Matt Lucas: Creative discovery, grief, and tape recorders

0:00Hello and welcome to Happy Place. I'm Fern Cotton and this is the show that explores the life experiences that make us who we are. Today, I'm chatting to Matt Lucas. I had five years at a hard secondary school that I found a very difficult environment. And I think that and not having hair, my parents divorced, my dad went to prison. And I just saw acting as a way of not being me and being someone and something else. And in terms of sort of developing a sense of humour and developing some kind of vocal dexterity in terms of a sharpness, was a necessity to counteract the things that people said to me.

0:43Matt is perhaps best known for being a comedian, an actor and a presenter, but recently his creativity has been channelled into writing and into music. He's written a children's book called The Boy Who Slept Through Christmas, but it's basically a musical too. Matt's written 20 original songs that make up part of the story and you can scan QR codes in the book to listen to them as you read. It's a really cool concept. Anyway, I found this chat with him so life affirming because he's such brilliant proof that we can always discover new skills and passions later in life. There's always more to learn about ourselves.

1:23This conversation was also such a lovely opportunity to understand the experiences that have shaped Matt's career. We talk about the prison system, about what work we still need to do to support LGBTQ plus people and about grief, too. I hope there's lots in here to get your brain really whirring. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork.

2:06Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. Hi, this is Knox from the Popcast with Knox and Jamie. And maybe like us at the Popcast, you also know people who have been smokers or vapors. And Zen is the one product it seems like everyone is talking about. because there are many good reasons to make a change to Zen nicotine pouches. Reasons like Zen nicotine pouches are still America's number one choice for smoke-free, hands-free nicotine satisfaction. And you can choose between 10 varieties, each variety available in either 3 or 6 milligrams.

2:40Check out zen.com slash find to find Zen at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Hey, I'm Dr. Z and I'm a neurosurgeon. So that means long hours, early rounds, late nights, and everything in between. And through it all, I wear figs. They're comfortable when it counts and functional when I need them the most. So where do you wear your figs? On shift, on call, on the couch in the break room listening to this podcast? Wherever it is, they fit right in. And now listeners of this podcast can get 15 % off their first order. Just head to wearfigs.com and use code FIGSRX at checkout.

3:16That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids' spending with real-time notifications. Kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Sign up for Greenlight today at greenlight.com slash podcast.

3:49Okay, we'll get to Matt in just a moment. But first, I really want to tell you about a very special one-off event to celebrate the release of my new book, Little Things. I'll be on stage at Union Chapel on the 30th of January, sharing my everyday mental health toolkit to help you counteract stress by making small positive changes. You can come and learn some really lovely simple habits and we can all get some brilliant advice from some of my favourite mindfulness experts. I'm going to be joined by a host of special guests who lead some really cool interactive stress busting activities. Spoiler alert, they do include a group meditation and an invigorating sound bath.

4:35Oh, it's going to be so lovely. Bring a cosy blanket, bring a hot water bottle, wear your fluffiest socks it's all going to be gorgeous and it will hopefully promote a bit of serenity and reduce some fatigue and stress along the way. My new book Little Things basically focuses on the small things that we can do for ourselves to help get curious about the causes of our stress learning more about our own reactions to it and also how we can better cope with it all. If you want to come along I'd love to see you there in your fluffiest socks Get your tickets. It's feign.co.uk forward slash fern dash cotton.

5:17So that's feign f-a-n-e dot co dot uk forward slash fern f-e-a-r-n-e dash cotton. All right you lovely lot I might see you there but now here's the show.

5:51Hello, Matt Lucas. Hello. How are you? All right, thanks. How are you? Good. I don't even know when the last time was that I saw you face to face. I can't even think. But we have met. Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember we once met around a pool in Miami? Oh, yeah. That was about 20 years ago. That would have been a while ago, wouldn't it? Yeah. We were both on holiday. You've got a good memory. I've got a great memory, for fun things anyway. Yeah. But it's so lovely to see you. We've got lots to talk about, namely your beautiful book, The Boy Who Slept Through Christmas, which is a very entertaining book, but also a very poignant book, and a book with music.

6:30You've got these little QR codes that you've put throughout the book, which then lead into songs that you've written. So why did you want to incorporate that element into your book? Well, so this is my first novel and it's for children, but also adults, I would say. It's my attempt to do a kind of home alone, big Christmas story. I love musicals. I've been in a few musicals and as I was writing the book, I thought I would love this to be a stage musical one day. And, you know, I was procrastinating from doing the next draft of the book by just writing some songs. And it occurred to me that we have the technology now.

7:09You know, if I'd done this 15 years ago, there would have been a CD in the back that you would have lost. But I decided to do lyric videos and write and record 20 songs. And then as you read the book, there are QR codes throughout the book so you can hear the songs as you go through. So it is a musical novel. and if you get the ebook as long as you're online you click the links and it takes you through to the music videos or if you're listening to the audiobook you just the songs just come on as and when i yeah i wanted to to a try and convince somebody to invest in this to take it to the stage and b i thought you know not everyone lives near a theater not everyone can afford to go to the theatre.

7:59This is a way of bringing a musical to people. It's so lovely. And, you know, obviously you've been in some fantastic musicals, but when did the sort of songwriting thing kick in? I hear that you got a piano during the pandemic to sort of tinkle around on. Was that where these songs started forming? Well, I had, when I lived, I lived in America for seven years and I had a nice piano there. Like a grand? A baby grand. A baby grand. Yeah. Very sexy. Yeah. But my house in London is much smaller. And if there was a baby grand, there would be no room in the room. No bed, but there's a piano. Yeah. There'll be no room to play it.

8:36So, yeah, I started writing songs. Like I wrote a couple when I was at university. But when I was on Shooting Stars, I started writing these little sort of 45 second comic songs. and then at the beginning of the pandemic I ordered that small electric piano to my house because I thought hang on a minute I might be here for a while and I started playing Thank You Baked Potato which was one of my old songs and the reason I played it is because I think it's only got three or four chords in it it was about the only thing I could play because I can't read music and I'm not a pianist I can just play chords and figure out chords to songs as I go and I changed the lyrics and made it about the pandemic, you know, because I thought this is quite an alarming time for children.

9:24And also a lot of adults weren't social distancing right at the beginning. And I thought, I remembered when I was a kid, my dad was a smoker and I really wanted him to stop smoking. And there was this television commercial on TV with Superman and Nicotine was the villain. And I kept seeing this advert and then I would lobby my father to give up smoking. And so I thought if I can get the kids, I can get to the adults as well. So I just had that moment because I was so distressed at watching the news and seeing that people weren't social distancing because I just thought maybe we're all going to die.

9:59So I just put it on my Twitter. I just filmed myself singing Thank You Baked Potato with some new lyrics and it went viral. And then I recorded it as a single and it went to number one on iTunes and number one in the download charts. and then I was approached to turn it into a book and I paid for like a music video and all the the proceeds went to this charity called Feed NHS which I was one of the founders of I mean really Helen McCrory and Damien Lewis did the work along with a guy called John Vincent they did a lot of the work but I was sort of there or thereabouts and this book came out Thank You Baked Potato and it did well and it raised money and then I thought I'll do a follow-up book and I did a follow-up book called Merry Christmas Baked Potato which was out two or three years ago and for that book I wrote like a four minute song and when I wrote that song I thought oh I've just written a full song not just a little minute-long jingle I've written a full song here that made me think oh maybe maybe I should give this a go because I love musicals and I've been watching musicals my whole life obsessively and traveling all over the world to watch them.

11:15And I've pronounced on everyone's musicals, you know, what I liked, what I didn't like. So I thought it was time for me to put my money where my mouth is and start writing one myself. Well, it's a lovely addition to the book. It's the short answer. Oh, we don't like short answers. We like really lovely, loquacious answers. No, it's a beautiful addition because, you know, you've got, again, this sort of entertainment of the story and it romps along and it's really really enjoyable but you've got the the poignant element is Leo the main character in the book has lost his mum and he's anticipating Christmas day without her and he's really wanting it to be the perfect Christmas day so you've got grief in there which I think is really important around this time of year because of course Christmas is it's like a full-bodied experience whether you want it or not it's got colours that we recognise it smells of pine needles and cinnamon and it's got jingle bells and sounds to it and everywhere you go at this time of the year you know twinkly lights it's sort of everywhere so I think if you have lost someone it's kind of unavoidable you're gonna be thinking about them or what your Christmas time was like when they were around so it is an incredibly difficult time for some people out there.

12:33Of course, you've experienced acute grief in your life in varying ways. Did it just feel like a very important thing to bring that to this book? It's a kid's book, but you've got to be able to cover grief and talk about these big subjects with the youth audience. Yeah, I mean, I thought, you know, there will be children out there and this Christmas might be, for a lot of them, their first Christmas without a grandparent or an uncle, an aunt, a teacher, a neighbour, a friend, maybe in terrible cases, a parent or a sibling or even a pet. And Christmas is really idealized in the media. And for many people, Christmas is a very difficult time.

13:17But it is still a time to stop and give thanks for the year that's just gone. And, you know, think about how things might change for the better in the year ahead. Yeah, I mean, I've, I lost my father when I was 22 and he died late November. So that Christmas was hard as was the next one and the next one and the next one. And it's strange because I'm Jewish. So we have Hanukkah, but we still get together on Christmas Day because it's a public holiday. And also because some members of our family are not Jewish. people have married people who aren't jewish some members of our family were not born jewish and converted so we celebrate christmas without a christmas tree and we don't do christmas presents but we have hunneka presents and hunneka the jewish festival of light is around the same time as christmas so we often end up giving the presents on christmas day um we don't have christmas carols but we as a family we like the turkey and the roast potatoes and all of that so So we sort of, our Christmas doesn't look that much unlike a lot of people's in this country, you know, and we're British.

14:31It's unavoidable. We're Jewish, but we're British. And so we want to do a British Christmas. You go into a shop and there's Christmas music playing. I think it's unavoidable no matter where your religious beliefs sit, you know, whereabouts you are in the country. It is unavoidable. And Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas and he was Jewish. There you go. You know, a lot of Christmas songs have been written by Jews. So I thought, right, it's time to do a few myself. But yeah, Christmas is tough. I've had loss. I've lost a partner. I've lost a parent, both very much before their time, two people gone before their time.

15:05And so I'm aware of that anxiety and that pressure. And it's not even not everyone, not everyone has lost someone, but some people are just, they might have lost their job or they might be, you know, struggling financially and particularly the moment. So there's all sorts of things. They might not be well, they might be in hospital. This book is poignant, but it's also funny. I mean, it is a comic novel. And, you know, this boy wishes Christmas away. And for reasons that are explained in the book, but which I'm not going to give away, he does sleep through Christmas and wakes up and it's Boxing Day and he's got to go and get Christmas back.

15:42And so the last sort of third of the book is his sort of road movie, his road trip going around trying to find Father Christmas and getting into various different scrapes and adventures. I worked really hard on it and it's not cool to say it, but I'm really proud of it. We bloody well should be. I think it's a really lovely thing to say that. We're so weird about saying we're proud of stuff, aren't we? Especially as adults. I feel eggy about it, but there are things that I'm really proud of inside. I think it's a really lovely thing to admit out loud. Yeah, there's a few songs in it as well, I think.

16:16Oh, I didn't know that I could write like that. That's amazing. Yeah. It's really cool. And also to sort of discover that you're really wanting to push forward with that, I'm not going to use the word hobby, but that new sort of career passion down the line. We don't have to discover all this as teenagers and kids. These can be things that develop as you get older. I love that. We're in our first musical at 49. It's fantastic. And the songs were written during a period where I was actually very depressed and I kind of locked myself away for a couple of months and wrote my way out of depression, which I'm not saying that everyone can creatively yank themselves out of it by any means.

16:54But that's what I did. I was able to do on this occasion for myself. I mean, I've experienced the same without a doubt. like creativity has been my saviour again and again in whatever form, whether it's writing or painting or just brainstorming ideas. And I think, you know, everyone's got creativity within them. Sometimes it's just not recognised, I guess. What was bringing on that particular period of depression? I just had some bad news and I was renovating my house and I wasn't in my own house. And I know, I don't mean it, not in a grand way. my house is really small two-bedroom house little little house i live in which i love you know it's um but it's my home my little nest and so that that probably didn't help as well just i don't know i mean that that was a side issue i just had some just had some things happen you know and they you know knocked me for six but i think i probably without that depression i probably would have had six songs in this book or four but I locked myself away and just completely threw myself into this I mean I wasn't it you know it was quite feverish I was not really sleeping much I was it's very hard I found for me when I write songs I find it hard to sleep until a song is finished but I also find it I don't know if a song is ever finished so so I was living strange hours and just being completely instinctive as a writer, which is not something I've found that easy to do in a world where your phone's on and there's social media and just we, I seem to know more people than I ever knew before.

18:42Yeah, what's that about? Well, it's just the way it's gone, isn't it? And to actually sort of hide for a couple of months and also, you know, to shock my agent because after the Christmas break, you know I emailed my agent said um so there's now 20 songs in this and she was like okay but in the book there'll be four songs and then it's great that you've written the rest for the musical I went no in the book there'll be 20 songs I guess because I couldn't divorce one from the other the two are the set one of the same the the book and the songs it's one entity um so we just had to deal with the practicalities of recording a musical which I paid for the music and hired some of the greatest singers in the West End you know then the publishers sort of everyone retrospectively had to get on board and yeah and we had to work out technically how to do it so I sort of threw this big curveball at the publisher and at my agents and fair play to them and much gratitude to them all for running with it.

19:49Yeah, it was, yeah, I've worked really hard on this. Isn't it interesting how sometimes the fluidity of creativity is much more fluent when we're not feeling good? Yeah. I often have that. If I'm feeling chipper, I'm sort of less inclined to maybe dig deeper and get a bit introspective or whatever might need to be excavated. I can sort of, I don't know, flit around the surface. But when you're not feeling good, that's where I'm painting better or I'm writing from a deeper place. Maybe you have to get it out. You do. You have to sort of purge yourself of it somehow. And so, yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't want this to sound conceited, but there are like lyrics in this that I didn't know I had in me and there are musical phrases in this I didn't know I had in me.

20:42I didn't know. So it has been a journey of discovery. I've written a lot of sketches with David Walliams over the years and I've written lots of little comic songs on my own. But to write, you know, the opening number is almost 14 minutes long in this. It's a bit of an opus. I love it. Yeah. It's a Queen Bohemian Rhapsody. Yeah. It's, yeah, as my mum says, is it a bit too long? Is he a bit too long? It's never long enough, quite frankly. It might be a bit too long. I think it's a bit too long. It's so brilliant. The other songs that are shorter, Don't Worry. Oh, it's so lovely. And the character Leo, he's very responsible and he wants to get things right.

21:23And obviously part of that is due to his grief. But at times in the book, he is quite lonely as well. Are they feelings that you experienced in childhood that you drew upon? I think childhood is lonely. Absolutely. Yeah, I think there's so much you have to figure out for yourself. So much that isn't explained. So much to process all the time. You know, my gosh, I'm so glad my childhood, we didn't have Instagram in my childhood. Twitter and YouTube. I mean, they're great when they're great, but I'm so glad I wasn't overwhelmed and bombarded. I mean, I have books, thick books that I grew up with that I read time and time and time again because there wasn't really much else to do.

22:10And I remember when I was, I think we were nine or 10 and we rented a video recorder from Granada or Rumbelow's Radio Rentals, one of those places. And then things changed. We had a bit of control. You could record something and then put it on when you wanted to. And that changed. I think about the generation before us who didn't even have video recorders and two television channels. I try and tell my kids now, guys, you know you're choosing out of the 8 ,000 films that are available to you, we just had to watch what was on. And their brains cannot accept that idea. that there was just four things you could choose from.

22:52I hated Why Don't You. Why don't you? Yeah, I hated it because I couldn't understand the accents of the people on it. If they were from Newcastle or Wales, I couldn't because I hadn't really met people from those places. Yeah, same. And I couldn't understand them. Their accents were too thick for me as a kid, but I never missed it. And that's the point. We had no choice. We had nothing to do. I mean, nothing. Why don't you? Such a good reference. I like people from Wales and Newcastle. Don't worry. Oh, yeah, no, same. Yeah, but it was just, I couldn't, I didn't know what they were saying. Or Northern Ireland, I just didn't know what they were saying.

23:27But we didn't go anywhere. So we didn't, we weren't mixing with people from other parts of the country because we were literally where we lived. Yeah. And that was it. Parochial. Yeah. I mean, I've heard you talk about your childhood in varying ways, one of them relating to your alopecia and saying that you had this keen sense of developing a personality, probably prematurely, because you were keen not to be the kid who just didn't have hair. You wanted to be known for other things. Do you think that's helped you cultivate your comedy, your humour as well as a young person? Yeah, I think the elements of that.

24:01And also I had five years at a very hard secondary school that I found a very difficult environment. And I think that and not having hair and other things going on, difficult things. My parents divorced, my dad went to prison. There were a few things. I also had really bad asthma and really bad eczema as a kid. The first 10 years of my life, I think I was covered in eczema, my body. I just saw acting as a way of not being me and being someone and something else and in terms of sort of developing a sense of humor and developing a sort of some kind of vocal dexterity in terms of you know a sharpness uh was just was was a necessity to counteract the things that people said to me you said you were either you sort of recognized you either being bullied or patronized yeah i think that's probably true so what were you so your coping mechanism was sharpness yeah yeah yeah humor you know my late father was a big fan of of comedy and american comedy and was you know i was shown blazing saddles at a young age and i and you know for my birthday i think when i was 12 or 11 taken to see space balls you know and my dad encouraged me to watch Jack Benny.

25:34And I remember being 10 or 11 and Monty Python's Flying Circus had just come out on video. And my dad rented those and The Meaning of Life and all those movies. And some of them were really rude. And the deal was, you know, you can watch, you can't watch horror movies or gore. You can watch movies with bad language. But if you use the bad language, you can't watch those movies anymore. So that was the deal. So I was like, Okay. Yeah. So I had this great comic education from my father and I used to watch Saturday Live on TV and Jasper Carrot and these shows. And I had this tape recorder that I would hold up to the television.

26:14And then in the school playground, I would be listening. I had this Sony Walkman ripoff and one of the earphones didn't work, but one of them did. And I would listen to these comic routines in the school playground, you know, at lunchtime. And then when I was 18, I started doing stand-up comedy and I ended up performing alongside some of the comedians whose routines I'd learned, you know, five, six years earlier when I was quite starstruck. But yeah, it was a necessity to me as a child with no hair from the age of six to be good at something. Had I been a great footballer, a great sportsman, had I been a brilliant musician, I think it would have been okay.

26:55I needed to be really good at something had I been a good artist. But I wasn't great at any of those things. I was an all right drummer. I had a drum kit from the age of 13 for my bar mitzvah and I ended up playing on Shooting Stars. Of course. So, I mean, I could play the drums, but I wasn't. I'm no Buddy Guy, you know. I'm not a, was that the guy? Charlie, what's he called? Buddy Rich? Buddy. There was some brilliant drummer and I've shown myself up by not knowing his name. You know Charlie Watts? Charlie Watts, yeah. I think it might be Buddy Rich. We'll go Buddy Rich because I don't know either.

27:27Yeah. Let's say, no, let's say someone new. Let's say I'm no Ivan Carmichael. Let's just say there was a drama called that. Let's land on that. No, I'm no Ivan Carmichael. His group, Mervyn Bailey's Jazz Muffins, were a really big influence on me. Oh, I'm so glad. No, I get it. And, you know, I think for a lot of kids that feel like they perhaps don't fit in, there is an urgency to cultivate something that makes them stand out for other reasons. And it can lead you to really great things. Really great things. Yeah. Or bad things. Or bad things. You've got to pick a passion that's, you know, beneficial and not detrimental to your well-being and life.

28:13The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork. To keep work moving, go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. Hi, this is Knox from the Popcast with Knox and Jamie. And maybe like us at the Popcast, you also know people who have been smokers or vapors.

28:50And Zen is the one product it seems like everyone is talking about. Because there are many good reasons to make a change to Zen nicotine pouches. Reasons like Zen nicotine pouches are still America's number one choice for smoke-free, hands-free nicotine satisfaction. And you can choose between 10 varieties, each variety available in either 3 or 6 milligrams. Check out zen.com slash find to find Zen at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Hey, I'm Dr. Z and I'm a neurosurgeon. So that means long hours, early rounds, late nights, and everything in between.

29:24And through it all, I wear figs. They're comfortable when it counts and functional when I need them the most. So where do you wear your figs? On shift, on call, on the couch in the break room listening to this podcast? Wherever it is, they fit right in. And now listeners of this podcast can get 15 % off their first order. Just head to wearfigs.com and use code FIGSRX at checkout. That's wherefigs.com, code FIGSRX. Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids' spending with real-time notifications.

30:04Kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Sign up for Greenlight today at greenlight.com slash podcast.

30:18You mentioned that your dad went to prison. This was when you were a young teenager and it was a brief spell. And I've heard you again say that it's something that you just kind of got through at the time. Yeah, we got through it. Is that something that you've had to sort of process as an adult? Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I've thought about it and written about it a bit. I don't want to talk about it in great depth just because, you know, I have a brother who's also my father's son and my father's widow and my father's stepchildren, my stepbrother and stepsister, you know, who are obviously very close to him.

30:54And I want to be sensitive to how they understood that experience, you know. But yeah, I mean, thinking about that, I mean, this book, you know, there will be children whose parents will be in prison this Christmas. Yeah. You know, or siblings. We don't think a lot about the prison population. My dad made some mistakes in his business and, you know, paid the price. Yeah, it's not nice going to visit someone in prison, that's for sure. It's really stressful as a kid. Have you ever been inside a prison in this country? I don't think I have. I'm trying to think if I've ever done any filming in one.

31:33I'm very nervous around the subject of prisons. I can't put my finger on why. I mean, there are maybe certain reasons, but yeah, I feel nervous about prisons, going in prisons. I'm massive massive admiration for people that do work in prisons and much needed work on mental health and you know general sort of care and well-being and and helping people in prison I find it quite a tough subject I think yeah I mean people are there for so many different reasons so when you're in there my dad was convicted of fraud and was sentenced to nine months and in those days you got a third off for good behavior as long as your sentence was under a certain uh was you know i don't think if you were sentenced to 30 years you get necessarily get a third off for good behavior for a really severe crime but my dad was sentenced to nine months and served six i think nowadays if he was sentenced to nine months he would serve fewer than six months because i think it's half your sentence but he was in prison with murderers and rapists and drug sellers and all that kind of thing.

32:45And it's not massively streamlined. There's like open prison and closed prison. And he was moved to an open prison after, I think, 10 days. But the first 10 days of his sentence, he spent in a closed prison, sharing a cell with someone. And I think that's pretty scary for people. you know and maybe and i know a lot of people think it should be scary you know um that there's different aspects isn't it one reason you go to prison is to protect the public another reason you go to prison is for punishment another reason you go to prison is for rehabilitation there's all it's it's you know there's lots of different reasons but um i feel i feel sorry for the population of people in prison you know a lot of them haven't had the opportunities that others have had and um yeah i think it's a it's a very tough environment yeah i wish for those people it wasn't as tough as it is when he came out did you notice that it changed him in ways yeah yeah definitely yeah of course it changed him yeah yeah he swore like a trooper when he came it's a great new skill yeah he swore like a trooper um yeah and then that dissipated and then he you know yeah different he was he didn't sweat the small stuff anymore when he came out he did the crime and did the time yeah yeah um you didn't get the opportunity to talk about your sexuality with your dab which I know has left you with a certain amount of regret that you didn't get to have that conversation well you know it was a generational thing so my father was a really loving father um really supportive very kind to me would come and see my comedy gigs was really proud of me made sure to tell me there was so much about him that was good you know even though he'd made this mistake earlier you know and and paid for it he was very loved there were over 400 people at his funeral.

34:51He died very young. He dropped down dead of a heart attack at 52. And I look up to him very much. I think he was from a generation that didn't understand LGBTQ plus people. Back then, visibility was much smaller. Being gay was linked so strongly to AIDS. A lot of people saw homosexuality as a sort of deviant behavior rather than a sort of identity. I also was single. I wasn't really dating anybody back then. So it wasn't like there was ever a time where I wanted to sit him down and say, Hey, look, I met someone. Um, but he was vocal about his discomfort around gay people. Yeah. Very vocal about that.

35:41But he did say something to me not long before he died. He didn't know he was going to die. None of us knew he did flippantly. He did sort of throw something into a conversation once he said, Oh, if you ever want to come over, you want to bring a friend over or a girl or a guy or whatever, like just, just, you know, that's fine. Let me know. And he threw that in. And I was like, did he just say that? Well, he died and I hadn't come out to him. And I had a conversation a couple of years after his death two or three years after his death with his sister and i told her on the phone that i was gay my aunt um who recently passed away and and she said your father knew i said did he if you're a smoker or vapor ready to make a change you really only need one good reason but with zin nicotine pouches you'll discover many good reasons zin is america's number one nicotine pouch brands.

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37:21Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. Your business is one of a kind, so your website should be too. With Wix, it's easy. Almost too easy to create a website that's perfectly yours. Just tell AI what kind of site you want to build or choose from thousands of templates. Change whatever you want, whenever you want, and get everything you need to start running your business your way. No matter what you sell or what you aspire to be, you can do it all yourself on Wix. Go to Wix.com. She said, yeah, he knew he was just waiting for you to tell him.

38:04She said he knew and he was okay with it. He was okay with it. He'd come to terms with it. So I didn't tell him I was gay because, well, like I say, I wasn't seeing anybody. I wasn't going on dates, but also I thought it would break his heart. And also I was a little bit worried that he might not want to see me anymore. so I just thought you know what at the time I felt like it would have been a selfish thing to do to tell him I was gay because I thought maybe you know it'll cause a lot of drama and it's not about me you know I get enough attention because people always talking about me because I'm on the telly and that's probably I should just leave it you know I just leave it and also I don't think I was very confident in myself you know having grown up without hair and obviously being overweight I didn't have any great sense that there were people queuing up to date me.

39:00So I just sort of, even though I was sort of, my friends knew like that I was, you know, gay or maybe I like women as well. I wasn't sure I was figuring it out. There was no urgency in coming out in that regard. But after he died and after my grandmother died, I went to a therapist and I was dealing with, you know fame and bereavement and my sexuality and I was like okay I it's time to deal with all of this stuff so in my early 20s I started to sort of properly come out and in my mid-20s I came out to my mum and my stepdad and my brother and just everyone else you know and it wasn't long before I was David the only gay in the village in pvc and leather that's my favorite yeah so so you know I I did the whole journey.

39:52But so many people of our generation will have had that experience. And actually, we can't ignore the people out there who still feel terrified to come out because it could be of religious reasons or whatever. And I was brought up religious. Today, yeah, that's terrifying. Yeah, when I told my mum I was gay, I mean, this is 25 years ago. You know, one of her first instincts was, well, the rabbi doesn't approve, you know. Well, now our synagogue, the rabbis are okay with it and they do, you know, lesbian and gay blessings there and things like that. So people do evolve and communities evolve. And I've no doubt, I've no doubt my dad would have been fine with it.

40:34Like I've no doubt, you know, it just takes time. And it also, also, you know, it's an abstract thing, but when people meet the partner or they meet the friends and they go, ah, it's fine, you know. And almost all of my friends growing up were straight and none of, they're all still my friends. None of them have any remotest issue with me being gay or anything. It's really not that, it's not that interesting. No, but I think that it's, it's a really important conversation to have because there are still people that aren't able to live in a liberated way as they should be able to. And also I think, you know, we grew up in a particularly homophobic and just strange time during the sort of 80s and 90s.

41:20It wasn't like it is today where we're having really open chats and there are moments to mark the celebration around it. It was, you know, a very fearful time for people wanting to come out. This is how it was. You'd watch TV and, you know, once every couple of months there'd be, Kilroy was this programme that was on in the mornings on the BBC and it was, he'd be walking around the audience. It was a bit like a sort of Oprah Winfrey type show. And every couple of months, there'd be a sort of fairly incendiary, often quite lurid sort of gay related episode. Like, you know, these gays want to get married or these gay people want to adopt or these gay people think that it should be allowed to teach about homosexuality and sex education in schools or whatever it was.

42:07and the majority, the vast majority of the studio audience would be against homosexuality by default. And you'd have a few people who would be out on the show talking and they were sort of treated a bit like freaks. And I would talk to people and I would sort of sound them out on the subject, you know, when I was meeting new people. And somebody would say, a very common response was, I don't care what they do in private, just as long as they don't shove it down my throat. And that was seen as a liberal, open-minded take. If you met someone and they said that, you thought, oh yeah, okay, they don't hate me.

42:48And that's amazing. But there was so much fear about AIDS as well. And you have to understand that in the 80s and 90s when you look at what it was to be gay in this country. You have to understand that. You also have to understand Section 28, which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools, which came in when I was about 14 or 15, whereby you could not mention the existence of homosexuality as a teacher for fear of being sacked and prosecuted, I think. Certainly being sacked. I mean, it's not long ago, is the other terrifying thing. No, it's not long ago. And actually it was repealed not that long ago.

43:29Things like gay marriage weren't even a concept. People weren't really talking about gay marriage. No. Weren't really. There's an episode of, I think, This Morning, probably in the Richard and Judy era, where there's a gay wedding on the show and it is just seen as the biggest freak show in the world, you know. I mean, they're celebrating it, but it's just seen as the most bizarre thing, two men getting married. I mean, and this is something that you, yeah, you're internalising. I'm pretty sure there weren't many people that you could talk to about those feelings or the fear that you must have had growing up as a teenager.

44:01No, not really. But when I was 16, I met David Walliams, who had a girlfriend, but we'd go out, I'd meet him, we'd go to the theatre. I was 16, he was 19. Actually, we met then, but the next year we were in a show together at the National Youth Theatre, and then we started socialising. So I would have been 17, he would have been 20, and he had this beautiful girlfriend, Katie. but we'd go to the theater and then I'd meet him at the station and he'd be wearing a skirt and long black socks and like a hair clip and lipstick and makeup and I'd go oh my god and people would stare at us on the tube and so he he kind of pushed me propelled me in a way to be a bit more out there and a bit more, which obviously we were in our comedy.

44:58He had a fearlessness about him. We had a girlfriend, but there was a queerness to him. And so he moved everything so far that I had to move a bit with him and become less apologetic about who I was. So, I mean, I really put that down to him. And I remember calling him, and I'd known him for years and years and years, And I came out to my mum, I think 98, 99, and I called David up and I said, even though we would see each other Monday to Friday every day, but I think it was a Friday night. And I called him up and I said, you know, I might be a little bit fragile, a little bit tender on Monday because I've just had this big conversation with my mum and told her that I'm gay.

45:42And he was really great about it. And so that's brilliant that you did that. And you know how wonderful when you'll be able to be the person you are. and you'll be able to go dating. And he was really supportive and loving. And, you know, we ended the call and there's a beat and then the phone rang and I picked it up and it's David goes, you never told me you were gay. Disgusting. And then just hang up. It's perfect. Yeah, which is exactly, which David was like, David just saw it as kind of fun and funny and silly and daft and an opportunity for humour, which, you know, obviously we did in our, in Little Britain, you know, dressing up as everything.

46:19And so it was really healthy for me to have someone like that in my life, offering a totally different view because he'd also grown up in the suburbs. But he, you know, he was quite a rebel himself. I love when you meet people that bring out your own inner fearlessness because we've all got it. Yeah. It just depends on the environment you've been brought up in, what you've got going on. but when you meet those people who drag you out of your comfort zone and take you to sort of the the boundaries you're not even sure are there that is exciting and I think it's it's brilliant because you've got people like that who who pull out that fearlessness and in the same way and you can be influenced in a really positive way but I think on the other end of it when you look back to the 80s and 90s where you've got people who are openly being homophobic it's because they're just simply going with crowd mentality.

47:10And there's so much to be said for that in a negative way and a positive way that people just go, oh, everyone else is thinking this, so I'll just go with that. You see it now even on social media, people jumping on negative bandwagons just to sort of be part of the crowd. And it's actually so liberating when people take you in a whole other direction. Yeah, and so Little Britain was a very queer show and we played, you know, transvestites and gays. And, you know, we were keen to shock and celebrate and challenge people and how comfortable were they with this. And, you know, now it's viewed from quite a different perspective.

47:44But at the time we were doing it, it was quite a sort of lefty liberal way of challenging the status quo by being unapologetically, shamelessly queer on primetime BBC. It was game changing. I mean, in some ways, maybe. I don't know. And you have hinted at writing together? Yeah, we've got an idea. We've got a couple of ideas for things. So we're meeting and we're talking. And, you know, he writes three or four books a year. That's wild. I'm writing another book. I co-host Fantasy Football League. Yeah, so we're busy boys. So it's just finding the time. But we had lunch last week. That was really nice.

48:23And we message each other pretty much every day, just sharing memes and jokes and shocking stories we've seen like all friends do, you know. We do that and we laugh a lot, which is nice. One totally unrelated thing that I read about you, which I thought was so lovely, was this really gorgeous relationship you had with your grandmother and the fact that you would speak on the phone really regularly and that's something that you massively miss now and it really got me thinking about my own grandparents. And so certainly my grandmother's had a really great relationship with. And I really miss, I actually look back and think, why didn't I ask them X, Y and Z?

49:04Why didn't I have the conversation about, you know, my nan being evacuated in the war or whatever it might be? And the importance of that and sort of trying to drill it into my own kids. Not that they're particularly interested in that. But it is such a lovely relationship to have. And the fact that you would speak on the phone almost nightly. What did those conversations bring you? What did you talk about? Well, my grandmother was a refugee from Nazi Germany and she her plan was to be a doctor like her father. It was a very eminent doctor and the Nazis banned Jews from going to school in the end.

49:40So her education was interrupted and she, you know, she made it to the UK. And I'm always incredibly grateful that Britain took her in. and she became a nurse and she was a really fiercely intellectual person and so our conversations were about art and theater and politics and current affairs very much you know she challenged me a lot I didn't agree with her politics necessarily if I didn't agree with her politics but we would have sort of deep intellectual conversations and it was great you know and she had a very, she could be stubborn and I mean, hugely affectionate and loving, you know, she had one child, my mom and two grandchildren.

50:28So, you know, we meant everything to her. Um, but she was a great sort of matriarch of the family as well in terms of, uh, cousins and, you know, she'd lost her parents. She'd lost a lot of cousins in the war, aunts and uncles in the Holocaust. So she She was acutely aware of the value of staying close to those who have survived. She was great. She was funny. She even came to see me do stand-up, which is wild, because I was doing really strange performance art-like stand-up, using the C word, using really, really extreme language. And she would come and watch it sometimes. I love that. Yeah. And she saw me at the Hammersmith Apollo when Shooting Stars was on a double bill with the far show and she would come to radio shows i think she wanted me to be a shakespearean actor i think that was what she wanted for me which i did end up doing a couple of times um she wanted me to be in the rsc or the national theater you know um i mean gloriously she was a snob i love a glorious snob yeah um and she was german but she was also sort of fiercely proud of being British.

51:40She very much took to British life and she loved the royals. And so she would take us, me and my brother, when we were kids to things like the Royal Tournament and the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the Museum of London, all of these kinds of places to theatres. And she was a huge fan of opera. So she would play us opera sometimes, which I found very boring. but yeah she was a big she was a big influence on me her and my mum and my dad all in different ways were huge influences on me yeah it's beautiful it's really lovely sounds like a very very special person Matt it's been so lovely talking to you, really enjoyed chatting to you and I love your book I wish you all the luck with it are you turning it into a musical, is it happening?

52:31well I mean it is a musical already because it's a musical novel but on the stage Yeah, I've had some interest from producers. So yeah, we're going to set up some meetings, I guess, and explore the possibility of getting it on stage. I had an amazing afternoon about two weeks ago where I went to the home of Claude Michel Schoenberg, who's the composer of Les Miserables. And I played him some of the music and he gave me lots of advice and criticism and guidance. And that was really invaluable. and I felt incredibly honoured to be in that, in his presence with him listening to my work, given that he's written possibly the greatest musical ever written.

53:14Wowee. Or certainly up there. Yes, that was great. So I'm really, really keen to get it onto the stage and to write new songs and maybe cut some and to change it and explore what else it can be, yeah. Well, I wish you all the love and luck with all of it. Thank you. And thank you so much for being on Happy Place. It was very nice to get out of the house. And also, I love your jumper. I like yours. We've got really good knitwear going on today. We have. Yeah. We have. We've got Christmas on our minds, mate. We really have. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. Matt, thank you. Lovely, lovely human being.

53:53Thank you for sharing just so much of your life story with us. I really, really appreciated that chat. It was beautiful. There's very much still timed by a copy of Matt's book as a Christmas present for any little ones in your life. It's called The Boy Who Slept Through Christmas. And at Happy Place Book Club is the place you want to go on Instagram for some more grown-up reading recommendations from me. If you're a book nerd, head over there now. I am. All right, back next week. But for now, a huge thanks again to Matt, to the producer Anushka Tate at Rethink Audio, and to you lot, I love you.

54:58We'll see you next time.

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