germ@namur: Vicky Pollard

Vicky Pollard

Victoria, nicknamed « Vicky », Pollard is one of the most popular characters of the TV series Little Britain, and is played by Matt Lucas. In the series, Vicky is 15, lives in Bristol, and she is mainly known for her famous yet annoying catchphrases that she babbles in a strong dialectical accent, such as “No but yeah but no but yeah but no”.
Matt Lucas, who plays Vicky, is also one of the two creators of the series with David Walliams. But Vicky is not his only role in the show, since he has played no fewer than sixteen different characters since Little Britain started. He has also had his own radio show since 2010, entitled And the winner is, in which he hands out fictional awards based on nominations by his guests.
Little Britain has been broadcast since 2003, and is made of sketches involving amplified, stereotypical parodies of unsophisticated British people. The name of the series is a wordplay on “Great Britain” and “Little England”. It has had a lot of success because Brits can usually relate to the everyday-situations the characters are in, or else it can remind them of other people they know.
Vicky Pollard represents the most extreme “chav” ‒ which is a stereotypical type of anti-social youth typically dressed in sportswear ‒ that you can find on British television, and she also represents most of today's youth, in a way. Indeed, the list of her wrong-doings includes swapping one of her babies for a band’s CD – and having 12 babies throughout the show ‒, dropping out of school when she was 11, getting arrested several times for shoplifting, wearing a terrible pink tracksuit all the time just like the rest of her family, and so on. She is clearly far from being a model and is, like the BBC would describe her, a “common-or-garden teenage delinquent”.
Matt Lucas got the idea for Vicky Pollard when he was studying at the university of Bristol, where he had to do a survey for one of his classes, and he got the idea of asking random people in the streets the question: “how are you?”, and wait for their responses, expecting them not to answer in an honest way. Then a young boy came along who must have got really frustrated by the question because he just said in the most inarticulate manner: “yeah but no but yeah it's like, it's kind of er..”, and that triggered Lucas' imagination for the character and he immediately told David Walliams. But Lucas got the idea for Vicky's appearance only after seeing the cover photo for Time Out Magazine in 2001, on which the young modelling duo of Nikki Carpenter and Stacey Bennett appeared wearing the same kind of outfit and hairdo you would find on Pollard.
Vicky is one of the most important characters of the show, having appeared in all episodes except for one. She has become one of England's most-known characters, and one of her quotes even made it in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, alongside John Lennon and other influential people.