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“Your mouth will go dry and you want to go to the toilet a lot.” “I get very tired before I go on stage,” says Lucas. “But I’d rather feel tired than have horrible butterflies in my stomach.”I point out that once they get going both men seem to enjoy flaunting themselves on camera. Walliams has indeed described them recently as “very clean-living”.We talk briefly about Lord Archer, whom they’ve never met, and then about interviews, which they always do together. “What I like about being interviewed,” says Lucas, “is that we get asked questions we wouldn’t usually ask each other.” And about stage nerves. Later this evening they will be interviewed on stage at the National Film Theatre by Graeme Garden of the Goodies.We are soon at our table and plumping for calamari, sea bass with lentils, grilled chicken with parsnips, new roast potatoes – does it matter who ordered what? – and steamed broccoli, please, thank you Lucas and Walliams say please and thank you a lot In loud clear voices And drink only water Both appear to be more or less teetotal. Lucas comes across as an intelligent and thoughtful young student, anxious to please or, as he puts it at one point, “not mis-communicate”. The closeness and affection between such different-looking people is lovely to behold.And they have already spent much of the day together, working on their third Little Britain series, laughing a lot and lunching off Marks and Spencer take-aways in David’s flat in north-west London.

Matt Lucas lives quite close, in a bit of a mess, and made the journey over to his friend’s swish, gilt-mirrored abode – “like Liberace’s holiday home” says its owner – by C11 bus unrecognised by other passengers. Pressed by Radio 1’s Jo Whiley about their relationship, Walliams replied, “I think there’s a great love growing between us. Three years ago, there was serious talk of him as a potential prime minister. The launch of his book Politics and Progress, after the 2001 election, looked very like a gathering of the Stop Brown campaign, with Alan Milburn, Peter Mandelson and many others in attendance.

Now, as a political realist, he must know that the public would not accept a prime minister whose personal life is as unsettled as his appears to be.Apart from his astonishing ability to rise above social and physical handicaps, David Blunkett can expect to be remembered as a politician who began by being popular in his party, but in the end preferred to be populist, and as one of the most authoritarian home secretaries the Labour Party has yet produced.. Hurrying through the streets to have dinner with Matt Lucas and David Walliams, I pass several overweight men and women, two people in wheelchairs, and any number of juvenile delinquents, some of them girls and at least one with her hair done up in the pineapple style. Would it be stretching credulity to claim that I also spotted, lurking in the shadows, various cross-dressers and other gallant souls?

Hurrying through the streets to have dinner with Matt Lucas and David Walliams, I pass several overweight men and women, two people in wheelchairs, and any number of juvenile delinquents, some of them girls and at least one with her hair done up in the pineapple style. Within moments, his partner in crime has bustled or bundled into the restaurant, his bald head covered with a cap and a student’s bag on his shoulder. Matt Lucas is more informally dressed than his tall companion but tells me later he has recently bought two suits from Gieves and Hawkes, a couple of shirts “and a nice tie”. Six foot three and wearing a dark blue suit made by Richard James of Savile Row – “They look after me there,” he says later – he gives an impression of formidable health and efficiency. His hair, hidden on television under innumerable straggling, floppy or fringed wigs, is enviably well cut.

Watch this space.” They have also done long press interviews in which they have given away practically nothing.I am five minutes late for our meeting in a basement restaurant off the Strand and David Walliams is already standing at the bar. Walliams’s favourite contemporary novelist, incidentally, is Kazuo Ishiguro. Together, Lucas and Walliams have attended the National Television Awards at the Albert Hall – at an earlier awards ceremony Walliams kissed Jonathan Ross on the mouth – and made “virtuoso” appearances on Richard and Judy’s sofa. Dolled up as Lou and Andy, they have toured the country promoting the book of their first series and attracting – this proves my earlier point – scores of admirers in wheelchairs.