Believe it or not, the characters in Little Britain are not real! I am sorry to shatter the illusion but it's true. They do, however, bear remarkable similarities to real people and situations. We at Project76 have decided to reveal... The Secret Origins of Little Britain!

A lot of the inspiration for Little Britain came from peole they had met or the freaks you see on rubbish daytime TV shows like Trisha and Kilroy. There is a small bit of reality in each character but they end up becoming quite warped by the time they appear on ye olde sprite box.

Dame Sally Markham and Miss Grace: Dressed in pink, endless romantic novels, fluffy dogs. Even Matt Lucas refers to Dame Sally as 'a female version of Dame Barbara Cartland'. See the above picture of Dame Barbara dictating to her secretary. It's spooky!

Marjorie Dawes: Matt went to Weightwatchers with his mum when he was 13. He lost nearly three stone in 6 six months but was obviously traumatised enough by the experience to create Marjorie and revisit his past in the pilot episode sketch where the boy joins Fatfighters as a new member.

Kenny Craig could be based on so many of those cranks you get on the telly these days, most notably Max Maven. Unlike Max, who uses his powers for large personal gain such as TV shows and books, Kenny is sadly limited to getting cheap Chinese meals and winning at Scrabble.

Daffyd Thomas was based on someone in their social circle . He was a bisexual Welshman who was very territorial about his sexuality. If anyone else thought they might be gay or bisexual he got upset because it made him less special. Matt has said that he was disappointed in the lack of drama in his own coming out as everyone was too cool about it or thought they were a bit gay themselves. This seems to be true in London too from what I know.

Dennis Waterman is not really a miniature man but sadly does sing a lot of theme tunes to the shows he appears in. Pilot director Graham Linehan thought it would be funny for him to be tiny so he is. The real Dennis saw it and thought it was weird, which it is. He is still writing theme tunes though.

Lou and Andy began as a Rock Profile idea with Lou Reed living with and looking after Andy Warhol. Their conversations would go around in circles, e.g. "What do you want for your tea?"... "Chips"... "But you had chips yesterday"... "Yeah I know". The real Lou and Andy were nothing like this, but then when you think about it they were probably even weirder. Matt and David stress that it's not a joke about disability, more about laziness and mollycoddling done in a pantomime style. Lou also resembles the radio show character Cockney Filmstar, at least in his voice (no idea what he looks like, it was radio). 

Vicky Pollard was originally inspired by a student film Matt made in Bristol called How Are You? where he asked people in the Broadmead shopping area how they were. A teenage boy couldn't really give an answer, lots of yeahs and buts and this became the basis for Vicky. It was changed to a teenage girl and expanded upon to include motivation as to why she was so inarticulate: she was trying to buy time because she had always done something wrong. Visually she resembles those dreadful chav women in ill-fitting sportswear and too many gold chains you see in every bloody high street these days.

Emily Howard was inspired by the kind of transvestites David Walliams sees in parks. I don't know what parks these are but I do know where they get their ladies' things from. They wear the kind of female clothes that only trannies would wear and it's all a big game where they want to believe you think they really are a woman. But obviously they are not!