The bizarre genesis of Little Britain favourites

Little Britain favourites Lou and Andy were originally based on Lou Reed and Andy Warhol, star Matt Lucas has revealed.

There may seem few similarities between the lazy wheelchair user and the carer whose kindness he exploits and the creative godfathers of artistic New York.

But the dependency between the characters was first formed when Lucas and co-star David Walliams imagined the relationship with Reed and Warhol for their previous BBC Choice show Rock Profiles.

“There was no wheelchair then,” Lucas recalled. “But the beginning of that relationship started there.”

The odd revelation came as Lucas was interviewed by Jimmy Carr for an episode of Chain Reaction, a new Radio 4 talk show to be transmitted from December.

Lucas also talked about his time on the stand-up circuit, where he appeared as aging thespian Sir Bernard Chomley, and how the loneliness of life on the road, and one memorably bad gig, put him off performing.

He said, “I used to get booed off a lot,” but admitted the worst was at the Edinburgh Festival in 1995, when he was appeared in a one-off show Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer performed at the Playhouse.

The show was late starting, and by the time he got on it was 2am, and the audience drunk, tired and fed up of having to wait for the show to get on.

“I got booed off in front of 3,500 people,” he recalled. “Not by 3,500 people – it was about 100 lads – but in front of them. Something died for me there. It imbibed me with a little bit of fear.”

But he didn’t quit that night. Instead, the last straw was to come a couple of years later.

“My dad had just died and I was in this Manchester hotel room after a gig, where the only window was in the ceiling, looking up. The gig had gone all right but I thought, ‘this is pretty lonely’.

He said it wasn’t an easy decision, as it hit him hard financially. “I could get quite a bit of work because of Shooting Stars,” he said. “But I just stopped enjoying it.”

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Published: 23 Nov 2004