The press’s shameless David Walliams amnesia

It’s 2009 and David Walliams is promoting his second children’s book, Mr Stink. Thanks to the wonderful coincidence that his publisher HarperCollins shares an owner – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – with The Times, he’s the subject of a remarkably gentle profile in that paper.

The writer, Robert Crampton, asks: “Do you need the approbation of these attractive young (very young sometimes, a recent date was 18) women to feel good about yourself?” At the time that was written, Walliams was 38 years old.

Walliams responds to the question with sentiments that have all the depth and warmth of a greetings card purchased from a 24-hour garage: “I like women a lot… I definitely put women on a pedestal. They’re a lot nicer than men. I idolise women. They don’t often mind.”

A few paragraphs later, Crampton returns to the topic of what he calls “womanising” by bringing up one of Walliams’ close personal showbiz friends, Russell Brand.

“Oh no, Russell is a different kettle of fish”, Walliams assures the interviewer, “…it’s like he’s some sort of sex messiah.”

He recounts being in a nightclub with Brand and watching him “snogging one girl and he just stopped and started snogging another and I was like, ‘What about her [the first girl’s] feelings?”

Walliams wants to make it clear, you see, that he is a “sensitive person”, not that he doesn’t sometimes imagine “[being] on a Club 18-30 holiday, only worrying about drinking beer and shagging birds”.

In the same profile, Walliams tells Crampton he won’t get as emotional for him in this interview as he did during a Desert Island Discs appearance earlier that year. Following the range of accusations against Walliams laid out in the ITV News and Guardian investigations – which he denies – of sexual harassment, grooming, and begging for sex, the title of the track he names on the show as his favourite – The Smiths’ Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want – could be read as grimly ironic.

What Walliams got often was adverts for his books in The Times and Sunday Times dressed up to look like editorial. In December 2019, The Funday Times Christmas Special was centred around a Q+A with Walliams (“Fun fact! If you put all the books that David Walliams has sold side by side, they would go all the way round the world — and more than once!”).

The following year, Walliams found an upside from the Covid pandemic when the Funday Times Home Classroom featured him yet again answering queries sent in by children learning at home.

“Exclusive extracts” from Walliams’ books – so difficult to acquire when you’re part of the same corporate structure as the publishers – popped up in The Sunday Times, and The Sun with tedious regularity: Bad Dad in The Sunday Times (2017); The Midnight Gang in The Sunday Times (2018); Fing in The Sun (2019) and The World’s Worst Teachers again in The Sun (2019). The publicity machine ticked on like clockwork.

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Another aspect of that Times profile was what Crampton called “the obligatory moan about the press”. Walliams complained about a report that said he and Rob Brydon had been thrown out of M&S for “chucking toilet rolls around” and also moaned about the sort of stories that featured lines like “David takes romantic stroll with mystery brunette”. These, he said, were “problematic”. I suspect he might use that word a little more carefully these days.

A trip into the archives of Britain’s tabloids reveals that Walliams was once a very frequent subject of their attentions. The Daily Mirror’s website has 83 pages of stories on him, but if you attempt to read old tales like “David Walliams’ diary of his charity swim along the Thames” or “Richard Madeley: David Walliams sends me lewd texts”, you’ll find the links no longer work.

Stories on Walliams’ stunts for the paper’s Pride of Britain Awards – which named him Most Influential Public Figure in 2006 after his English Channel charity swim – are still available, for now.

The Sun’s online archive contains nothing before 2016, four years after Walliams joined Britain’s Got Talent, as a judge. There are many puff pieces to be found (“Prince Charles is great fun: David Walliams talks hosting The Royal Variety Performance for a second time”), numerous seemingly planted stories about his love life (“Sexy New Laydee: Funnyman David Walliams woos newly single Norwegian model with romantic dinner-date”) and plenty of blatant plugs for his books (“Love Being A Dad: David Walliams says his biggest joy is reading to his little boy”). That last one was an “exclusive”.

Walliams was also a frequent character in the Mail Online’s ‘sidebar of shame’, with many stories about women he was apparently dating and seemingly minute-by-minute coverage of the goings-on at Britain’s Got Talent. In 2020, the paper published an “exclusive extract” of what it called his “hilarious new book Slime”. The same day, it ran a Q&A with Walliams conducted by a “panel of child fans” in which he said, “Villains are always the most exciting characters to write. They are the ones who make the stories happen.”

On the evening that accusations against Walliams finally came to light, The Mirror’s website was leading with ‘Five bombshell claims in David Walliams scandal’ – no mention of that Pride of Britain award – while The Sun is now calling the “funnyman” it feted so frequently “the primetime predator”. And the Mail, once so proud of its exclusive on Slime, has a whole section on its website titled “Walliams Unmasked”.