Little Me

Matt Lucas

Description

The hilarious, heart-warming and tear-jerking memoir from one of Britain's best-loved comedians and actors, Matt Lucas. Hello there. Welcome to my autobiography. Throughout this book I talk about my life and work, including Little Britain, Come Fly With Me, Bridesmaids, Les Miserables, Alice In Wonderland and, of course, Shooting Stars. The thing is, this is a bit different to most memoirs you may have read, because it comes in the form of an A-Z. For instance, B is for Baldy! - which is what people used to shout at me in the playground (not much fun), G is for Gay (because I'm an actual real life gay) and T is for the TARDIS (because I'm a companion in Doctor Who now). You get the sort of thing. Anyway I hope you buy it at least twice. Thank you.

Sujets

• Television

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786891075
• Langue: English

Extrait

Matt Lucas is an award-winning comedian, actor and writer. He started his comedy career in the early nineties, working with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer on The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer and Shooting Stars , where he played giant baby George Dawes, but discovered major success with co-star David Walliams in Little Britain and Come Fly With Me , for which they won three BAFTAs, three NTAs and two International Emmy Awards.Matt received much praise for his work on stage in Les Miserables and has since gone on to feature in many successful films and TV shows, including Alice in Wonderland, Bridesmaids, Paddington, A Midsummer Night's Dream and now Doctor Who .

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Matt Lucas, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN 978 1 78689 086 3 Export ISBN 978 1 78689 106 8 eISBN 978 1 78689 107 5
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
While every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders of illustrations, the author and publishers would be grateful for information about any illustrations where they have been unable to trace them, and would be glad to make amendments to further editions.
Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh.
Contents
Preface
A – Accrington Stanley
B – Baldy!
C – Chumley
D – Doing the Circuit
E – Eating
F – Frankie and Jimmy
G – Gay
H – Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School
I – Idiot
J – Jewish
K – Kevin
L – Little Rumblings
M – Middle of the Book
N – Nearest and Dearest
O – Oh Look, it’s Thingy
P – Prosopagnosia
Q – Queen (and other Teenage Pursuits)
R – Really Big Britain
S – Southend, Sydney and Sunset Boulevard
T – The TARDIS
U – Upstage
V – Various Other Things I’ve Been In
W – What are the Scores, George Dawes?
X – Xenophobia
Y – Yankee Doodle
Z – Zzzzzzzz
Acknowledgements
Image Credits
Index
This book is dedicated to Emily, the kindest, most patient person in the world.
Preface
Hello. How are you? You been up to much?
And that’s the first line of my book. Now I know a lot of people write books and the opening line is something all clever like ‘I walked along the moors, leaves crunching beneath my feet, the dying sun retreating from view’, but the publishers said I have to write the truth, and I don’t think ‘I was sat on the sofa, polishing off a Chambourcy Hippopotamousse in front of Lovejoy ’ is particularly suspenseful so I’ve decided to open with ‘Hello’, and then, even if you don’t care for anything that comes after that, at least you’ll say I was well mannered.
Secondly, this is, I guess, a sort-of autobiography, but, as you will have gathered, it isn’t quite chronological. I have no attention span left. I give up halfway through reading a text message. This is my attempt to keep things zipping along. Life may begin at babyhood (I just checked and I’m slightly disappointed to learn that word already exists) but my thoughts and memories are dotted about. The alphabetical approach is actually an attempt to corral them somehow.
Tonally it’s probably a bit all over the place, because that’s me. Half my life has been spent with people complaining that I’m too serious, that – in the words of my late father – I ‘think too much’. The rest of the time people tell me to stop mucking about.
Also, everything in this book is – as far as I know – true. But not everything is in this book. I know things that would ruin people’s careers. I certainly know things that would finish mine. I’m not looking to burn bridges. You might have to read between the lines here and there. In Ethel Merman’s autobiography there is a chapter entitled ‘My Marriage To Ernest Borgnine’ which just has one empty page. I’m not going to go that far, but there’s no scorched-earth policy in this book. I’d like to keep working if I can. I’m only forty-three. If I spill ALL the beans, then no one will trust me, no one will hire me and I’ll have no option but to go into the Celebrity Big Brother house. I’m far too crotchety in the mornings for that. It’s not going to happen.
And finally, in this book, amongst many other things, I refer on occasion to Kevin McGee, the man I loved and lost, a kind, warm, beautiful being who didn’t have the armour for this world. I have always been reticent to talk publicly about our relationship and the events that followed it. Grief for me has been profound and unrelenting, but also private. I have a moral discomfort with using his suffering to sell a book, to elicit public sympathy and money. We also had an agreement during our separation not to discuss what happened. He kept to it and so have I. So I’ll talk about how I have tried to find a way forward after his death, but I won’t be going into rich detail about our relationship, his illness or suicide. The other truth is that there is so much about him that I don’t know and never will.
I’ll tell you what I can about my life, but much of it, frankly, has been about learning to live without the answers.
Right, let’s get on with it.
Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 1987
A – Accrington Stanley
I didn’t often break into a run but on that spring morning in 1986 my pudgy twelve-year-old self jumped off the coach, hurtled along the path, took a left at the Art building, down the PE corridor, past the room full of state-of-the-art BBC Micro Model B computers, up the Chemistry corridor and into the house block.
There were already a few other boys waiting eagerly for the arrival of Barry Edwards, my lanky, mop-haired form master and proud writer of Columbus! , a new musical (score by Mr Hepworth) to be performed by the Junior School at Haberdashers’ that summer.
I’d already pondered the impending bittersweetness of appearing – no – starring in the show while my father languished in Spring Hill open prison, unable to witness in person what would surely be the beginning of my prodigious rise to fame and glory.
Edwards appeared, pinning the cast list to the noticeboard, before swiftly exiting. We clustered around it. Being one of the shorter boys, I had to wait a moment to get a peek. At the top it said that Oliver White – from the year above – was to play the title role. I cast my eyes down the list and noted the names of a couple of friends, delighted that we would be performing together.
I scanned quickly to the bottom and started again – thoroughly, this time – from the top. After all, there were a lot of names on there – at least thirty, I would say.
Mine, however, was nowhere to be found.
My initial surprise quickly gave way to disappointment, but even that gave way pretty quickly to self-flagellation, something I’d been given to a fair deal of late. What on earth had I been thinking? Little me, the tubby boy with no hair, at the bottom of every class – what right did I have to suppose that I might be any part of this?
At morning break-time I went to my locker, reached into the brown pencil case full of coins and took out a couple. I had been appointed class charity monitor at the beginning of the year and I collected a donation from the less forgetful boys each Friday morning, during registration. Lately I had been given to pinching a coin or two to spend at the tuck shop, cramming my fat face full of jam doughnuts and Lion bars.
I sat with my friend Andrew Bloch, who had also been waiting for the list to be posted, and who had evidently shone brighter at his audition than I had in mine. His glee at being cast was being kept in check so as not to make me feel any worse. There weren’t many boys like that at this school.
We sucked determinedly on our rock-hard Jawbreakers (gobstoppers, three for 10p, with chewing gum in the middle, if you ever actually made it that far) as the ramifications of the morning’s key event became clear. Throughout my disastrous first year at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School I had consoled myself with the thought that my impending brilliance in the Junior School musical would put everything else into context. Sure, I had failed academically across the board – a wobbly cast-off on the otherwise perfect production line of future Oxbridge graduates – but once everyone finally came to appreciate where my skills really lay, I, Lord Olivier elect, would be hailed by staff and pupils alike, my academic shortfalls a mere footnote. ‘He struggles with Physics, yes ,’ they would say, ‘but his Hedda Gabler was sublime. Leave him be.’
Life returned to normality. I spent my days sat in class, utterly befuddled by an overload of information – the Treaty of Rapallo, lowest common multiples and oxbow lakes – and my nights in front of the television, watching Albion Market and Highway – anything – when I should have been doing my homework.
And then suddenly, one day, a couple of weeks into rehearsals, a rumour went around. One of the boys had pulled out of the show and Barry Edwards was to hold further auditions for his replacement one lunch break. I checked the drama noticeboard and sure enough there was another opportunity to be in the show. This was it. This was the moment. Like Peggy Sawyer in 42nd Street (which I had seen that year at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane), I was to save the day. Four of us put our names down and took it in turns to deliver the same speech. But then came the final insult: Edwards decided not to cast any of us, not even Russell Donoff.
On the coach home from school I sat with Andrew, prising from him updates on how rehearsals were going. My envy had given way to awe. I accepted my place under the table, happy to feast on the scraps.
A couple of weeks before Columbus! was to be staged, it was announced at Assembly that ushers would be required. I eagerly signed up for all three nights, herding a parade of old toffs and proud parents to their seats.
As