Preview camp DaviD
DAVID WALLIAMS Camp David The Autobiography MICHAEL JOSEPH an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS Contents Introduction 1 A Religious Start 2 The Demon and the Ogre 3 A Dutch Nudist Camp 4 The First Laugh 5 ‘Don’t do it!’ 6 Theatrical Types 7 The White Rabbit 8 Kenny Everett on a Monorail 9 ‘Age cannot wither her’ 10 ‘A couple of queers’ 11 A Swimmer Who Dabbles in Comedy 12 Enter Daffyd 13 The Bongos 14 A Giant Egg 15 One Person Laughing 16 Learning to Love an Oddball 17 Hant & Dec 18 Mash ’n’ Peas 19 ‘An anal misogynist cul-de-sac’ 20 ‘Asleep in yesterday’s suit’ 21 A Surprise Guest Star 22 ‘An Old Pile of Rubbish’ 23 Goblin or Hobgoblin? 24 ‘Pick up the phone, let’s fight’ 25 A Poetic Soul 26 Two Words 27 The Comedy Pope 28 In Bed with Rob Brydon 29 4.48 a.m. 30 ‘Don’t fall in love here’ 31 ‘Yeah, I know’ 32 Tonight Is Forever Illustrations Permissions Acknowledgements For Lara. How I wish I had met you sooner … x ‘When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one.’ Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Introduction May I begin by offering my sincere apologies. If you have bought this book assuming it was a history of the President of the United States’ country retreat, sorry. This is the autobiography of a camp British comedian, me. I always vowed never to write about my life unless I was completely honest, and Camp David is a completely honest, perhaps too honest, account of my life. The book starts with my birth in 1971 and ends in December 2003, after the first series of Little Britain was broadcast on BBC2 in the autumn of that year. The part of my life you will know the least about is here in this book, in all its joy and sadness. From the moment Little Britain aired, my life was documented in tabloid newspapers. However, little did the press know of the extraordinary life I had lived before I became famous. So here it is. For the first time ever. My story. David Walliams PS I am not the bald one in Little Britain. I am the taller, less funny one. 1 A Religious Start ‘Guess what me and your dad saw on the high street today,’ said my mum. She was breathless with excitement. ‘I don’t know,’ my eight-year-old self replied. ‘Guess!’ implored my dad. ‘I don’t know.’ My mum took a pause to add suspense. ‘A black man!’ she said. I was as surprised as they were. A black man in Banstead in Surrey? ‘What was he doing?’ I asked. ‘Was he lost?’ asked my ten-year-old sister Julie. My mum and dad searched each other’s faces for an answer. ‘He was just walking along the street, I suppose,’ said my mum. ‘Maybe shopping?’ added my dad, helpfully. That was what growing up in Banstead in the 1970s was like for me. So spectacularly uneventful that seeing a black man in the street was a major incident. I am told I was born in the early hours of 20 August 1971. At a maternity hospital in Wimbledon called St Teresa’s, which was run by an order of nuns. A religious start to a very irreligious life. So eager was I to be born, I came out quickly and my dad missed my birth. My father had two main obsessions. Bridges and tunnels. Peter Williams (he didn’t have a middle name because his parents couldn’t afford one) was an engineer for London Transport for the best part of fifty years. He loved looking at railway bridges and tunnels, and if we travelled on the train anywhere he would point out a bridge and say proudly, ‘I worked on the maintenance for that.’ Peter Williams was born in 1936 and so as a child lived through World War II. My father told me a story once that seemed to have little significance to him, but that had huge significance for me in trying to understand him. When he was boy, as Nazi rockets flew over his little terraced house in Balham, south London, his parents bought a rabbit. My dad, who could only have been six years old, naturally assumed it was a pet, named it and grew to love it. Peter cared for it, he fed it, he even mucked out its cage. Then one day he came home from school and saw the rabbit hanging dead outside the back door. In that lean time of rationing it had been food all along. My dad had loved, but the thing he loved was killed. In my opinion he never found it that easy to love again. My mum Kathleen was a laboratory technician in a school, one of those shadowy and often dysfunctional figures that help the science teachers bring out and put away the equipment for experiments. At my secondary school we used to refer to the lab technician as Igor, after the hunchbacked assistant of Dr Frankenstein. Though I never saw my mother at work, I cannot believe the pupils at Sutton Grammar School, where she worked, called her Igor. If my dad could be cold, she couldn’t have been warmer. She has spent her whole life doing things for others. One evening a week she was a Brown Owl to generations of Brownies until she was forced to retire at sixty-five. A Banstead artist once painted her portrait. It was of her in the local community centre bent over the sink doing the washing-up. Kathleen Ellis met Peter Williams in 1961, when she was sixteen. She married him at eighteen. She has two younger twin sisters, Sue and Janet, whose extremely close bond excluded her. A lot of my mum and dad’s courting took place at Tooting Bec Lido, so swimming must be in the blood. My dad even had a chipped front tooth from showing off as a youth, diving into a pool. Loving came much more naturally to my mum than my dad, and despite not breastfeeding me (which I would later correct with one of Little Britain’s most memorable sketches) she couldn’t have loved me or my sister or her husband any more. We grew up in a quiet little close in Nork, the posh end of Banstead (not that it has a ghetto), in a nice detached house with a garden and crazy paving out the front, where my mum still lives. Both my parents were working class Londoners, my dad from Balham and my mum from Mitcham. They moved out into Surrey suburbia in the hope of becoming middle class. It felt like a
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