David Walliams

Video: David Walliams makes 'stinkovision' on stage

David Walliams, well-known from playing a cast of characters in Little Britain, has become an award-winning author of children's books.

One of his popular tales, Mr Stink, has been transformed into an interactive musical showing at Leicester's Curve Theatre.

Williams says it is one of the first productions to use scratch and sniff technology.

David Walliams to write tell-all book

David Walliams, famous British comedian and ladies man, is set to release an autobiography telling all about his love life and rise to fame.

Come Fly With Me 'too offensive' for regional Australia

Residents of regional Australia have been deemed too sensitive to cope with Come Fly With Me, the latest comedy series by Little Britain's David Walliams and Matt Lucas.

It takes a brave man to front a daft show about so-bad-they-are-good films when he's equipped with a truly execrable script, as is the case here. But maybe that's the point. Anyhow, David Walliams is at his most camp and arch as he introduces two hours of clips from some real stinkers. Awfully Good Movie Moments is quite good fun, particularly if you wish to reacquaint yourself with what must surely be the worst sex scenes ever filmed, those between a flailing, slapping Juliet Binoche and Jeremy Irons in Damage. But wait, maybe Heather Locklear snogging the Swamp Thing is even more dumb and disturbing. Or what about two evil dolls in a sexy clinch in Bride of Chucky? Walliams roams far and wide, looking at dreadful death scenes (including one involving a carrot that must be seen to be believed), horrible accents (hello Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and Don Cheadle's toe-curling cockerenee in Ocean's Eleve]n) and his top five most annoying film characters (Dakota Fanning's screaming brat in [i]War of the Worlds). Mind you, possibly the most disturbing sight of all is of Walliams dressed as Demi Moore at her potter's wheel in Ghost.

David Walliams on the set of Doctor Who

David Walliams is barely recognisable in his Dr Who alien costume.

Awfully Good is one of those shows which, I presume, is only around to fill airtime with archive footage. In this case it's with adverts which host David Walliams claims are so bad that they are good.

I have to admit that as far as archive shows go, this one is indeed awfully good. It's a very simple set up. Just show a quick ad and you can get a laugh from something as simple as the name (examples include a diet pill called "Ayds" and a toy dog called "Gaylord") or the product itself. It's really quite amazing that products like golf clubs you can urinate into, the flatulence deodorizer and spray-on hair haven't caught on. Incredibly amazing, in fact.

The most excruciating part of the show was actually the adverts which were either racist, sexist or in some other way inappropriate. It'' shocking to think that only a few decades ago advertisements could openly imply that poor time management is the fault of your wife not giving you enough Kellogg's. Kellogg's seem to be a prime offender, too, having also commissioned an advert featuring a black footballer suffering from a white eye.

The best part, for me, was seeing adverts which I myself could remember. Being a relatively young man most of the adverts were before my time, and many came from abroad, but just occasionally I could see something which made me go: "Yes! I remember that. God, that was rubbish." I'm looking at you Selfstyle Windows, and We Buy Any Car for that matter.

But before I go, I'd like to point out that the worst ads in the show we not those in the programme. It was those during the ad breaks for Awfully Good. They were not so much awfully good, rather just plain awful.

It'll be hard to take Mad Men ­seriously again after seeing the kind of guff American advertising that agencies really churned out back in the 1960s.

David Walliams is back fronting the second in his occasional series celebrating the world's worst TV commercials. It's a marathon of a show stuffed with two hours of sexist and racist ads and wildly inappropriate public service information films.

There are some bizarre celebrity campaigns, like Barbra Streisand doing her bit for "retarded children" and Clint Eastwood warning of the dangers of crack.

There are also plenty of products that should never have seen the light of day - like the device that slips under your mattress so you can reach for your shotgun without getting out of bed, the Hawaii chair that lets you hula your way to fitness in the office and a product called "Sticky Nips", that does exactly what you'd imagine.

Who could forget Mandy, the peroxide blonde bombshell with the catchphrase "Ooh, you are awful but I like you"? During the sixties and seventies, it must have been quoted at parties, pageants and playgrounds up and down the land as often as Vicky Pollard's "Yeah but, no but" or Victor Meldrew's "I don't believe it" decades later.

Yet Mandy's creator, Dick Emery, seems to have been largely erased from the nation's comedy memory bank. Unlike Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies, whose work is deservedly kept alive by repeats on Gold as well as the terrestrial channels, the brilliant Emery has been curiously absent from our screens since his death 30 years ago.

None of the contributors to Dick Emery - A Comedy of Errors could account for this glaring oversight, including presenter David Walliams, clearly a big fan in his youth. The best they could come up with was that Emery's success predated the marketing boom of the eighties when artists like Cooper and Morecambe and Wise were immortalised on T-shirts, mugs, greetings cards and the like.

While the documentary was a fitting tribute to an outstanding comedy talent, it also revealed the troubled man behind the many funny faces. Nervous, insecure and incapable of fidelity, Emery's early childhood had been spent on tour with his parents, a variety double act, not the most stable of upbringings.

His love life - five failed marriages, umpteen love affairs - reflected a restlessness and terror of being alone. One of his children, Eliza, now a singer-songwriter, said he sought constant reassurance that she loved him, even though it was probably his kids who needed assuring the most.

Walliams concluded in characteristic Emery style, "What we need is more Dick on our screens," followed rather predictably by a rousing "Ooh, you are awful but I like you".

David Walliams joined by his mother for Millionaire

David Walliams, Patsy Palmer and Olly Murs will all be in the hot seat when they take part in a live edition of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? for Mother's Day.