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
