Inside Jonathan Ross’ ‘very close’ friendship with Brand & Walliams as star ‘horrified’ by revelations

DAVID Walliams threw his head back and laughed. On stage at the 2004 British Comedy Awards, Jonathan Ross had just pointed out that the show was 15 years old.

Like most 15-year-olds, he joked, it was drunk, unpredictable and “probably going home with David Walliams”.

A girl the Guardian calls Alex remembers watching from her bedroom. She’d met Walliams at a Little Britain fan event when she was 15. By the time the awards went out, she says, he had already called her and sent her a postcard wishing her luck in her exams.

Alex told News and the Guardian that Walliams later asked her for sexualised photographs and that they first had sex when she was 17.

She said the sex was consensual but she felt he had used his fame to take advantage of her. Another woman, called Jade in the investigation, said Walliams kissed and sexually touched her when she was 15. Walliams denies wrongdoing.

The allegations were published a day after was for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others.

For years, the three men turned up in the same places. They were all on Channel 4’s Big Fat Quiz of the Year in 2006. Two years later, when Morrissey cut short a gig at London’s Roundhouse, Ross, Brand and Walliams went on stage together to break the news to the crowd.

They saw each other off screen, too. Ross went to Walliams’s wedding to at Claridge’s in 2010. Later that year, Ross and Walliams were guests when Brand married in India.

When Brand’s divorce from Katy was finalised, in 2012, Ross let the comedian hide out his holiday home in Swanage, Dorset. It is understood that Ross was not present.

It later emerged that in July of that year Brand was accused of raping a woman against a wall in his Los Angeles home, an allegation Ross was unaware of at the time.

Ross was also a guest when Brand married Laura Gallacher in 2017.

he was “horrified” by the allegations against Walliams and by Brand’s crimes. He said he had once been on friendly terms with both men and was “genuinely unaware of their conduct”. He was photographed out on Wednesday, a day after issuing his statement.

Referring to the “tasteless joke” at the Comedy Awards, Ross said the scriptwriters gave him the line and he understood it as a joke about Walliams publicly dating younger women.

He called it “a tasteless joke that I would not dream of making today” and said he would have refused to tell it if he’d had any reason to think it referred to real events.

‘Go home with her dress still on’

Ross had joked about Brand on television, too. This time the woman at the centre of the gag was sitting right next to him.

was the only woman on the panel of Channel 4’s Big Fat Quiz of the Year in 2007. She was on Ross’s team, sitting near Brand and .

Ross called the pair two of the best-known “cocksmen” in the business and insisted on swapping seats with Allen. That way, he joked, she might “go home with her dress still on”.

Brand and Fielding made jokes about rape. Allen later called the exchange “really horrendous”.

The charity dinner photo

While the three moved in the same showbiz circles and were often pictured in each others’ company, one picture tells a haunting story in the wake of the allegations against Walliams.

In a photograph shown in ITV’s David Walliams: Power and Silence, Walliams has his arm around Lilly Creightmore. Ross and Ricky Gervais are seated at the table at the charity event.

Creightmore was trying to make it as a photographer when she met Walliams. She was 18 when she first agreed to have dinner with him and now claims she was “groomed” and “manipulated” by the comic.

She told the Guardian she remembered feeling young and out of place at the celebrity parties he took her to.

Walliams has insisted he did not act inappropriately and did not “target” her because she was “vulnerable” or “young”.

The calls to Andrew Sachs

Andrew Sachs was due to be interviewed on Brand’s Radio 2 show in 2008. When the Fawlty Towers actor didn’t pick up, Brand started leaving him a message.

Ross interrupted, shouting that Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. She was 23 when the calls went out.

They kept ringing. In one message, Brand asked if he could marry Baillie. Ross said he’d like to be a page boy. Brand tried singing an apology, bringing up the relationship again.

In his memoir, Brand said Ross suggested cutting the calls, then phoned him on the way home to ask again. Radio 2 aired them. Brand quit the show and the BBC suspended Ross for 12 weeks.

Back on Ross’s sofa

Two years after the calls, Ross interviewed Brand on stage at the Hackney Empire to launch his memoir, Booky Wook 2. The pair apologised for the calls, describing them as “not deliberately malicious but deliberately stupid”.

Brand went on Ross’s ITV chat show in 2013. It was the first time they’d spoken about the row together on television.

“Let’s deal with this, because we’re both keen to put this behind us,” Ross said. He said they regretted the fuss they’d caused and the hurt it may have caused Sachs and his family.

There was one thing Ross said he was glad had come out of it. “We became very close.”