A CULT celebrity has revealed his inspiration for the comic creation which gained him national fame came from his home town.

Purley and South Croydon schoolboy, Matt Lacey, has amassed more than 5 million YouTube hits and landed a book deal for his satirical Gap Yah sketches – a parody of student gap years in which Matt plays his alter ego, Orlando Charmon.

The 25-year-old, who attended Margaret Roper and Whitgift schools, told the Advertiser this week in an exclusive interview that it was a teacher who kindled his public schoolboy parody.

Matt said: "It just started as a silly voice I would talk in with friends but, having since thought about it, I think the character developed while I was at school.

"Our English teacher at Whitgift, Stewart Cook, once showed us some Harry Enfield scripts and got us to write our own characters as homework.

I did one about an angry old Etonian who was upset because a spoon had been stolen from the dining area. I remember that homework because I've always been someone who just does the minimum, but I did that twice."

Matt, who studied history at Oxford, added: "We'd recently played rugby against Eton and I remember them saying how awful everyone from John Fisher had been because they had stolen things – even a spoon.

"It was really funny and the first class shock I got. I think that incident was also something which developed the character."

Matt uploaded the Orlando sketches – a posh schoolboy who "chunders everywhere" while visiting Peru, Tanzania and Burma in his "gap yah" – with his comedy group Unexpected Items in 2010.

He now tours Europe performing as the guffawing gap-year student in stand-up routines and launched the Gap Yah Plannah late last year – a guide book for gap year students – after two publishers approached him.

Matt, whose parents still live in Bencombe Road, Purley, added: "It's lucky really because I didn't know what my game plan was if this hadn't worked out.

"My advice would be to anyone creative to upload things onto the internet. It's amazing.

"For the first couple of weeks it didn't really get any hits at all and then overnight it went from 1,000 to 40,000 and then kept going up by about 150,000 a week after that."

The former A-level drama student also revealed he took a gap year in which he "spent most of it in Ireland working in a Chinese restaurant run by Romanians".

Whitgift teacher Stewart Cook said: "I am delighted but not surprised he has been such a success. He is a very bright guy with a wicked sense of humour, and when he played Claudius in Hamlet he was just wicked.

"He was always entertaining in class at Whitgift and I'm pleased to see he is still being creative."