Matt Lucas got the Bake Off gig after Noel Fielding dreamt it, he reveals to Jimmy Carr

Matt Lucas got his Bake-Off job thanks to a dream Noel Fielding had.

The former Boosh star revealed that producers had hit a dead end in their search for a replacement for Sandi Toksvig - until he dreamed that the former Little Britain star was alongside him in the tent.

‘I had a dream he was doing it - and I hadn’t seen him for about ten years,’ he revealed in conversation with Jimmy Carr. ‘I told Channel 4 and Love Productions and they said, "That’s a good idea, let’s get him in."

‘And two weeks later he was in the show.’

When Carr queried if the story was true, Fielding joked;’I don’t just look like a witch, I am I witch.

‘It’s weird. We were stuck, we were trying various people and it wasn’t quite gelling and then I said, "I’ve got it!"’

Fielding also said that the ‘weird off-the-cuff explosive comedy’ of George Dawes, Lucas’s surreal ‘big baby’ character on Shooting Stars, was evidence he would work in the Bake-Off tent.

During the conversation, which was part of the online festival put together by Montreal-based Just For Laughs,  Carr suggested he might have made a good co-host to bring a bit of edge to the good-natured baking contest, imagining viewers saying:  "Did you see Bake-Off last night? Wow! Why did he call the nice lady a cunt?"’

Carr also asked the inevitable question about whether Fielding would ever reunite with Julian Barrett for more Boosh programmes..

‘We would like to but I think Julian would like to - classic Julian - do some live stuff,’ he said.’ ‘Obviously it’s not the best time.

‘I would be up for doing… we never did a film - that was  the one thing we really wanted to do and we didn’t do .

‘I’d love to do a film. I wouldn’t be against doing television. But we’d love to do live stuff again because that was our thing we liked improvising. 

‘Sometimes our gigs were really long and meandering, but our fans, that’s what they liked. It was a bit jazzy. Obviously, because that’s what Julian was into.’

Fielding also said he missed stand-up and ‘when i do stand-up I always think I should be doing this all the time and I think you have to be the sort of person who can do it every night’ – like Carr.

But Carr revealed he was trying to write longer stand-up pieces - of ‘seven to eight minutes on one topic’ - rather than transgressive one-liners.

Carr also spoke about getting a hair transplant during the lockdown ‘which I didn’t really need but what else are you going to do in a lockdown? I just wanted to get out of the house’.

He also revealed he had some Botox from Simon Cowell’s plastic surgeon, and spoke again of having had all his teeth knocked out and replaced.

The pair also reminisced about doing the  Edinburgh Fringe at the same time in the early 2000s, and spoke about how parts of it  had now become too commercialised;  discussed offence in comedy, especially ‘cancel culture’; and tried to introduce Simon Munnery to the North American audience...

Here’s the full conversation:

Published: 11 Oct 2020