking a slow handclap.

Other than school, he had a happy upbringing in Banstead, Surrey. His father Peter was an engineer with the former London Transport and his mother Kathleen was a laboratory technician. His older sister, Julie, “would dress me up like a doll in dresses and fur hats. So I had got used to it when I went to an all-boys school and was asked to play a girl in the school play. I got a big dress and big laughs.”

While at Reigate Grammar School, in Surrey, he joined the National Youth Theatre where he met Lucas. During their first conversation he did an impersonation of the comedian Frankie Howerd (whom he later played in a BBC drama), while Lucas “did” Jimmy Savile.

After an apprenticeship of minor roles, they were given a first series of Little Britain in 2003. Their grotesque caricatures struck a nerve. Among others, Walliams played Emily Howard, a deluded, overly made-up transvestite with the catchphrase “I’m a laydee” and Lucas created the dimwitted delinquent Vicky Pollard. Walliams said he knew they had a hit on their hands when “every time there was a story about single mothers the papers started talking about a nation of Vicky Pollards”.

“It was a show that had an influence out of proportion to its five years on television,” said Stephen Armstrong, The Sunday Times’s comedy critic. “It reinvigorated character comedy. There are two strands to British TV comedy, the music hall tradition and the Oxbridge tradition. The music hall dominated the early years of television, but slowly Oxbridge took over.

“Little Britain took a long while to take off because it was out of step with comedy in the 1990s. It is quite timeless in a way, full of transvestites and silly jokes, but comedy was ironic and political at the time. If there was any notable character comedy it was something like The Pub Landlord. Little Britain was very camp and over the top. That campness appeals to the British sense of humour, which is why Walliams is so popular.

“He’s in a direct line from the great Saturday-night entertainers like Bruce Forsyth and Larry Grayson; performers who have that music hall style that somehow reaches across the footlights. There’s also a tradition of cross-dressing in comedy that goes back to the 1970s and Benny Hill, Dick Emery and Les Dawson. There’s no one quite like that around now other than Walliams and the Saturday night viewers adore him.”

His second career, as a children’s author, was clearly inspired by his childhood experience of wearing girls’ clothes. The Boy in the Dress is now widely read in school and used as a springboard for discussion about gender roles. “It’s an unconventional premise,” said Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times’s children’s books editor. “He’s prepared to go out on a limb. He has a trick of filling a whole page with ‘ha ha ha’ so it’s not the most literary prose but Mr Stink, about a homeless man, has a poignant side to it and there is a strand in his stories that is quite touching. There’s a lot of slapstick humour but there is also an element of social realism that gives them substance.”

His star-studded wedding in 2010 to Stone, celebrated at Claridge’s, seemed to put the cap on Walliams’s achievements, which included swimming the Channel to raise money for Sport Relief, the Strait of Gibraltar and 140 miles of the Thames from Lechlade, in Gloucestershire, to Westminster. But even as the guests were finishing the wedding cake — wheeled in by Lucas dressed as Marjorie Dawes, the FatFighters slimming expert from Little Britain — there were doubts about the pairing of such an “odd couple”.

Despite having a string of glamorous girlfriends, Walliams had sometimes mused on his effeminate manner. He wondered whether he was gay, but said: “I so love being with women and love women’s bodies that I think, no, I can’t be.” Stone, 12 years younger, was just out of a stint in rehab for alcohol abuse when they met. Walliams was entranced by her cool, blonde looks and gap-toothed smile. She wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend but “David had been pursuing me, then he stopped and a few months later I thought we should go on a date”, she said.

It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see that two such driven, introspective and fragile people under one roof is a combustible mix. Walliams is said to be “fiercely protective of Lara” and eager to get back together.