David Walliams

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.

As it returns for a second series, Big School really seems to have found its comedy feet. David Walliams' performance is still every bit as subtle as his cross-dressing "I'm a laydee" Emily was in Little Britain. That is to say, not at all.

But Big School is well enough written to survive his camp, asexual gurning and the dream cast add extra polish to an already shiny script.

In tonight's opener, music teacher Mr Martin (Daniel Rigby) is about to launch his pop career. (His single, written by David Arnold and Michael Price, sounds like an entirely credible X Factor winner's song.)

Mr Barber (Steve Speirs) has had to take a career change, PE teacher Mr Gunn (Philip Glenister) is now also teaching geography, and even the confident Miss Postern (Catherine Tate) finds herself at a crossroads in her career.

In one slightly depressing piece of casting, former EastEnder Cheryl Fergison replaces Julie T Wallace as the wordless lab assistant who has the hots for Walliams' Mr Church. Why depressing? Because making someone the butt of the joke just because they don't look like Angelina Jolie feels uncomfortably like bullying.

But the real reason for Big School's success is probably Frances de la Tour. Even when she's not actually on screen, just knowing that she's lurking somewhere in the building as vinegary headmistress Ms Baron is reassuring.