David Walliams allegations and industry awareness of his reputation, Digi Mart USA News: A comedy sketch from the BBC’s Comic Relief campaign in 2013 opens in a doctor’s office, where a trouserless David Walliams is told he must contact “everyone you’ve been intimate with over the last year.” It was one of a number of apparent public nods to Walliams’ alleged promiscuity made within the TV and comedy worlds over more than 20 years.
Those references have raised questions over whether claims about bankable stars have been ignored or indulged by those industries. The Guardian and ITV News published allegations by several women that Walliams used his power and celebrity status to prey on young women and teenagers for sex.
Walliams, 55, denies any wrongdoing.
The most striking reference came in 2004 at the British Comedy Awards, when host Jonathan Ross said the event was “probably going home with David Walliams” as the camera panned to him. Ross has said it is now “deeply shocking” to revisit the footage, which he said was submitted by the event’s scriptwriting team and which he believed referenced Walliams publicly dating younger women, “exaggerated for comic effect.” TV insiders said the joke would have been seen by several people involved in the production before it reached Ross, and one described an apparent “degree of enabling” within the industry.
In 2004, Walliams appeared on Scott Mills’ BBC Radio 1 show, where he described himself as a gentleman who “love[s] the company of women.” Five years later, on Channel 4’s Chatty Man, Alan Carr said Walliams was “a bit like an illegal taxi driver: you lure [women] into a false sense of security and then you pounce.” In 2006, Jimmy Carr asked at the launch of Britain’s Next Top Model whether getting “a go on David Walliams” was the prize.
In 2021, a character in the BBC show Motherland referred to Walliams as “a bit like David Walliams, but less sinister.”
Lawyers acting for Walliams said he had made no secret of the fact that during a period of his life “he enjoyed the company of women” and acknowledged this was a popular topic of the tabloid press. They said he accepts that he and others joked about this period of his life, adding that these “are jokes … and are not statements of fact.”
TV insiders said the references do not suggest those involved were aware of specific incidents involving Walliams, although one said a degree of awareness about his reputation “is there, in plain sight of everyone.” Comedian Lucy Beaumont raised concerns, saying a young TV worker told her he was asked to take young women to Walliams’ dressing room. Beaumont said she did not witness any worrying behaviour herself and fears speaking out could affect her career, telling Sky News that people “lose work” for doing so.
