Richard Osman has said that it’s difficult for him “not to feel some sense of shame” as someone who worked in comedy at the same time as David Walliams.
Little Britain’s Walliams was accused of sexual misconduct with girls as young as 15 following investigative reports by The Guardian and ITV News. Multiple women accused him of “grooming” them when they were teenagers and one woman described her alleged encounter with Walliams when she was 15 as a “sexual assault”. Walliams denies any wrongdoing.
Osman, who worked with Walliams on one of his first TV jobs in 1999, revealed that he met the comedian when he was 21 years old and still went by the name David Williams. The Little Britain star later changed his name as there was already a member of Equity, the trade union for actors, called David Williams.
“My first ever job was with, well, it was David Williams at the time. He literally just left university and we worked on a computer game show and then we did a pilot for [production company Hat Trick] with Dominik Dimond hosting and David Walliams and Simon Pegg were the talent in that,” Osman told co-host Marina Hyde on The Rest is Entertainment.
“We fell out, not for any exciting, shortly afterwards and I didn’t work with him again. But I absolutely of course have followed his career and what he’s done and seen where he’s been at the heart of British TV.”
Referring to the allegations made against Walliams, Osman continued: “I think it’s hard for any man who worked in television in the 1990s and 2000s to not feel like they failed, to not feel blind, to not feel some sense of shame about what has happened. It’s not a sin of commission, it’s a sin of omission and not understanding you need to create an environment in which everybody felt safe.
“You look back and you think, if you’d started understanding what was going on then and understand that Nineties laddy culture was not a natural culture. It was a slightly weird aberration. It’s tough looking back and it’s horrific. I’m delighted to still be around at a time when people are being found out.”
The final project Walliams and Osman worked on together was Channel 4 comedy series Boyz Unlimited, which they co-created with Matt Lucas. It followed a career criminal as he tried to form his own boy band. Walliams said in his autobiography, Camp David, that after being told that Hat Trick – where Osman worked – would be making the show without them in the cast, the pair refused to work with the production company again.
The sitcom was poorly received and cancelled after one series, with Osman later admitting that it made him “give up writing for a long time”.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Osman gave his recommendations as to “what can be done in the future and what should have been in the past” to allow those working on TV shows to complain about the behaviour of fellow colleagues or talent. It came after comedian Lucy Beaumont, who blew the whistle on Walliams’ conduct, said that many people don’t know where or who they can complain to.
“Obviously people were complaining about [Walliams], because there’s people on this documentary who were complaining about him. The point is, and Lucy makes this point brilliantly, they did not know where to complain. She says at one point there’s no HR here,” Osman said. “The truth is there is HR, but if you work on any TV production, you’ll do loads and loads of safeguarding stuff. You can keep looking down, you’ll see somewhere that you could complain if there’s an issue, but it is not front and centre.”
He suggested that TV series should have “a mandatory offboarding interview with HR where you talk about your experiences on that show”.
“If you have anything to say about anyone senior on the show, whether that’s talent or producers of commissioners, that is the place to say it. It can be anonymised so if you want to make an official complaint do so. Most people don’t really want to for the myriad reasons that we understand,” he continued, adding that the system would help pick up “red flags” and would be “shared across companies and across the industry and across channels”.
“If across those eight years, there are four anonymised complaints and there is a slight pattern which you can guarantee there would have been in this case, then again you can’t force anyone to go to the police and you wouldn’t want to force anyone to go to the police – we know how difficult that is – but what you can say is we are not going to employ this person on our production. You are allowed to do that.”
In a statement to the Guardian and ITV News, Walliam said regarding his allegations: “Looking back, I realise that at times I behaved thoughtlessly towards other people I had casual sexual relationships with… I realise I did not always take people's feelings properly into account. That is something I regret.
“And whilst a power imbalance is inevitable when one party is famous, abusing that power is something else entirely and it is something that I never did. I am not a sexual predator… I have not broken the law… I am devastated that some of the women I met ten to twenty years ago have now expressed hurt or anger towards me.”
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