Get him! Yet the strange thing about Walliams is that people increasingly do. His rise to the cusp of major-league stardom has happened almost despite his non-adherence to the principles of other male icons. Where David Beckham is pretty, athletic and mute, David Walliams is handsomely bearish and quick-witted.
But then this man is nothing if not contrary. He will swing from the chandeliers to declare his own campness, yet, one-on-one, man-to-man, over nothing more testosterone-fuelled than sparkling water in a Soho private members’ club, he is more thoughtful and instinctive than his anarchic, pantomime-dame comedy persona suggests. Walliams is no more camp than any other man who has spent a term at boarding school or bought a Prada tie — the irony being that, precisely because of his tenacious charisma, men fall for him with almost the same regularity that women do. He has claimed that he is only 70% heterosexual, yet his sexuality glistens. And he is acutely aware of it.
He chose a comedy partner in the form of his old National Youth Theatre buddy Matt Lucas, who, because of a childhood accident, was left hairless, giving him a curiously prepubescent and asexual appearance. While Lucas is central to the humour, particularly the visual humour, of their astronomically successful sketch show Little Britain (“The crew always laugh when Matt comes out of wardrobe. They hardly ever do when I do”), it is Walliams who has emerged as its personality, its star.
Like many comedians, he was bullied at school. Unlike most, he loved it. “Oh yes, of course I was bullied,” he says cheerfully. “The boys used to call me Daphne, which was meant to put me down. I was very camp.” We’re talking stiff Surrey schooling in the early 1980s here. The young Walliams was a member of the navy cadets. He only joined because he liked dressing up in a sailor’s uniform every Wednesday afternoon. However, his little peacock routine didn’t sit too easily with his more boysy classmates. So he opted for the performer’s only weapon — revenge. “I just completely played up to it.”
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Daphne became his thing. David learnt to love his inner female; something he later used to astonishing, finely nuanced effect in Little Britain. “They were punishing me for being different. But my reaction was to embrace it. I turned it around quite nicely, actually. Then they all started looking at me to entertain them. It was a great way to defuse things. They’d shout for me: ‘Daphne! Daphne!’ But the taunts never made me cry. I was the kind of person who got bullied and loved the attention of it.”
Walliams still carries around a fear of not being noticed or acknowledged. “I’m terribly attention-seeking,” he says, less a confession, more an observation. “It’s very different once you get all this attention, though. Because then you want to control it. And you can’t exactly.”
Proof that you don’t always get the sort of attention you want came at a television awards ceremony last month, when the film director Ken Russell heckled Walliams and Lucas as they went to collect their gongs. He was objecting to a sketch in which Lucas’s weight-loss-club character, Marjorie Dawes, spits on real-life dieter Vanessa Feltz. “Get off,” shouted Russell. “You will not get a third series. You can’t go spitting in people’s faces.” Walliams wasn’t upset by the incident, just baffled: “It was odd to have incurred the wrath of someone like him,” he says. “Actually, it’s rather an achievement to have offended someone like Ken Russell, isn’t it? I suppose you have to take that as a great honour.”
There is another dichotomy in Walliams. Although one of the cleverest celebrity males to emerge in the Heat age, he is also brilliantly tabloid. He has been romantically linked with Abi Titmuss, Patsy Kensit and most recently, Denise Van Outen, who he escorted home after the Brits. The real clincher, though, is Lisa Moorish, a celebrity-circuit favourite whose entire life seems to spin dizzily around adopting future male icons. She’d mothered Liam Gallagher’s and Pete “crackhead” Doherty’s children before the ink had dried on their legend. On her tacit approval alone, I’ve put twenty quid on Walliams ending up as James Bond one of these days (and I’ve worked some fabulous odds on it from William Hill).
It seems everyone but Walliams agrees that Little Britain is just the start of his story. He remains publicly devout to his alliance with Lucas, who he believes to be the funnier comic performer of the pair. “I think he’ll go down as one of the greats,” he says, in a spirit of open-handed sincerity. Yet it is Walliams who remains the fascination. Despite all the low-rent bedroom chicanery — and the fact that he looks like a bit of a sexual wild card — he categorically denies that his romantic and domestic arrangements revolve around him having a problem with keeping it in his pants. He is, in fact, looking for love: “Definitely. I would love to have gone through this past year with somebody I loved. I don’t want to talk about individuals, because it just fuels the situation with them, but when lots of extraordinary things are happening to you, it would be lovely to be able to share them. Yeah, it sometimes looks like I’ve been serial-dating, but I would gladly have stayed with some of these women. It isn’t my choice, necessarily. If you know what I mean.”
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He is, he insists, much more comfortable in the company of women. “I don’t have a lot to share with other men. My heart sinks when I get into a taxi and someone starts talking to me about football. The other week, I was walking into a car park, and coming out was somebody I recognised. It was a famous person, the guy who’s married to Louise Nurding. Jamie Redknapp. He saw me and said, ‘Ah, well done on the comedy awards last night, mate. Very well deserved.’ And I instantly thought, okay, I have to pay him a compliment back. But I was at a loss. Does he still play football? If so, who for? Has he scored recently? What do I say? So I said ‘Keep kicking those balls!’, in this absolutely tragic way. I felt like such a failure.”
His lack of engagement with white-van men (perhaps because they are Little Britain) is of scant importance. In many ways, it has been Walliams’s making. He has become a genuine signifier of a change rattling through the celebrity world, intriguing as much for his candid nonconformity as his talent. And he is gelling with the public very nicely indeed. Slack-denimed workers on building sites chant his Little Britain catch phrase as he walks past them: “I’m a lay-dee!” Daphne has somehow become the common man’s outlet.
He loves all of this, of course. It is about being noticed. And the success of the show and his surprising tabloid élan have placed him at the epicentre of a giddy new life. “I went to a party at Sam Taylor-Wood’s before Christmas, and the whole thing was literally dripping with famous people,” he says, forgetting that he is now one of them. “Oh, look, there’s Kate Moss. There’s the Osbournes. There’s Lucian Freud. There’s Hedi Slimane. There’s Elton John. It really was the most extraordinary collection of people. And the thing you forget is that they do actually watch telly. You’re almost more of a novelty to them because you’re not a highbrow artist. That Kate Moss knows my name is very exciting to me. When you meet people who you’ve grown up admiring and watching, you never imagine that you’ll sharing social space with them. It might seem very superficial, but...”
He trails off, perhaps aware that his star-struck enthusiasm could come across as bragging. After 10 post-university years in the performance wilderness, Walliams genuinely seems as profoundly disquieted by his infamy as the rest of us. A recurrent conversational theme is the nature of success, something that is only just beginning to fit him like a pair of tailored trousers. Though schmoozing his way through being the toast of the town, he still remains one of us. “There is, ” he confides, “a fantastic picture of me and Kate Moss, and Sam and Jay Jopling. They all look so cool, and I’m stood there in this big group hug, just smiling from ear to ear. I really must try to perfect my paparazzi face. Not to give myself away so much.”
It would be rather a shame if he did. Honesty becomes him.
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A MAN WALKS INTO A PUB ...
This is Walliams’s favourite joke (as told to him by David Arnold, who does the music for Little Britain): “A man walks into a pub, and he’s got a giant orange instead of a head. The landlord says, ‘Oi, mate, you’ve got a giant orange for a head!’ And the bloke says, ‘Yeah, I know.’ So the landlord asks why, and he says, ‘Well, I went up to my attic and found a magic lantern. I rub it, and a genie appears and tells me I can have three wishes. My first is to have a million pounds, which he gives me. The next is to be attractive to every woman in the world, which he makes me. Then he says: “What do you want for your third?” So I say — and I feel really stupid for this now — that I want a giant orange for a head, and he does that for me too.’”
Guess you had to be there ...
David Walliams stars in the Comic Relief Little Britain DVD, £4.99, out now at HMV