In recent years, David Walliams has faced numerous controversies that have significantly impacted his career. His responses to these issues have been notably firm.

However, none of his reactions have been as direct as his defense of a particularly contentious live performance from the comedy show Little Britain, which helped catapult him to fame.

Reflecting on the live version of the popular series, Walliams confidently stated, “It always brought the house down… not a single person ever complained.”

Yet, new information uncovered by the Daily Mail paints a starkly different picture of the Little Britain Live tour. Notably, it has been revealed that a stage manager on the production was a convicted child sex offender.

Contrary to Walliams’ claims of universal laughter, some audience members, including one who spoke exclusively with the Daily Mail, have recounted their unsettling experiences watching the show. They recall being deeply affected, with memories of the event lingering even after two decades.

Considering the content of the act, it’s unsurprising. During the height of Little Britain’s popularity between 2005 and 2006, Walliams regularly engaged in performances that many now see as dressing up sexual humiliation as comedy, causing discomfort among viewers.

The trajectory of the act was consistent. A man from the crowd – from multiple recordings the Daily Mail has seen, they always seemed to be young – would be singled out by the now-disgraced children’s author and pulled beneath the stage lights in front of a packed audience.

They would then be made to perform with Walliams, who played the fictional role of a predatory children’s entertainer named Des Kaye.

Walliams, a bestselling children’s writer, was last year dropped by his publisher HarperCollins following allegations he had harassed junior female members of staff

Footage shows how Walliams, now 54, would say they were going to play a game of ‘hide the sausage’. A rubber ‘sausage’ was then produced, and at the beginning of the ‘game’, Walliams would touch the young men’s chest, groin and buttocks over their clothing.

He would then pull the men’s trousers and underwear down, before gyrating on top of them, simulating sex, and then finally kissing their bare buttocks.

Having such an intimate area exposed to a huge crowd before being pinned to the floor and thrust against forcibly was clearly intended to be nothing short of mortifying. In several filmed performances, Walliams was met with resistance, but still the young man’s buttocks were exposed on stage. One witness who watched the routine unfold with a boy she estimated to be no more than 17 told the Daily Mail it felt ‘like watching somebody being abused in front of you’.

‘I’ve never forgotten it, it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen,’ she said, the memory of the show at Sheffield City Hall in 2005 still crystal clear. ‘This kid was singled out by David Walliams and brought up on to the stage, clearly against his will. He was pulled up from the crowd. He clearly didn’t consent to being on the stage.’

She recalled an ‘intake of breath’ in the audience when the young man stood in front of them.

Remembering him as looking visibly uncomfortable, she estimated his age to be ‘about 17. He hadn’t quite grown up yet’.

As for whether he warmed up as the act proceeded, she was emphatic that he did not. Rather, that he looked desperate, as if he wished for the ground to swallow him up. ‘As I was watching, I thought, that kid is never going to get over that. He’s never going to get over this humiliation,’ she said. ‘He would be traumatised. He was obviously a vulnerable person, he looked vulnerable.’

She added: ‘It just looked like a kind of life-defining thing. It just seemed so vindictive. Like it wasn’t about making a joke, it was just humiliating somebody, and it wasn’t remotely funny. I remember it quite vividly. I was just an audience member, and I’ve never forgotten it.’

The act Walliams so gleefully led when Little Britain was at the peak of its fame makes one wince at how readily he dressed up sexual humiliation as entertainment

A man from the crowd – from multiple recordings the Daily Mail has seen, they always seemed to be notably young – would be singled out by the now-disgraced children’s author

Walliams would touch the young men’s chest, groin and buttocks over their clothing. He would then pull the men’s trousers and underwear down before gyrating on top of them

The sketch routinely came towards the end of the first act, shortly before the interval.

And according to the book Inside Little Britain – written by Walliams, Matt Lucas and journalist Boyd Hilton – the plan was explicit. Walliams, it reveals, was ‘planning to do this every night of the tour to a young man plucked randomly from the audience’.

And indeed, again and again, footage from various performances shows Walliams selecting two participants from the crowd, specifically searching for ‘a little boy and… a little boy’.

At one performance, when a young man revealed on stage that he was only 16 years old, Walliams responded with a gleeful ‘Bingo’. He then added: ‘You’re a big boy for 16, aren’t you – that’s what I’ll tell the judge.’

In one clip, his former comedy partner Lucas, 51, can even be heard prompting: ‘Simulate the buggery’ after Walliams lunged. In one recorded performance, after the sketch had ended and the young man remained on stage, Walliams asked him: ‘Did you enjoy that?’ When the visibly shaken participant replied ‘no,’ Walliams said: ‘That’s the way I like it.’ Such a comment sounds even more sinister when one considers who was behind the stage, as well as on it.

The Daily Mail can reveal that Gareth Weeks, the stage manager working behind the scenes on the production, was already a convicted child sex offender while the tour was under way – although there is no suggestion that Lucas, Walliams, and the rest of the production knew about his past at that time. According to a 2020 report from the BBC – which did not mention his role on Little Britain specifically – Weeks had been jailed for sexual offences in 1993, long before he took up his role on Little Britain Live.

Despite this, he continued to work in theatres across Britain, where the court later heard he boasted to friends about his links to well-known figures in entertainment. Years later, in 2020, Weeks was sentenced to 15 years in prison for abusing a 14-year-old boy he had groomed online.

Exeter Crown Court heard he sexually assaulted the teenager during their second meeting, went on to assault him again, and secretly filmed the abuse before sharing the footage with another paedophile.

Weeks’ involvement in Little Britain Live is documented in Inside Little Britain, which records him using the tour as an opportunity to pursue men.

In one disturbing passage, he is described showing Lucas a photograph on his phone of a young man lying naked beside him in bed, saying he had also taken other images. Lucas told Weeks that it would be best if he kept such photos to himself.

David Walliams in a sketch for the Little Britain live stage show at the Hammersmith Apollo

Elsewhere, the book recounts an exchange in which Walliams asks Weeks whether he had found any ‘cute boys’, to which Weeks replied: ‘No, none. No c**k. But I’ll soon sort that out. I’ll find some.’

So explicit is the apparent presumption that the young male participants in this act are being exploited that the book describes them as the ‘victim’, while the routine itself is bluntly characterised as ‘David’s molestation of a young man from the audience’.

The text, published in 2007, also captures Walliams reflecting on the segment in his own words.

Asked what he most looked forward to about the show, he replied: ‘The bit I’m most looking forward to is Des Kaye. Getting to play with a nice young man from the audience.’

At the time, fellow comedian Jonathan Ross, now 65, appeared to share his enthusiasm. Having seen the performance, he later remarked his favourite part of the show was Walliams ‘molesting that boy’.

Elsewhere, the text records Walliams joking about the sketch’s potential consequences.

Reflecting on the routine, he is quoted as saying: ‘If we did the show in America, I’d probably get lawsuits from everyone I molested. But in Bournemouth I can somehow get away with it…’

Meanwhile, footage from the BBC documentary Little Britain Down Under – narrated by comic Rob Brydon and filmed during the show’s tour of Australia in 2007 – showed Walliams describing how the routine was driven by the fact he was ‘greedy for laughs’ and defending his actions with a sardonic grin, saying: ‘If I started exposing their penis or something… that would be horrible then. It would just be abuse.’

He is also shown reading aloud a letter from an individual hitting out at the sketch.

‘I was shocked, dismayed and disappointed by the character Des Kaye,’ read Walliams.

The author went on to say the skit presented ‘molestation of the boy’ as ‘a great joke’, and said: ‘For me this was not a joke, for me this went too far. I was molested when I was very young.’

In the footage, Walliams says: ‘To me, there are no subjects you can’t make jokes out of, because if you make that line you have to get rid of all comedy.’

Other onlookers, however, did not see this as comedy.

‘I was once taken up on stage at Little Britain live and humiliated by him in an inappropriate manner. It stayed with me ever since,’ wrote one user on X.

Another added: ‘Oh this was awful – I went to one of those shows and was so disturbed… everyone laughed and laughed and assumed it was another actor on stage, but the guy who he did it to was in shock and appeared to be shaking after the show and briefly said to me it was not planned at all.’

A medic who said they were on duty during one performance at London’s Hammersmith Apollo wrote: ‘The guy in question was upset by what had happened, Mr Walliams didn’t care.

David Walliams and Matt Lucas perform on stage at Little Britain’s Big Night charity gala performance at the Hammersmith Apollo in November 2006

‘The more the poor audience member protested the more Walliams thought it was funny.’

Meanwhile, human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, told the Daily Mail: ‘His portrayal of a predatory sex abuser is not funny. It was vile.

‘This sketch should not be repeated. It should be withdrawn from public viewing and filed away in a film archive so that future historians can see what used to pass for “comedy”.’

Walliams, a bestselling children’s writer, was last year dropped by his publisher, HarperCollins, following allegations he had harassed junior female members of staff.

Shockingly, it was claimed female employees were told to work in pairs when meeting the star, and ordered not to visit his house.

It further emerged that an investigation into Walliams’s behaviour was reportedly launched in 2023 after a junior employee raised concerns. One of the women who raised concerns was allegedly given a five-figure payout and has since left the company, although it is unknown what the payout was for.

In December, The Children’s Trust confirmed Walliams had been dropped as an ambassador for the charity, while the BBC said it had ‘no future projects’ in the pipeline with Walliams, despite refusing to pull his appearance in the Would I Lie To You? Christmas special.

Notoriously, Walliams left Britain’s Got Talent in November 2022 under a cloud after audio recordings emerged of him making disparaging remarks about contestants off-camera.

Microphones had picked up him using vile misogynistic language, describing one female as ‘like the slightly boring girl you meet in the pub that thinks you want to f*** them, but you don’t’.

Although Walliams publicly apologised, he sued the production company Fremantle for misuse of private information and breaching data laws. The company apologised and Walliams is thought to have walked away with about £5million.

Yet Walliams still clings to hopes of reviving Little Britain – even speaking of it as recently as last month.

But for those who watched his live performances, allowing him to repeat similar acts of degradation must surely be nothing short of inconceivable.