Come Fly With Me

Interview With Matt Lucas And David Walliams

Set in an airport and following the lives of the people who hold it all together – including airline owners, check-in staff, fast-food workers, immigration officers, pilots and cabin crew, as well as the passengers – Come Fly With Me is a "mockumentary" series which sees David Walliams and Matt Lucas doing what they do best: dressing as over-the-top characters and making the nation laugh.

BBC Programme Information's Jane Dudley met David and Matt at one of the two airports they used. The pair are determined that Come Fly With Me appears as close to real-life as possible, much like the genre they are sending up.

Says Matt: "Sometimes members of the public gather behind the camera and like to watch. But what you gain is hopefully a show that looks like no other comedy show; that has a kind of authenticity and a scale about it that you could not easily create in a studio, unless you had tens of millions of pounds to build one."

"Nearly everyone knows what an airport looks like and sounds like, so you couldn't fake it," adds David. "If we had faked it, it would look pretty puny I think.

"It is hard though; there are a lot of distractions. We're used to being on a set and people saying, 'Quiet please, action'. But here, any moment, a tannoy can go off, a vehicle can go past beeping or someone can start shouting or running through the airport, so you've got to try to concentrate with that going on around you."

"The staff at both airports have been wonderful," adds Matt. "We couldn't have done it without their goodwill."

The inspiration for Come Fly With Me came from a desire to do something different, following the success of Little Britain and its transatlantic counterpart, Little Britain USA.

Says David: "There have been two major series that are real documentaries on the airline business, Airport and Airline, but we were looking to do another multi-character show and we thought that would play to our strengths. We didn't want to do a sketch show as we'd done that with Little Britain, and the more we thought about it the more possibilities there were. You can have everybody, from someone who runs an airline to someone who cleans the toilets. And many people have had bad experiences of airports and airlines, so we felt it was right for comedy."

Matt continues: "You can play regular characters but you can also have one-offs – passengers at the airport; people you just see once. And also, unlike Little Britain, it doesn't have a laughter track because it's all filmed entirely on location and the characters are aware of the presence of the camera because it's a mock documentary, so this gives us the chance to have a slightly different relationship with the camera."

While Come Fly With Me will inevitably be compared with Little Britain, neither David nor Matt feel any pressure to match its phenomenal success and Matt says he actually feels less pressure: "When we were writing Little Britain, the first series was so successful, and with the second I was really aware that we were writing a show that had become more written about than a lot of TV shows and it had taken some sort of strange cultural significance. With Come Fly With Me, I think well, we can't – and we shouldn't aim to make something as big as Little Britain. Something like that probably only happens once in your career if you're extremely lucky.

"So in a way I was always aware that a lot of people were anticipating it with Little Britain whereas this feels like something else."

David continues: "Yeah it's new – the only baggage we're carrying is having had a big previous success but then again we're starting over with something new."