David Walliams: 'I don't really want to be nice'David Walliams, tabloid lady's man and TV cross-dresser, has written a sweet children's book about a boy who loves dressing up in female clothes. Is the king of comic cruelty showing a softer side?
By Suzi Feay
David Walliams gets the first question in himself, almost as soon as I sit down. "So what do you think of the book, then?" I tell him that I liked it, obviously, or I wouldn't be here. "You have to say that!" he objects. "What would you say if you didn't like it? 'I enjoyed... aspects of it. The characters. A moment. Some of those words you used...' "
We're on a balcony in north London, perched on hard metal furniture and catching a few late summer rays. Wearing a bright red designer T-shirt and large shades, Walliams is very big, very relaxed and extremely polite. Seeing my cup of tea, he wants one too. "There's no rush on it. Just a cup of tea like that would be lovely. Thank you," he says to his publicist. There isn't much trace here of the ladies' man beloved of the tabloids, or indeed the comedy grotesque of Little Britain.
I wasn't a big fan of the programme, finding its humour a bit cruel for my taste, so I was surprised how tender and kind Walliams's first book for children is. The Boy in the Dress is the touching story of Dennis, whose glum life with his divorced, depressed dad and hostile older brother, is relieved by his addiction to Vogue and his fascination with women's clothing, somehow tied up with the one photo he has of his mother wearing a beautiful yellow dress.
Though he cross-dresses for a living in Little Britain, Walliams plays down any autobiographical element. "When I was young, my sister used to dress me up, but I was younger than Dennis, four or five. I suppose I was more drawn to ... female things, but no, I didn't really look longingly at Vogue. I don't think I even saw any copies until I was grown up. No one in my family ever bought it."
Once the idea came to him of a boy going to school in a dress, he started to work it out in detail. "I didn't want him to be too young; I think he's got to make a conscious decision to do this, and to be in some way aware of the consequences in a way that someone who was five wouldn't," he muses. "You think, he should be about 12, the girl he befriends, Lisa, she should be about 14. There are some little references to sexual awakening in this. Some of which were taken out," he guffaws. "Not that they were crude, but you know, when you're 12 you do think about those kinds of things. In my school, we only had girls in the sixth form. You'd be, like, 11 and you'd fancy girls who were 17, and you wouldn't understand that you couldn't go out with them! 'Yeah, well, they might!' "
Walliams wanted to do something for the young fans of Little Britain: "So many kids say to me, 'I'm allowed to watch bits of [Little Britain], then it gets turned off.' It's like when I was young, watching Not the Nine O'Clock News. Do you remember that song, 'Cunnilingus'? I remember my parents saying No! Off to bed! and I'd think, 'I don't know what it means!' Still don't, actually."
There's a great line when Dennis finds his dad's porn mag: "He was disappointed when the ladies took their clothes off – he preferred looking at what they were wearing." But the porn reference apparently led to "a big debate" with his publishers.
"My instinct, especially having co-written Little Britain, is to push things quite far, so it was hard for me. I felt I wanted to reflect the real world, and that's the kind of thing that is in the real world: a parent having a porn mag. Although I greatly admire books where kids do extraordinary things like go to the moon or solve crimes or whatever, I wanted this to reflect kids' experience and not have things in it that wouldn't happen." He starts laughing. "Obviously I've done totally the wrong thing, because kids like Harry Potter which is all wizards with special powers, but it's not what I personally wanted to write."
He's done something more original than a Harry Potter knock-off. Dennis's story can be read as a fable about not fitting in and the importance of friendship. Walliams listens attentively, and seems touched by my approval.
"What I'm always worried about," he confesses, "is that if you become well-known and successful, people are just going to let you get away with something that's not good enough. That I would hand in my first draft and they would just go: 'Oh yeah, fine, great.' Ker-ching. I wouldn't want that in any aspect of what I do. In my life, I'm not going to write that many books. I may never write another one, so this has got to be really good."
He is positively starry-eyed about his illustrator. The publishers asked him who he wanted: "And I said, 'Well, you're not going to get him, but Quentin Blake. Obviously he's not going to do it. Is it even worth asking?'"
Clearly there was something about the story of a frock-wearing football freak that appealed to Blake, and despite the fact that he made Lisa blonde instead of brunette, Walliams was thrilled with the results. "The first time he drew Dennis, I thought, that's amazing. The emotional resonance he brings, the moments he picks are great. I loved everything he drew, but also I didn't feel it was my place to change anything unless I really had to. This is my first children's book, it's Quentin's 100th! And he's the children's illustrator, so I didn't feel like: Quentin! Some notes."
On the table is the script he's been studying before I arrived: Pinter's No Man's Land, about to open in the West End as I write. It is, he says, filled with literary references and about "two mad poets". Walliams turns out to be a serious poetry reader, especially just before bed: Larkin, Sylvia Plath ("very depressing, constant images of death"), Ted Hughes, "classic stuff". "I always travel with Philip Larkin's Collected Poems, because I think wherever you are there's a time to reread something."
He studied drama at Bristol University. The dramatist Sarah Kane, who later committed suicide, was in his year ("she dreamed up some really, really disturbing stuff. But you know, she was funny too"), while Simon Pegg was in the year above.
"We did plays and comedy shows together and we were friends. He was always hilarious and I did learn a lot, watching him. The frustrating thing that he has that I don't have is this incredible likeability. He'd come on and read, say, a comic romantic poem and all the girls would go aaaaah! Isn't he nice? I'd come on and they'd all go, oh, what a *******." He laughs heartily then says with a slight sneer, "I don't really want to be nice... it's a good job I'm not."
He's nicer than he gives himself credit for; certainly more modest and charming than I was expecting him to be. Walliams leaves me with a story about a young Little Britain fan who sent in a picture of himself dressed as their transvestite character. "He wrote: 'I'm going to school on fancy dress day as Emily Howard,' and I thought, maybe we have changed things a tiny bit, because it's all right now, on some level, to go to school dressed like that and that's good. I don't know that boy's story, but I found it quite uplifting really." n
The extract: The Boy in the Dress, by David Walliams (HarperCollins £12.99)"... 'Now can I look in the mirror?' he asked.
'You haven't got any make-up on yet.'
'No, Lisa, no!'
'You've got to do this properly, Dennis.' Lisa reached for her make-up bag. 'This is so much fun!' ... She rolled the lipstick gently across his lips."
Independent
