Little Britain star Matt Lucas has insisted that the reboot of the show will showcase more “diverse talent”.
Matt and his former comedy partner David Walliams have been quietly working on a new show for some time.
While the former Great British Bake Off host previously insisted this project would not be a revival of Little Britain, he appeared to confirm the divisive comedy show’s return during an interview with The Sun.
“The show will be different in many ways,” he told the tabloid. “We are talking about how we can have diverse talent on screen and in the writers’ room and conceive it as something which is just not about me and David playing absolutely everyone.
“That is something we should have done but didn’t do back then. But we were making the show at the same time as many other people who were doing what we were doing and had that approach.”
Little Britain has long faced criticism over some of the characters depicted in it, and the conversation resurfaced in 2020, after which both Matt and David issued a public apology for portraying characters of different races in both that show and another of their sketch comedies, Come Fly With Me.
Around this time, Little Britain was also removed from the BBC’s iPlayer service, although it has since returned, albeit in an edited form with some scenes removed.
In a statement issued to HuffPost UK last year, a BBC rep explained that comedians Matt and David had made “edits” to their original show “that better reflect the changes in the cultural landscape over the last twenty years since the show was first made.”
Responding to criticisms of Little Britain, Matt told The Sun: “Because some people are upset about what we do, or what we have done, out of respect to those people I don’t talk about it publicly because I don’t want to cause further upset to people who were upset.
“I totally accept there are different opinions. I accept people feel very differently from others and I respect everyone’s opinion from wherever they come from on this subject. I see things differently now to how we did. Things have changed and I respect that.”
Matt and David most recently reprised a number of their Little Britain characters for a one-off special as part of the BBC telethon The Big Night In, which aired during the pandemic in April 2020.