Walliams launching a book in 2012. (Danny Martindale/WireImage)
I always thought it was surprising how many women are taken in by men in “fauxmosexual” sheep’s clothing. And then, knock me down with a feather boa, it turns out that I went through exactly the same experience with David Walliams — albeit by proxy, because I’d lost my youthful beauty by the time he was on the prowl.
It didn’t stop me from making my crush clear in a 2008 Guardian piece about attempting to learn to drive, and falling for my instructor, Graeme. “GRAEME. You know how for years a name can seem totally ordinary, then you meet this brilliant person who has that name and it never looks the same to you again? That’s how it was with Graeme, a very agreeable cross between David Walliams and Mahatma Gandhi.”
I thought about Graeme for days afterward — and all because he was the only person I’d met who reminded me of David Walliams.
I liked Walliams so much that I even found him attractive in some of his Little Britain guises, which were all grotesque, such as Lou, the concerned carer of the apparently disabled miscreant Andy. I also liked him as the recent widow who is reminded of her late husband Ivor by literally everything that exists. I even liked him — horribly — as the gerontophile who has unspeakable fantasies about his friend’s nan. As it transpires, Walliams stands accused of being the very opposite of a gran-fancier: one 15-year-old describes her alleged experience with him as “sexual assault” while another accuses him of grooming her as a teenager. (He denies wrongdoing and insists that he is not a sexual predator.)
Imagine my excitement when he started to hold book signings at a children’s bookstore literally two streets from me. It was as much as I could do not to borrow a child and turn up. He was late, the Brighton Argus reported, despite owning a property on Hove’s nearby “millionaire’s row”, Western Esplanade, and he did not speak to the newspaper’s reporter. Perhaps he was still smarting from the paper’s revelation that he had been fined £600 for what the judge called a “prolonged piece of extremely fast driving” — 99 miles per hour — on the A27. Maybe that’s when things started going downhill. Still, the thought that he had a house in the ’hood remained pleasant to me. What if I ran into him, looking miraculously ravishing one day, on my way from The Blind Busker to the Gin Tub?
If I’d been in the habit of watching the ghastly, often gay, you-scratch-my-back talk shows of the time, I might have seen him on Alan Carr’s Chatty Man in 2009 and immediately got over my crush. “Taking time out from starring in Little Britain and going out with every beautiful woman in the country to be here tonight…” says Carr, smarmily introducing his guest. Walliams sashays on to the strains of “Boys (Summertime Love)”, by Sabrina Salerno, kisses Carr on the lips, does what is vulgarly known as a “tit-bump” several times, then exclaims “GET OFF ME!”
What follows is a smorgasbord of smut, sexism and strutting machismo hiding behind a gender-fluid front.
“Boys, boys, boys, I’m looking for a good time?” quotes Walliams. The audience laughs knowingly — and then he pivots. “Because when I was a kid I really fancied the singer, Sabrina…” This is truly a man who wants to have his cock and eat it.
“Where is Sabrina now?” Walliams wonders. The song was more than 20 years old; Sabrina herself was already a haggard 19 when “Boys” was a hit.
Walliams goes on to recall — in the course of plugging his book The Boy In The Dress — that he himself cross-dressed from an early age. Carr inquires why Walliams won’t marry Natalie Imbruglia, a pop star whom he knew at the time and has admitted to falling for.
“She’s turned me down because ‘You’re a vile sexual predator’”, says Walliams, not appearing particularly troubled.
Elsewhere in the comedy world, Walliams’ love life remained a punchline rather than a cause for concern. Jonathan Ross does not emerge well from this mess. He bellowed at the 2004 British Comedy Awards: “The comedy awards is 15 years old — 15 years old! And like most 15-year-olds, it’s drunk, it’s unpredictable and it’s probably going home with David Walliams.” Walliams laughed delightedly.
“Cuddly Gay” Carr doesn’t come out well either. In his semi-autobiographical sitcom Changing Ends, Alan Carr writes: “I thought women were a bit like olives: they turn your stomach at first, but if you persevere, you’d learn to love them.”
Walliams, judging by today’s revelations, seemed to consider the young women he toyed with akin to olives too; insubstantial appetizers. “I am devastated that some of the women I met 10 to 20 years ago have now expressed hurt or anger towards me,” he said in a statement. Who expects an hors d’oeuvre to demand respect?
Walliams does not dispute the investigation’s accounts of him approaching many unworldly young women over social media and going on to meet some of them in person, even at home. Was that what it was all for, the ambition and the striving and the applause? How could so many, including me, have been taken in by so little?
But then Walliams always had a way of knowing what buttons to push. One mother at the Hove bookshop said: “He puts quite a lot of history in the books. I know his granddad fought in the war, in the RAF. When those veterans came on Britain’s Got Talent he got quite emotional.”
But was that apparent emotion any more real than being a grown-up girly-boy — or any realer than the sympathy he showed the Britain’s Got Talent hopefuls before he was recorded deriding them?
It’s said that, as with Russell Brand, the entertainment industry was bending over backwards to conceal Walliams’ habits in order to protect “the talent”. The real question is: was the talent even worth it? We’re not looking at Caravaggio here. We’re looking at a light-entertainment chancer who got lucky.
“Lad culture” is blamed for a lot of the sexually exploitative behavior which took place in the recent past. But, damningly, the likes of Walliams are a far cry from an actual young lad drooling over Loaded’s latest “High Street Honey”. Well, lads, consider the stomachs of the nation’s women well and truly turned in return.
