Britain or bust

How Lucas and Walliams nearly split

Matt Lucas and David Walliams say they would have split up if Little Britain hadn’t become a hit.

All their previous ideas failed to become a success, with only Rock Profiles bringing them a cult audience to BBC Three’s predecessor, BBC Choice.

In a South Bank  Show documentary to be aired at Christmas, Lucas says: ‘Rock Profiles was successful with a cult audience but we couldn’t break on to terrestrial TV. I thought Little Britain would be our last roll of the dice.’

Walliams added: ‘Little Britain was a radio pilot we did after two others failed.

‘We’d also written sitcom scripts that hadn’t worked out. And we wrote a TV version of Little Britain that also didn’t get commissioned.”

The show only came to BBC Three following the success of the Radio 4 series – and last month channel controller Stuart Murphy admitted he hadn’t even listened to the show before commissioning it.

Walliams added: ‘With Little Britain we did feel it was the last chance saloon for us, so thank God people liked it.’

 

Published: 2 Dec 2005

Live comedy picks

We see you are using AdBlocker software. Chortle relies on advertisers to fund this website so it’s free for you, so we would ask that you disable it for this site. Our ads are non-intrusive and relevant. Help keep Chortle viable.