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It has been an extraordinary year for David Walliams. The 37-year-old actor has played British comedy legend Frankie Howerd in a biopic Rather You Than Me, swam from Spain to Africa for charity, produced the first American edition of his hit series Little Britain with partner-in-crime Matt Lucas
and is currently starring in a West End revival of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land alongside Harry Potter star Michael Gambon.
However, the project that is closest to his heart is his first children's novel, The Boy in the Dress. "I can't help thinking 'my God, who else gets to do all these things?"' he says, sitting in his dressing room at Duke of York's Theatre, waiting for his stage call.
"It's just brilliant. I'm a real workaholic and I love keeping busy, so I feel really good that I've been able to do all these different things and to really commit to them. It's not like I've got a book out and someone else wrote it."
The story of 12-year-old Dennis, who is persuaded by the most beautiful girl at his school, Lisa, to glam himself up in her best frocks, The Boy in the Dress is a refreshingly underplayed tale, which should raise a wry smile from both children and adults.
"It's hard to blow your own trumpet without coming across as a bit arrogant but it's probably the best thing I've ever done," says Walliams. "It's been fantastically greeted by lots of people who have read it and it was a bit unexpected because there's sometimes a bit of cruelty to the humour in Little Britain.
With this book, I've really aimed it at kids, 8 to 11-year-olds, and the message of the book is quite sweet one: 'It's okay to be different.' It's quite moving and a lot of people have said that they cried at the end." Walliams has described The Boy in the Dress as "a story about adult hypocrisy and the injustice of being a child" but it is also about the prejudices of many young boys, who would be horrified at the mere suggestion that they don a skirt.
"It's a metaphor for being artistic," says Walliams. "It's about being in a dress but it could be any type of difference. Dennis' friend Darvish is a Sikh and he wears a turban. I wanted to make it clear to young readers that there was a parallel there. If you conform too much, you end up not really developing yourself.At school, the kids who are different are often the ones that end up doing well."
Walliams wrote the book over an intensive six-month period last year. "I didn't resent it," he says of the time it took. "Even after I'd come back from a long day of filming, I'd spend a few hours on the book because I really loved doing it."
However, writing a novel has not always been one of his burning ambitions. "It was more that I had this idea," he admits. "I woke up one day and thought what would happen if a 12-year-old boy went to school dressed as a girl because school can be very conservative and children can be very insensitive. They sometimes bully each other for being different, whether it's being overweight or because they've got glasses. I thought it would make an interesting story: why would a kid do this and what would the consequences be? I thought it could be a good book for kids because it is about a kid."
Even though Dennis' dad bans him from watching "Small England or whatever it's called where those idiots dress up as 'laydees'," Walliams is keen to distance The Boy in the Dress from Little Britain. "If people shout things out to me in the street, that's the one that they shout," he says, referring to his character Emily Howard and her trademark catchphrase, "I'm a laydee".
"Little Britain is quite adult so I thought it would be good to do something especially for kids because I know it has a big audience of children," he continues. "When we do live shows or signings, kids would be really excited to meet us. Sometimes they say 'I'm only allowed to watch some of Little Britain' as they're sent to their bedroom when the rude bits come on. I thought it would be nice to do something where the parents can be confident that it was meant for them and won't have anything in it that was a bit too risque."
Despite his penchant for cross-dressing and his own notoriously ambiguous sexuality, Walliams is adamant that The Boy in the Dress is not based upon his own childhood. "It is autobiographical in the sense that the events of the book happened to me when I was young, but younger than Dennis," he recalls.
"When I was about 3, my sister - who is two years older than me - dressed me up in a bridesmaid's dress and there's a picture of me in it in the back of the book. I think that's quite common. When you're that age and you're pre-school, you don't know what's right and what's wrong to wear. But I didn't go to school dressed as a girl as much as I wanted to."
Unlike Dennis, who lives with his father and brother and acutely feels the absence of his mother, Walliams is not the product of a broken home. Born David Williams - he changed his name to avoid confusion with another actor of the same name - he was raised in Reigate, Surrey, by his transport engineer father and teacher mother. "I thought it was important for Dennis to be without a strong female role model and that's where Lisa comes in," he explains.
"It was important that the mum was not there. It would be a really different story with the mum around. I wanted a story where it was just the dad, Dennis and his brother John, where there's something very painful at the centre, which cannot be healed. His relationship with his family gets a lot better by the end of the book. They do love each other; they just can't express it."
However, at the suggestion of his publishers, Walliams does appear in the book in the guise of the unnamed narrator. "I rather like how it's framed as a story," he says. "I say 'this is a story that I'm about to tell you'. I liked that sort of thing when I was young and was reading children's books.
Like with Roald Dahl, there was always a sense of him in his stories. He is actually quite judgmental in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The kids who go into the factory are judged - one is a gossip, one watches too much TV and one is a spoiled brat. You can see that he's judging these children. I wanted to have that sense of story, to try and give it a kind of classic sense if I could, to hopefully make it a story that will hang around for a while." As a lifelong fan of Dahl, Walliams was pleased that the Norwegian-born author's long-time illustrator Quentin Blake agreed to provide the drawings for The Boy in the Dress.
"He's number one in his field and the others are all a long way behind," he says. "His work is iconic and he's associated with one of the greatest writers of all time, certainly one of the greatest children's writers. When I was asked who did I want to illustrate the book, I said 'Quentin Blake'. He asked to read the manuscript and liked it. He did it on the merit of liking the book not just because I was well-known or he would get paid. He bonded with the material and I was very chuffed about that."
Walliams admires how Blake, who has also collaborated with the likes of Michael Morpurgo and current Children's Laureate Michael Rosen, leaves room in his drawings for children to use their imaginations. "His real genius is that he gives an impression of what people look like, he doesn't tell you exactly what they look like," he says.
"Dennis is on the cover but he could be every boy. I looked again at Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and he never quite defines Charlie or Willy Wonka. What's nice about Quentin's work is that for adults of my age or older who pick up the book, it will remind them of the books they loved when they were young, which were probably Roald Dahl books, and for kids it's just a charming style that they can enjoy."
Walliams has started work on a second children's book, although he is not planning any further sartorial excursions for Dennis. "I think I've told his story," he says. "I'm not sure where else I'd go with it. His story has a beginning, a middle and an ending. You should let your ideas take you where they need to go.
If you have an idea that involves a child, then maybe it'll work out better as a children's book and if I woke up tomorrow with some ideas for a play I wanted to write then I'd do that." However, he hopes to write the screenplay for a television adaptation of The Boy in the Dress, which is currently being developed by the BBC, although he doesn't foresee a role for himself.
"You'd have a lot of fun with the casting because there are some really good characters like the dad, the headmaster and the shopkeeper, Raj. I don't think any of them would be quite right for me though. Maybe the headmaster but I'm not really old enough. But that's fine, I can't be in everything."
Anyway, he has other projects to tend to, such as Little Britain USA. Despite concerns over how its quintessentially British humour would be received in the United States, Walliams is happy with how Little Britain USA has fared so far. "America is a very tough country for television and if something doesn't work they take it off after a couple of episodes," he says.
"It's hard for me to get a sense of it because I've been in London while Matt has actually been in America as he's making a film. He says he's had loads of people come up to him in the street and shout out bits of the show to him, which is the best way to really work out whether something has caught on or not.
When Little Britain first got big in England, my life changed completely as people treat you differently. They knew who I was and quoted the show to me." Walliams is keeping his feet on the ground even though a second serving of Little Britain USA has just been commissioned by its American home, HBO. "You've got to play the long game in America," he says. "You think you're going to have an overnight hit but America is a big country and HBO is a subscription channel. You've got to make a couple of series at least to get going there but after that maybe we'll get a chance to make a film.
Sacha Baron Cohen did two series of Da Ali G Show for HBO and then he went on to make the Borat movie. It's early days for us in America but it's amazing that we're developing careers over there, especially having come from nothing."
* The Boy in the Dress (HarperCollins, $29.99)
