David Walliams

Adaptations of David Walliams's teen-lit offerings have rapidly become a Christmas staple. The latest book to get a small-screen rendering is his debut - the story of 12-year-old Dennis, a small-town boy whose feelings of difference are crystallised by Kate Moss on the cover of a fashion mag. The title hints at Dennis's habit: it's probably the kind of thing to raise the blood pressure of your local Ukip candidate but it is also a story boasting warm-hearted inclusivity and lessons in tolerance and Christmas cheer.

Jennifer Saunders on her new role

Jennifer Saunders plays a French teacher with a student who dares to be different in David Walliams' latest comedy drama.

David Walliams is filming Agatha Christie drama

Filming had to be halted while the emergency services were summoned after smoke machines set off fire alarms in nearby buildings.

David Walliams still leads book charts

David Walliams notched up his fourth consecutive week atop the Official UK Top 50. Awful Auntie shifted 37,903 print units.

Bad Education series 2 DVD review

School-based comedy series have a somewhat hit and miss reputation as anyone who has seen Teachers or the more recent David Walliams/Catherine Tate sitcom Big School will agree. But while not exactly disproving this rule, BBC Three's relentlessly hip sitcom Bad Education is well worth skipping homework for.

David Walliams settles phone hacking claim

Little Britain star David Walliams has accepted substantial undisclosed damages from News Group Newspapers (NGN) over phone-hacking claims.

Big School, series 2

Big School is a British Sitcom that began last year and was highly successful and incredibly popular. It has a common set up, being set in a regular secondary school, but the two main roles are filled by the nation's sweethearts, and comedy legends, Catherine Tate and David Walliams. The double act is striking because it blends two of the biggest comic actors from when I was very young, and I wouldn't necessarily have thought they could work so well together. But, God, do they.

This David Walliams vehicle - devised by the Dawson Bros and the man himself - is now on its second series, a mysterious feat for a school-based sitcom loaded with toilet jokes and rubbish innuendo. Rather than embracing its student contingent (see: Bad Education), far too much time is dedicated to the teachers. This week, hapless French pedagogue Miss Postern (Catherine Tate) is out to woo a new colleague, whose disability is played out for some predictably un-PC laughs. Big but not very clever.

Radio Times review

Mr Church and Mr Gunn are locked in their ridiculous competition to win the affections of needy, passive-aggressive school siren Miss Postern. It's her birthday but no one cares, apart from the frenzied Church.

As the second series of David Walliams's school-set sitcom hits its stride, there are more daft gags, but Big School manages not to be sent for detention because of the great cast - Philip Glenister, Catherine Tate, Walliams himself - who throw everything into it.

Some of the jokes go on too long, including a laboured bit of business involving a hunky, blind new geography teacher, and the whole thing is often breathtakingly coarse (a running joke about gay sex, for instance). But Frances de la Tour as the lubricious head steals every scene and it's always good to see Steve Speirs doing his mournful Welsh thing, here as the useless caretaker.