One of TV's most enjoyable culinary imports is The Great British Baking Show, and it's
got a new host in the form of comedian Matt Lucas. Here's everything you need to know
about this funnyman who's been a fixture on British TV since the '90s.
Lucas' British Baking Show hiring was not only unexpected, it also came together in
a rather bizarre way. As Lucas told Capital Radio, Noel Fielding, who's been hosting the
show since 2017, had a dream that Lucas was his co-host, so he then pushed for the producers
to let him audition.
"Instead of sort of saying to the producers, 'Oh, Matt, you know, I dreamt Matt Lucas was
the co-host', he just said, 'Matt Lucas would be a good co-host, I think.'"
The whole process was a whirlwind for Lucas. He got a call on Friday, had the audition
on Tuesday, and then his hiring was announced on Thursday. In the hiring announcement, Fielding
said,
"I love Matt. I love his warmth and his comedy and his big joyful smile. I think if we play
our cards right we could become the next Chas and Morph."
For anyone who doesn't know, Chas and Morph are popular claymation characters first introduced
to British audiences in 1977.
One of Matt Lucas' most distinguishing physical characteristics is his baldness, which is
the result of alopecia. His hair loss happened gradually, over the course of a summer, even
though he was just six years old at the time. Being a completely bald child led him to become
famous in his hometown, although it wasn't necessarily the sort of fame he wanted. In
his memoir, Little Me: My Life from A-Z, he wrote,
"My baldness was a source of amusement, sympathy, and revulsion for everyone."
But the thing that brought him so much childhood pain is also what led him to comedy. All the
attention he received as a kid is what made him become a performer.
"That forced me out of myself, to develop a quick wit."
As Lucas wrote in his memoir,
"I had figured out jokey responses to the same old questions if I was in a good mood,
and withering retorts if I wasn’t. I had mastered the art of staring back fearlessly
at people when I caught them sneaking a look at me. I had figured out, in my own way, how
to live with being bald."
He also explained,
"My baldness has made me distinctive, yet also allowed me to transform myself. Stick
a wig on and I'm someone else. Swap the wig and I'm now another person. Perfect."
Lucas first came to the attention of British audiences thanks to his downright bizarre
appearances on the celebrity quiz show Shooting Stars. He played George Dawes, an enormous
baby who would reveal the score of the game while sitting behind a set of drums. He would
typically interrupt the proceedings to deliver strange comedy bits, such as a musical ode
to baked potatoes. There was also time he just screamed the word "peanuts" at the audience
while jaunty music played in the background.
"Peanuts!"
Lucas revived George Dawes in 2017 to help with the Theirworld charity's childhood development
campaign. He told The Mirror at the time,
"For me, it was a good opportunity to be George Dawes again because I haven't been George
for eight years! I couldn't really resist, it's always fun to muck about as George. Sometimes
you just have to put on a romper suit and be silly."
One of the biggest successes of Lucas' career came when he teamed up with David Walliams
for the sketch comedy series Little Britain. It began as a radio show that launched in
2000 before transitioning to TV in 2003. An American version arrived in 2008, airing on
HBO for one season.
At its peak, Little Britain's popularity was so enormous that a 2005 Radio Times "50 Most
Popular People in TV Comedy" list placed Lucas and Walliams at the very top. When the show
arrived on HBO, the duo found themselves with a whole new audience in the United States.
Lucas talked with The Guardian in 2009 about the end of the show's run and explained,
"I wasn't bored of it. I just felt it's important to stop before we get bored of it. It's very
important to challenge yourself."
In the years since Little Britain's initial run, Lucas has been able to look back and
realize there are some problematic aspects of the show that, in hindsight, he would've
done differently. Perhaps the thing he most regrets is performing in blackface. In 2017,
he told The Big Issue,
"I wouldn't play black characters. Basically, I wouldn't make that show now. It would upset
people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now. Society has moved on a
lot since then, and my own views have evolved...As I've got older, I've become more empathetic,
I care more about hurting people."
Since first sitting down behind George Dawes' drum kit, Lucas has gone on to build up an
extensive body of screen work, including a recurring role on the iconic sci-fi series
Doctor Who. He's also racked up plenty of film roles, including the likes of Alice in
Wonderland, Paddington, and Sherlock Gnomes.
One early movie appearance proved to be a pivotal one, when he appeared alongside Rebel
Wilson to portray the sibling roommates of Kristen Wiig's Annie in the 2011 comedy blockbuster
Bridesmaids. To this day, he's still most recognized for that role more than anything
else.
Bridesmaids wasn't the only time that Lucas and Rebel Wilson were living together. The
two of them are actually close friends, and in fact they were even once roommates in real
life. As Lucas told BBC Newsbeat in 2015,
"We lived together for three years, had the best time and a great friendship has come
out of it."
"People say to us, 'Are you brother and sister, or husband and wife, or are you the same person?'"
The two have remained, in Lucas' words, "bosom buddies" over the years. They've never had
a falling out, they still speak with each other all the time," and they would've remained
roommates if not for Wilson becoming a huge movie star and buying a house. According to
Lucas,
"When we met it was like complete synchronicity, we're both very laid back and we're also quite
driven professionally and I see that in her and she sees that in me but we're not competitive
because we just enjoy each other's work."
Lucas and David Walliams ended Little Britain with a bang, as they embarked on a live tour
in 2006 that ran for a year. It was the longest-running live comedy show in British history. When
the tour wrapped up with a six-week stint in London, the duo had performed for more
than a million fans and raked in an estimated $30 million.
In 2010, Walliams and Lucas reunited for another TV series, Come Fly With Me, before embarking
on solo endeavors. In the British press, however, rumors swirled of bad blood between the two.
Walliams didn't deny friction during a 2012 appearance on the BBC Radio show Front Row
when he said,
"We're very different people and probably want different things and had different working
methods."
When he was asked whether their partnership was over, he said,
"Well, it's over for the time being. Whether it’s over for ever I don't know. But Matt
wanted to go off and do his own thing."
But whatever bad blood there was or wasn't between the two, they were on good enough
terms in 2019 to reunite for a Brexit-themed Little Britain radio special.
The massive success that Lucas experienced from Little Britain had a downside when he
suddenly became more famous than he ever wanted to be. As he told the Sunday Times in 2018,
"It was heart-stopping being in the papers every day…David Walliams was much more comfortable
with fame than I was. I thought I was famous when I was 21 years old and a big baby in
Shooting Stars, but really everyone thought my name was George Dawes."
During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show in 2017, Lucas revealed that he'd finally
managed to find the perfect level of fame now that he had shifted to the B-list. In
fact, he wrote an entire chapter in his memoir about what it's like to be a B-lister. One
of the downsides, he explained, was that people tend to stop him on the street and quote catchphrases
to him, even though sometimes they're the wrong ones.
"People come up to me a lot and go, 'Are you bovvered? Are you bovvered?' I say, 'I'm absolutely
fine, dear, because you're actually mistaking me for Catherine Tate.'"
In 2012, Matt Lucas starred in the dark comedy film Small Apartments, playing a weirdo shut-in
named Franklin Franklin. This character spends most of his time inside his tiny apartment,
wearing nothing but a pair of clogs and tighty-whities. When the film made its premiere at the South
by Southwest Festival, Lucas admitted he wasn't exactly thrilled to see himself showing so
much skin in the movie. He joked at the premiere,
"I saw a rough cut of the film about six months ago and thought, oh f---, what have I done?"
"All you fat, pale, hairless man fetishists, come and watch this movie."
When asked about the subject later by Entertainment Weekly, he said,
"I don't think vanity is going to help me. I don't have Ashton Kutcher's looks to lose.
So, you know, what the hell? I used to do stand up comedy when I started out and I used
to heckle myself before the audience could heckle me. It's that kind of thing."
He added,
"I'm not a movie star by any stretch of the imagination, so I don't have to worry about
those things. I already look like Uncle Fester on a good day, so it doesn't really matter
to me."
Following Lucas and David Walliams' Little Britain radio reunion in 2019, it was reported
that the duo had been in talks with Netflix to reboot the comedy. During a BBC Radio interview,
Lucas revealed,
"It might happen. We had a conversation with them a while ago and so the seed was planted
in our head. We'd love to bring it back in some way and at some point. We're both quite
busy boys, but we’re speaking often and one idea was to maybe do a stage show of it
again. It will come back in some form, we're just still figuring out what that will be."
In an April 2020 interview with The One Show, Lucas teased some more potential reunion details:
"Could it be a podcast? Could it be a series on TV? Could it be a stage show?...We have
just got to find the time but definitely we will do [it]. We are not 100 percent sure
but we will."
In March 2020, Lucas dusted off a classic bit from his Shooting Stars days. It was George
Dawes' baked potato song, in which the big baby declares how a spud has changed his life.
Lucas was just tinkling around on his piano when the old tune popped into his head. He
then added lyrics encouraging hand-washing and social distancing and posted a brief video
of himself singing the song on Twitter without thinking much of it.
But then the video went viral, racking up well over three million views. So a friend
suggested that Lucas release the song for charity. The result was "Thank You Baked Potato,"
a new single accompanied by an animated video. It was produced to raise money for FeedNHS,
a charity providing hot meals to the frontline staff of Britain's National Health Service
during the COVID-19 pandemic. There's no word yet on if Lucas' baked potato history had
anything to do with him landing the Great British Baking Show gig. But if we suddenly
start seeing potato-shaped cakes next season, then we'll know why.
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