HOWZAT

The early years

Lucas hasn’t given that many interviews, and those he has done tend to major on the stereotype of the sad funnyman. Admittedly, the stereotype has some mileage. But if there is one theme to our interview it is Lucas’s insistence that this unhappiness is not and never was the whole story.

“There were loads of happy memories from my childhood. There’s a temptation to characterise comedians as having a monopoly on suffering, and you can look at the facts and say, ‘Well, his hair fell out when he was 6, his parents divorced, his dad went to prison, questions over sexuality, struggles with weight,’ and assume every waking hour was a tyranny, but I don’t regard it as such at all. I had many happy moments watching Arsenal play, going to the theatre, wonderful friends, many of whom I still see, and a happy family. Many people have difficult lives and I don’t regard myself as one of them.”

The hair loss may have been the result of his being knocked down by a car when he was 4 and on holiday in Portugal. “Some medics thought it might be delayed shock.” Growing up, he says, he was “the bald kid. The Bald Man of Stanmore. I couldn’t get away with anything. I did feel very self-conscious about my appearance. Going through puberty was hard.”

The sudden and total hair loss is more likely to have been hereditary, as his father had also lost his hair, when he was about 13. “My dad wore a wig when we were growing up, a brown, Frankie Howerd style.” One of the traumatic things about visiting his father in prison in Aylesbury was he was not allowed to wear his wig. “I had never seen him before without it.” Going to visit his dad in prison was, he says, “really, really horrible. But I loved seeing him.”

Lucas’s parents separated when he was 10. He stayed with his mother and saw his dad every weekend. Then, when he was 12, his father, an aluminium importer, “made some bad decisions” to try to protect his failing business. “‘Cooking the books,’ I suppose they would call it. His intentions were good but his actions were a mistake.”

Lucas’s father was convicted of fraud and served six months of a nine-month sentence. He later remarried, as did Lucas’s mother. A decade later, when Lucas was in his early twenties and well-known for Shooting Stars, his father died. “There was a period, about the age of 25, when I became very depressed. I was dealing with bereavement, I was dealing with fame and I was dealing with trying to express myself and be gay and have relationships. I was out to my friends, but not my family. I saw a therapist regularly for three years; it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.”

His mother and stepmother are now friends. “It’s all very mature and amicable. They both came to my birthday recently. Good things sometimes come out of bad things.”

Lucas grew up “at the top of the Jubilee line”, on the border between Stanmore and Edgware, as part of northwest London’s Jewish community. His mother’s family had got out of Berlin in the late Thirties; his father’s, originally called Solotsky, had emigrated from eastern Europe to the East End three decades earlier.

Lucas went to Haberdashers’ Aske’s, a fee-paying school with a large (20 or 30 per cent, he thinks) Jewish minority. Sacha Baron Cohen and David Baddiel also went there. “I was number two goalie in the hockey squad until Jayesh Makan displaced me, and I shall never forgive him. I won’t be happy till I get my place back. These Baftas are meaningless.”

Lucas’s Jewishness is important to him. For one thing, he says, the crutch for many Jews is food, whereas for Gentiles, particularly in showbusiness, the crutch is more likely to be drink or drugs. “I’m lucky because many people in my industry struggle with alcohol or drugs. I struggle with my aunt’s delicious chocolate cake.”

He gave up smoking on New Year’s Eve, 2000, and “hasn’t had a drag since”. He is virtually teetotal bar the occasional sip “to be polite with friends. If I never drank alcohol again I wouldn’t be in the least bothered.” He remembers being in a pub with his dad only once. “It just wasn’t part of my culture.” He’s never had anything to do with drugs, he says. “I can’t be doing with all that. You could be spending your money on crisps, couldn’t you?”

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