Smash hit

Walliams likes women and women like him right back: just take a straw poll of all your female friends if you don’t believe me. “Personally, I’d much rather be around women than around men. Women are just better, nicer, more interesting. They are more caring and emotional. They talk about things that are important rather than talking about football… I love women,” he says.

For Walliams, a bit of ambiguity is useful professionally. “It allows me to go off in different directions, because I’m not fixed on one thing.” For Howerd, on and off stage, ambiguity about his sexuality was vital – both because he was ashamed of it, and because homosexual acts were illegal for much of his life. There was another, deeper reason for Howerd’s shame, however. This was revealed to the drama’s writer, Peter Harness, during conversations with Howerd’s partner of 37 years, Dennis Heymer (played here by Spall).

Heymer, who has never spoken on the record before, supplied unique insights into Howerd’s life, including shocking revelations that, during his childhood, he had been sexually abused by his father. Walliams himself visited Heymer at the couple’s house in Somerset. “Dennis told me that when they had sex, Frankie would always cry when he had an orgasm. Just imagine going through that. I think he just associated sexual pleasure with shame and pain and sexual abuse, although, of course, I’m only guessing.”

Walliams clearly feels deeply for his subject. Howerd has been a hero since, at the age of 14, he was taken by his parents, Kathleen and Peter, to see a performance of the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Three years later, in 1988, Walliams waited outside the Secombe Theatre in Sutton for his autograph. “I was asked recently how long I’d been preparing to play Frankie and I said, ‘Ooh, about 20 years.’ I know that I wouldn’t have wanted to see anybody else playing Frankie.”

Raised in Banstead, a suburban village in Surrey, Walliams’s background seems conventional enough. He comes from a loving and supportive family – today, on set, his mum has arrived, as she does on all her son’s projects, with a cake for the cast and crew. Still, Walliams describes his childhood self as a bit of a loner.

“I was quite a solitary kid,” he admits. “Quite happy to sit in my room listening to the records of Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson. Even then I was trying to learn from them.”

When they first met at the National Youth Theatre, Walliams and Matt Lucas cemented their relationship over impressions of their comedy heroes, especially Frankie Howerd. Oddly, they were due to be filming their HBO Little Britain series when the Howerd role came up. Had it not been for the US writers’ strike, Walliams would have been unavailable. Now, however, the US series is back on track. “It’s going to be interesting to see if American audiences find it funny,” says Walliams. He and Lucas intend to retain the essentially British humour of Little Britain. “It would be a big mistake to change it.”

Still, they are introducing some new characters, including Madonna’s PA, and giving an American slant to some of the old favourites. Vicky Pollard, for example, will be sent to Brat Camp, and Sebastian becomes Prime Minister and develops a crush on the US president. Walliams’s assertion that, in real life, he is closer to Sebastian than any other Little Britain character has occasionally been wheeled out as evidence of his own latent gayness. “But it isn’t his homosexuality that I relate to at all,” Walliams explains. “It’s the unrequited love.”

His own parents, he says, were together for 47 years, up until his father’s devastating death from cancer shortly before the filming of Rather You Than Me. “How do you find the kind of enduring love that my parents had?” he ponders. “At this moment, I haven’t a clue.” None of the high-profile beauties that he has dated have turned out to be the one. Now, aged 36, he is thinking that the next big adventure should, perhaps, be fatherhood. “But I don’t think I could be further away from becoming a father than I am right now. I haven’t got a girlfriend for a start and you need that, don’t you?”

Still, there are advantages to being single. “I get to take my mum to awards ceremonies and, recently, to the final of Strictly Come Dancing. I don’t know who was more excited about meeting Bruce Forsyth, her or me. Mind you, I’ve suddenly started to think, ‘Am I going to end up like Kenneth Williams, going on holiday with my mum?’ Maybe my friend Barbara Windsor could come, too.”

Walliams chuckles to himself. And despite what the last comment will do for his positioning on the gay-o-meter, he seems to like the idea. “Yes, Mum and Barbara and me. How lovely,” he says quite seriously. Titter ye not, as Frankie Howerd would say.

Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me will be broadcast on BBC Four on Wednesday, April 9

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010