David Walliams under fire again over disturbing Little Britain ‘hide the sausage’ routine involving teenagers as young as 16
David Walliams is under fire over a resurfaced Little Britain routine. (BBC)
David Walliams is under fire once again after footage from a 2007 Little Britain special resurfaced, highlighting a deeply disturbing comic routine involving a predatory gay character.
Critics have voiced outrage over a stage show routine which saw Walliams’ Little Britain character Des haranguing three young men aged 16, 17 and 18, simulating “buggery” and appearing to kiss their bare buttocks.
A resurfaced clip of the routine begins with the character inviting a member of the audience up onto the stage and asking them to confirm their age.
When one answers “16”, Walliams shouts “bingo”, adding: “You’re a big boy for 16 aren’t you – that’s what I’ll tell the judge.”
The character proceeds to plant a kiss on the participant, before playing a game of “hide the sausage”. This mostly involves Walliams lunging for their trousers, dry humping and leaving them with exposed buttocks and grappling to keep their genitals covered.
The act ends with the character kissing the victim’s bottom, before asking: “Did you enjoy that?”
David Walliams jokes: ‘I love cruelty.’
The routine first aired as part of Little Britain, Down Under, which aired on the BBC in 2007 and followed Walliams and his then-comedy partner Matt Lucas as they toured Australia.
“I love cruelty, it’s my favourite thing in the world,” Walliams says in the clip.
“You’ve got to know the boundaries. That’s funny but if I started exposing their penis or something, it would just be horrible then, it would just be abuse.”
So @BBC let @davidwalliams sexually assault teenage boys in Australia under the Little Britain brand then BROADCAST IT? (content warning) pic.twitter.com/3UTs4BlBj1
— kojima of gay descent (@socialistbangrs) July 7, 2020
Reshared on Twitter on Tuesday (July 7), the video attracted widespread repulsion and condemnation.
Little Britain pulled from streaming services over Blackface.
Walliams performed the bit as recently as 2009, when he was forced to apologise to Mark Ronson after leaving him partially nude during a charity gig.
In the decade that has followed Little Britain has been widely condemned for its reliance on distasteful, classist, racist and transphobic humour. In June the series was pulled from British streaming services following complaints about its use of Blackface.
Both Walliams and Lucas have acknowledged the cruelty of the show’s comedy. In January, when discussing a possible revival, Walliams told The Sun: You’d definitely do it differently because it’s a different time. There’s all kinds of tolerances that change.”
Three months later, the duo revived their infamous “I’m a lady” sketch for a Comic Relief and Children In Need special.
Jack Monroe criticised David Walliams ‘classist, fatshaming’ children’s books.
Already this week the comedian has found himself on the receiving end of criticism over his popular children’s books, which have been branded “classist fatshaming nonsense” by writer Jack Monroe.
Monroe reviewed the books in a lengthy Twitter thread, underlining what she said are negative portrayals of working class characters, an apparent reliance on racial stereotypes and the regular use of “fat” as a “derogatory description, pretty much throughout”.
Walliam’s publisher HarperCollins released a statement saying that he “writes about the real worlds of children using comedy as a way of confronting many difficult topics… which should be considered in the wider context of the overall stories”.
They disputed that a character lampooned for her frizzy hair and dubbed “Archbishop Desmond Tutu” could not be a racist stereotype, because the character was white, not Black as Monroe had said.
It appears nobody briefed the illustrator.
Of course there’s always the possibility that I’ve got this particular example wrong, so I’ll leave these here and you can decide for yourself. pic.twitter.com/AB7l2ZJnQF— ❄️ Jack Monrowflake (@BootstrapCook) July 7, 2020
Walliams’ representatives and HarperCollins did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The BBC declined to comment.
