Little Me. Matt Lucas

the rest of the evening – for the rest of the festival, in fact – comics and industry people came to commiserate with me. I’m sure the intention was to make me feel better, but each time it just confirmed that yet another important person had witnessed my humiliation.

      It wasn’t the first bad gig I’d had and it wouldn’t be the last, but the scale of it felt enormous and very public.

      Just a few weeks later, I faced another challenge when I was booked to join Blur on tour, as their support act.

      I’d already met the band, having been asked to appear in the video for their single ‘Country House’. Director Damien Hirst (clang, split in two, preserved in formaldehyde and sold for a million) wanted a bald guy to get chased by some sexy girls – in a reference to The Benny Hill Show.

      My memories of the shoot mainly involve having several asthma attacks as I ran round and round for hours on a hot soundstage full of farm animals crapping everywhere (them, not me). Even now, whenever I hear that song, I suffer a mild panic attack.

      I had a laugh with the band, though. Alex, the bass player, had seen me on TV a week or two before the shoot and remembered some of my gags. At the end of filming, I said goodbye and that, I assumed, would be that – but during our Edinburgh run my agent called to tell me that Blur had been back in touch. They were doing a mini-tour of UK seaside towns, as a warm-up for a big arena tour, and wanted a comic to support them. Was I potentially available and did I have a video recording of my act that they could watch?

      Yes and yes.

      My dad dropped me off on York Way in King’s Cross where the tour bus was waiting. There would be eight shows in nine days. Usually the support act would travel separately, but as I didn’t drive, the band had agreed to let me travel with them.

      It was the week of the release of The Great Escape album. The battle with Oasis had hit its peak and the two bands, constantly sneering at each other, were the darlings of the tabloids. Each morning we’d eagerly sift through all the papers and see what Noel or Liam had said about them. Damon or Alex would usually have a pithy response. They knew it was a game and they played it well.

      The band wanted to watch my set on the opening night, but I discouraged them, telling them it might take me a gig or two to work out what the crowd wanted. I should have let them see that gig, because it was probably one of the best ones I had on the whole tour – or rather, one of the only ones I managed to get through. Well, I say ‘get through’ – I had been booked to do half an hour but I never managed more than fifteen minutes.

      The following night, in Dunoon, where Blur were not only the biggest band in Britain but the first major act to play there since the Tourists fifteen years earlier, I lasted a full two minutes, before the crowd dispensed with my services as one, gleefully shouting ‘You fat bastard! You fat bastard!’

      I couldn’t blame them. There they were, a horde of frenzied teenage girls and there was I, a doughy, pudgy, surreal stand-up. While I had a warm response in a couple of the venues, I would say at least five of the gigs were calamitous – and that’s me being generous.

      While the audiences declared war on me nightly, the band at least took pity on me. I grew quite close to Alex James and Dave Rowntree, in particular – continuing to see them long after the tour was over – but any of my friends who came along would stammer in their presence. In Brighton, David Walliams came to visit and when I introduced him to Damon he was so starstruck he could barely speak.

      After the show, the band and their crew would get plastered. I didn’t drink much – preferring to smoke pot, as ever. It had become a real habit by then. In Bournemouth we went into the sea in the middle of the night, then Alex swanned around the hotel, naked. I was impressed by the band’s lack of inhibition and their conscientious adherence to the rock lifestyle – all while absolutely killing it onstage every night.

      Shortly after the tour ended, the first series of Shooting Stars aired on BBC Two (more of that later). I carried on gigging as Sir Bernard for another eighteen months – sometimes to audiences who heckled me throughout, calling for my TV persona George Dawes – but Shooting Stars was opening doors and I was keen to step through them. I’d slogged the circuit for four and a half years, doing hundreds of shows. I’d had the best of times and the worst. Now I was ready to move on.

      I began eating at a young age

      E – Eating

      I’m a bit peckish now, after all that. Shall we grab something to eat? What do you fancy? A sandwich? Anything in particular? Oh, you don’t mind? Great.

      What do I want?

      Oh blimey, where do I start?

      I’ve never tried cocaine, acid or even ecstasy. I haven’t had a joint or smoked a cigarette in nearly twenty years. I have maybe six drinks a year. Baileys on the rocks, usually, but I can take it or leave it.

      Food, on the other hand – that’s my vice. This thing here ain’t no beer belly. This is chocolate and chips, cakes and crêpes, croissants and croutons and copious amounts of crisps. When I’m eating breakfast, I’m wondering what to have for lunch. When I’m eating lunch, I’m musing on whether I’ll make it through to supper without needing a snack along the way. In bed, cursing my aching tum after yet another Roman banquet, I’ll munch a handful of Minstrels before dreaming of macaroons.

      It wasn’t always thus. I started eating in earnest around the age of maybe eleven or twelve. I’d had puppy fat until then, like many kids, but by the time I was heading for secondary school, I was a big fat pudding.

      It was announced one day in assembly, a year or two before I left primary school, that the canteen was changing. Until then school dinners were free and you ate what you were given or you went hungry. It was the usual fare – corned beef or Spam, a scoop of salty mashed potato from a packet, veg that had been boiled for what tasted like hours and, for afters, semolina, sago or sponge in custard.

      The government was privatising school dinners. It was sold to us as a positive thing – although we would now have to pay for our meals, we would get to choose what we wanted to eat. Obviously eager to turn a profit, the contractors simply served up junk food. And what ten-year-old wouldn’t just choose nuggets or pizza or burgers for lunch every day? I don’t think anything green ever touched my plate in that school again.

      At my secondary school, Haberdashers’, old-fashioned dinners were served – and again, you ate what you were given. Things should have calmed down a little then weight-wise, but unlike before – when I would walk from home to school and back – I was now heading up the road to catch the school coach from Stanmore station, where there was a kiosk. Each day on my way to school and on my way home, I’d stop there and buy something sugary.

      At school there was a tuck shop. While the other kids spent their lunch break playing football, I would queue up, wolf down a jam doughnut or a Marathon (as they were back then) and then head to the back of the queue and start all over again.

      My parents’ divorce, my father’s imprisonment, my discomfort at being bald, my increasing unease at my growing attraction for other boys, my anxiety at my persistently low grades and the ever-increasing workload – I struggled to talk about any of this. Instead I just ate and ate and ate.

      Back home after school, I would dissolve some chicken stock cubes in boiling water and add huge amounts of pasta, devouring the lot during Neighbours. A couple of hours later I’d be raiding the freezer and whacking some Birds Eye Steakhouse Grills and Alphabites in the oven.

      Things came to an inevitable head. While I was out one day, my suspicious brother pulled my bed away from the wall to reveal hundreds of discarded chocolate-bar wrappers beneath.

      It was decided that something really had to be done about it and so I enrolled in a weekly Weight Watchers class. My mum wasn’t overweight but joined me in an act