I always hated Little Britain – rot was at the heart of everything David Walliams did - The Independent

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If you were to take a time machine back to the early Noughties and set foot in a British secondary school, there is something you were almost guaranteed to hear. Ringing down the hallways would have been the dulcet tones of boys (most likely, though everyone got involved) slinging out catchphrases from the BBC comedy show Little Britain.

Originally a BBC radio show, it ran as a TV series for just three seasons, between 2003 and 2006. But for my generation of millennial teenagers, its cultural impact was immense.

David Walliams and Matt Lucas, the two comedians at the helm, were transformed into characters who, Walliams said at the time, were “big… grotesque”. And the public lapped it up, delighted by two middle-class men dressing up in fat suits, as trans women, as disabled, in blackface.

The show had millions of weekly viewers, won Baftas and comedy awards. It was broadcast in over 20 countries around the world and fêted by publications such as the Guardian, who called it “a beautifully observed sketch show”.

Earlier this year, Walliams said it was “definitely” set to make a return, after a Little Brexit one-off comedy special aired on BBC Radio 4 – only this time, it would be on Netflix, as “you can't get cancelled there”.

I always hated Little Britain. Quite apart from consistently “punching down”, in my own pre-pubescent brain it gave a casual and cruel language to bullies that they didn’t have before, that they could wield with intention to maim the vulnerable kids, the weird kids, the kids who were black, gay, disabled, or just indefinably different. Laughter, in my world, always had the capability to be savage. At that time, even naming that you disliked it, speaking up against it, could leave you open to more abuse.

That the show was ever broadcast on the BBC, our national broadcaster, makes my blood boil. That the BBC only removed it from its streaming platform – in response to the recently announced sexual abuse allegations about Walliams, who desperately tried to prevent their publication by seeking a High Court injunction – makes me close to explosion. The pair have shown only a little remorse for a show which, in 2023, Ofcom found to be “explicitly racist and outdated”.

More importantly, Walliams – who went on to be a judge on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent and bestselling children’s author – was this week accused of grooming young people at the height of his fame: young people of much the same age as the pupils at my school who had so fastidiously memorised and repeated lines from his show.

Journalists have been pursuing Walliams for years: multiple women have told ITV News and the Guardian that Walliams "used" and "abused" his power and celebrity to pursue teenagers and young women. In one devastating recollection in this week’s ITV documentary, David Walliams: Power and Silence, a woman given the pseudonym “Jade” tells how Walliams sexually assaulted her after he contacted her on MySpace when she was just 15, and he was in his thirties.

The Walliams investigation points to a pattern: a man who – like Russell Brand, who was this week sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in prison for rape and sexual assault – called himself a “sex addict”, who consistently pursued and had sex with young and/or vulnerable women.

One thing is clear to me: rot was at the heart of Little Britain, at the heart of the work and the personal life of Walliams. He has long cast a dark shadow over the TV industry and the world of comedy – which, by many accounts, still has much more darkness to excavate.

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