Craig David reveals how he felt about Bo’ Selecta! mockery

‘I wasn’t really understanding what was going on around me’

Craig David has reflected on Leigh Francis’s mockery of him in the noughties sketch show Bo’ Selecta!

“I wasn’t really understanding what was going on around me,” David told The Times.

The Channel 4 comedy, which launched in 2002, was named after a lyric in David’s chart-topper “Rewind” and starred Francis doing deliberately awful impressions of celebrities while wearing latex face masks. His impersonation of David as corny, lonely and uncool blew up and quickly became synonymous with the singer himself.

Soon after it aired, David retreated to Miami and threw himself into working out. It has previously been said that the popularity of the show led to David’s dip in popularity in the mid-2000s.

“I understood as far as it was a comedy sketch, people were getting into it, it was cool…" said David.

After The Times interviewer protested that the sketch show wasn’t “cool”, it was “cruel”, David reasoned: “It’s not different to Spitting Image, which serves its purpose.”

He added: “I think it leant a little bit more on me [than the other celebrities targeted, among them David Beckham, Spice Girl Mel B and Elton John], because of the title of the show. And there’s the part where, are you grounded like a mountain? Or are you the flag at the top, getting waved around, going crazy?”

David previously told iNews: “It actually wasn’t [the show] itself which was the lowest point for me. It was not being able to put music out in the way I always wanted to.”