Matt Lucas has said he would not make jokes about transvestites and would avoid playing black characters if he remade Little Britain.
The comedian told the Big Issue that he would not make a show in 2017 like Little Britain, which ran more than a decade ago, because he believed society had moved on.
“If I could go back and do Little Britain again, I wouldn’t make those jokes about transvestites,” Lucas told the magazine. “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. There was no bad intent there – the only thing you could accuse us of was greed. We just wanted to show off about what a diverse bunch of people we could play.”
Lucas, who appeared alongside David Walliams in the show, said he now thought it was “lazy for white people to get a laugh just by playing black characters”.
His only aim, he added, was to entertain, rather than hold any agenda. “And as I’ve got older, I’ve become more empathetic, I care more about hurting people. I’ve only met Gary Barlow a few times, but I’ve apologised every time,” Lucas said.
Barlow was one of the many musicians parodied by Lucas and Walliams. In their Rock Profile spoof series, the Take That frontman was portrayed as a bully constantly thinking about reforming the boyband.
Little Britain became a staple of British television, memorable for its characters including the teenage mother Vicky Pollard, who once swapped her baby for a Westlife CD; Daffyd, the Welsh man who claimed to be “the only gay in the village”; Emily Howard, the unconvincing transvestite who wore old Victorian dresses; and Marjorie Dawes, the leader of a local “FatFighters” group.
Despite its popularity, the show attracted criticism for misogyny and crude stereotypes of ethnic minorities and gay men.
In an interview in 2010, Lucas, who is gay, said he never aimed to bring comedy out of racial characteristics and was simply playing a character “who happens to be a different colour”.
The thing with Little Britain, Walliams said in the same interview, “was that we wanted to make it kind of like a cartoon strip come to life. So we wanted the characters to be quite simple in some ways.”
“Sebastian is in love with the PM. Daffyd wants to be the only gay in his village. Vicky Pollard is the inarticulate juvenile delinquent. We didn’t want them to be too expansive, so those catchphrases were very key to the identity of those characters,” he said.