David Walliams has been dropped from his lucrative publishing contract with HarperCollins, following an internal investigation into alleged inappropriate behaviour towards young female staff at the company. Former employees alleged to The Telegraph that they were advised to work in pairs when meeting with him and not to visit his home. It is by far the most damaging in a string of controversies linked to the comedian and writer, who has strongly denied the new claims. He had previously managed to delicately balance his career as a provocative, womanising comic with a moonlit role as Britain’s most important children’s novelist. Finally, that precarious coalition seems to have collapsed.
Born in London in 1971, Walliams grew up in the suburbs and attended Reigate Grammar School, the alma mater of Sir Keir Starmer. While studying drama at the University of Bristol, Walliams enrolled in the National Youth Theatre, where he bonded with another young actor, Matt Lucas, over a shared appreciation for Vic Reeves Big Night Out. They had a mutual interest in comedy that verged on the grotesque, which led the duo to their first sketch show, Mash and Peas, directed by Edgar Wright, which appeared on the Paramount Comedy channel in 1996.
But it was their breakout hit, Little Britain, that turned them into stars. After a successful first appearance on Radio 4, the show was adapted for the BBC’s alternative comedy channel, BBC Three, in 2003. “Matt Lucas and David Walliams are going to be the funniest double act on television this autumn,” a contemporary reviewer wrote. And Walliams and Lucas did, indeed, come to define early-Noughties comedy. From gobby teenager Vicky Pollard (“Yeah, but no, but yeah, but no, but…”) who got pregnant and swapped her baby for a Westlife CD, to demanding wheelchair user Andy and his guileless carer Lou (“I want that one!” Andy would routinely demand), the Little Britain characters became instantly iconic. In pubs and schools around the country, these catchphrases were barked with relish.
Little Britain was, in many ways, symbolic of the bitter televisual landscape of the Nineties. Take Marjorie Dawes (played by Lucas) who runs a weight-loss group called “Fat Fighters” and encourages attendees to eat dust. In part, it was a send-up of fatphobic dieting culture, but it equally lampooned overweight Marjorie’s delusions. Similarly, Vicky Pollard both parodied tabloid fears about “chav” culture and turned Vicky into the butt of the joke. This edge led to frequent criticisms that the show was racist, sexist, classist and homophobic: comedy legend Victoria Wood labelled Little Britain “very misogynistic”, while left-wing author Owen Jones decried its “caricatures”, particularly Pollard, “a grotesque working-class teenage single mother who is sexually promiscuous, unable to string a sentence together, and has a very bad attitude problem”.
In the years since it captured the zeitgeist, Little Britain has aged like cottage cheese in an airing cupboard. So too has Walliams and Lucas’s follow-up, Come Fly with Me, which has faced repeated criticism for its use of blackface and brownface.
By the time the series aired in 2010, Walliams had already established himself as a successful author. His first book, The Boy in the Dress, was published in 2008. Executives at HarperCollins who signed Walliams to this deal obviously saw something in the actor – fresh from his Little Britain role as Desiree DeVere, a monstrously cartoonish African-American maneater – that was not immediately apparent to viewers.
But The Boy in the Dress was an instant hit and sparked a run of 22 novels (plus seven short story collections and 10 picture books) that turned Walliams into one of the most bankable authors in British publishing. While his co-conspirator, Matt Lucas, seemed to shuffle away from the limelight, Walliams sought it out. In 2012 he joined the judging panel of Britain’s Got Talent alongside Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden and Alesha Dixon, a job that he would do for a decade, giving him a primetime platform.
Throughout this, Walliams struck a mercurial figure. He had made his name through exaggeratedly camp performances with Lucas (who is gay), leading to some unedifying speculation about his sexuality (though Walliams at times courted this: in 2011 Ofcom received complaints about a Channel 4 show in which Walliams announced that he’d “like to suck his cock”, in reference to a 17-year-old Harry Styles). Yet, at the same time, he was becoming tabloid fodder for high profile relationships with glamorous women. In 2009, the 37-year-old Walliams was reported to be romancing an 18-year-old model, Lauren Budd. A year later, he married supermodel Lara Stone, 12 years his junior. Following their 2015 separation, Walliams was linked with a string of women including Ashley James, Ashley Roberts and Keeley Hazell.
Somehow Walliams’s reputation in the publishing world remained bulletproof. Throughout this period, Walliams was regularly performing a notorious live sketch called “hide the sausage”, in which male volunteers (including celebrities like David Baddiel and Mark Ronson) were invited on-stage and had their genitals exposed to the audience by Walliams. Reports suggest that men as young as 16 were corralled into the routine. “You could never get away with that today,” Lucas wrote in his 2017 autobiography. “In fact, he didn’t always get away with it then.”
Yet, to outsiders, it seemed like he was very much getting away with it. That’s possibly because his books for children had become a publishing sensation, and he was held up in some quarters as an heir to Roald Dahl (another children’s author with a difficult personal life). “[Dahl’s] books are perfect and I don't think mine are in the same league,” he told ITV at the height of his popularity. “But it’s a nice comparison.” Through the 2010s, he continued to consolidate power in this market: his books were adapted for TV, translated to over 55 languages, and at one point reportedly constituted 44 per cent of HarperCollins’ children’s book sales. He seemed untouchable.
And then, at the peak of the #MeToo movement, Walliams was reported to have hosted an event for the Presidents Club in which a number of female staff had been assaulted by guests. The reports in the Financial Times implicated many powerful men and tarnished Walliams’s reputation. In the years since, Walliams’s interactions – particularly with young women – have been more heavily scrutinised, with him eventually leaving Britain’s Got Talent in 2022 after recordings of him making derogatory and sexually explicit remarks about contestants were leaked. And even his literary empire has received increased mainstream hostility (with The New Statesman judging it to come from “the Boaty McBoatface school of fiction”).
Now, “after careful consideration”, HarperCollins has severed ties with the author – a decision that was no doubt at odds with their bottom line. A spokesperson for Walliams responded saying that “David strongly denies that he has behaved inappropriately and is taking legal advice”.
But this feels like the culmination of an increasing dissonance between Walliams the children’s author and Walliams the prickly, controversial public figure. With so many bad headlines building up over recent years, it is baffling that his publishing deal lasted this long.
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