Matt Lucas and David Walliams confirm Little Britain reboot with ‘more diversity’

Matt Lucas has revealed that he and David Walliams are working on a new version of Little Britain.

The BBC sketch show followed the peculiar lives of a number of different diverse British characters and ran from 2003 to 2006.

Little Britain made household names of co-writers and co-stars Lucas and Walliams, and spawned books, talking dolls and even a live stage show.

In recent years, however, it has received criticism for its offensive humour, including blackface, fat-shaming and racial stereotyping. In the original series Lucas and Walliams portrayed all of the characters, but they will now be joined by a new range of actors to increase the show’s diversity.  

Confirming the return of the show to The Sun: Lucas said: “The show will be different in many ways.

“We are talking about how we can have diverse talent on screen and in the writer’s room and conceive it as something which is just not about me and David playing absolutely everyone.

“That is something we should have done but didn’t do back then.”

He added that he “respects” that “things have changed” since the show was originally broadcast. 

Little Britain episodes are still available to watch but carry a warning after previously being taken off both Netflix and the BBC.

Reflecting on the success of Little Britain to the Standard last year, Walliams said he felt “so grateful” for the experience and still gets people regularly quoting his characters’ catchphrases at him.

“I get ‘Computer says no’ quite a lot,” he explained. “When someone says ‘Do you want a receipt?’ I say ‘Yeah’ and they go, ‘Computer says no,’ I get that a lot. I guess Matt must get a lot of the ‘Yeah, but no, but’. All kinds of ones! I’ve had lots of bizarre ones, I remember being in Egypt crawling up this little dark tunnel and I just heard this echoing, I heard someone go ‘EH EH EH!’

“They each come back at you at strange times… lucky that you’ve done something that people know, people liked, it’s great, you know, it doesn’t happen to everybody so it’s something that you’ve just got to be so grateful for.”