Geoffrey Perkins, British television’s greatest comedy producer, died at the
age of 55 just a few days before the start of Harry & Paul, his latest
series. Perkins understood Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse better than
anybody.
“He gave me my confidence,” Enfield says. “He was gentle, incredibly clever
and very wise . . . But he was also strict. He always got to the centre of
an idea. He knew how to cut out the flab and get to the punch line.”
Perkins represented, as do Enfield and Whitehouse, a comedy generation that
bridged the gap between the edgy avant-garde — Pete and Dud, Monty Python
and The Young Ones — and the comfortable, old-school theatrical — Tommy
Cooper, Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies. He also knew something that
the rest of us take too much for granted: that there is some indefinable
combination of class, manners, provinciality and surreal whimsy that makes
Britain a uniquely funny place. Harry & Paul, which began on Friday on BBC1,
is a suitable monument. “We’re going,” says Enfield, “to put it to bed as he
would have liked it.”
The new series is a fast sketch show filmed entirely on location. Its
predecessor, Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry & Paul, had studio inserts, but
both men decided that this was holding them back.
“You can put on a slightly more disciplined performance,” says Whitehouse,
“when you are not worrying about the studio audience. You get conscious of
them, and that’s not the best way for us now we are old and nervous.”
“I get more nervous,” says Enfield, “and shout too much when the director
says, ‘Do the whole thing again’, and you ask why, but there’s only this
voice in your ear.”
“Poor old audience,” says Whitehouse.
He was 50 in May and, in the same month, Enfield was 47. Enfield is
comfortably rounded, Whitehouse uncomfortably gaunt. They look, as they
should, like two funny and friendly middle-aged blokes — a solicitor and a
bookie
— you might meet in any pub. Whitehouse reckons he’d still be a jobbing
plasterer, knocking back pints in the Brunswick on Morning Lane, in Hackney,
if Enfield hadn’t led him into comedy.
“Yeah, that same old pub.”
“It’s been knocked down,” says Enfield.
“No! The Brunswick’s been knocked down?”
“I told you. I called you from there.”
“Nice job, plastering,” I offer by way of consolation.
“I still do the odd bit of plastering, if you want to come and mix up
for me,” says Whitehouse. “It’s very satisfying.”
Neither has ever had consistent success, so, unlike, say, John Cleese or Peter
Sellers, they have never been able to sit back and rest on their
comedy-grandee laurels. They are not big film stars — they should be, they
are both comedy actors of the first rank — and, perhaps because of too much
channel and comedy competition, they don’t have a nation-building slot like
the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special. Rather, they live from show to
show, and are all the better for it. Harry & Paul has plainly been honed and
loved into existence.
It is, of course, a sketch show, a very British form that is currently in rude
health. Will you, I ask Whitehouse, now be doing sketch shows for ever? He
looks bereft.
“Oh, for ever! Please can I die?”
Sudden life-changing offers aside, the real answer is yes.
“I prefer the sketch show myself to sitcom. I enjoy that sort of cornucopia of
ideas.”
“We have a low attention span,” says Enfield.
“Yeah, we don’t want some plodding old sitcom story.”
Sketches, of course, mean they can both do what they do best: create a
bewildering variety of characters. Their gifts in this area are unmatched —
Johnny Depp once called Whitehouse “the finest actor of all time” on the
basis of his limitless character-creating abilities. The new show has new
cast members: a brilliantly multilingual football manager, the Dragons’ Den
bastards, the writer and the landlady, as well as the continuation of the
girls of the superbly observed Polish cafe, the posh scaffolders, Nelson
Mandela and so on. The setups, however, still linger on the eternal themes
of class, youth and age, and simple silliness. So, Enfield is humiliated for
being old in the Polish cafe, the scaffolders discuss Brit Art while
breaking off to grab their crotches at the sight of a passing girl, and
Mandela steals the iPhone of a wheelchair-bound Fidel Castro before pushing
him off a cliff — absurd and liberating.
Part of the trick is the shock of simple brutality lying comically beneath the
surface. It’s always funny. So, Whitehouse turns to me as Enfield
leaves the room.
“What a c***,” he says, with perfect timing, Enfield’s foot barely
having crossed the threshold. Sparkling water emerges from my nose. It’s the
immediacy of the savage subversion, the absolutism of the implied statement
that people usually don’t mean what they say.
Neither of them, however, wants to be pigeonholed. They both get uncomfortable
when I attempt to pin down themes.
“I don’t really like political satire,” Whitehouse says as soon as I use the
word “satire”. But what about Loadsamoney, the very emblem of what was
perceived as the callous greed of the Thatcher years? “We didn’t do it as
satire,” says Enfield. “It’s just that everything was very right-on at the
time, and we wanted to do the opposite.” He remembers fondly coming on as
Loadsamoney at a benefit show for striking nurses and shouting: “Get back to
work, you scum!” They applauded.
“That’s fun to do,” says Whitehouse, “when comedy subverts what you are
supposed to be doing and the audience goes along with it.”
Slightly more embarrassing, there’s the matter of Stavros, Enfield’s opaquely
accented kebab chef. “My son’s got a teacher called Stavros, a maths
teacher, about 38 years old. He’s very polite and nice to me, but I can see
behind his eyes he’s saying, ‘You ruined my childhood!’ I’ve never brought
it up — it’s just too embarrassing.”
Basically, they insist, it’s all about the process of being funny with
whatever material is available. This is a process, as they both readily
admit, with a history and a tradition. That tradition has always seemed to
be split between the avant-garde and the theatrical, a split embodied in
their differing personalities. Whitehouse veers towards the avant-garde,
mentioning The Young Ones and Monty Python as influences, while Enfield
leans towards the theatrical, becoming positively lyrical on the subject of
The Two Ronnies.
“The Young Ones went for the old stuff, too, they went towards Tommy
Cooper,” he says, “but The Two Ronnies were much more surreal than you
think. I remember a fantastic sketch with just people walking along the
street as if they were driving — overtaking and being fantastically rude. It
was brilliant.”
The pair are also in awe of the American tradition of character-led comedy
drama. Above all, there is The Simpsons.
“I think it’s just genius. There’s always a truth to every episode,” says
Enfield. “Homer is so like every man — pumped up but vulnerable — and Marge
is just so loyal.”
“It’s unsentimental,” says Whitehouse, “unlike a lot of acted sitcoms, and
they can do an incredible range of material.”
So, do they yearn for the American system of enormous investment in shows,
with vast teams of writers?
“I’d love it,” says Enfield, “I’d love to do any sitcom that had heart and
meaning . . . I’d love to do something like that, but I can’t see it happening.
I wouldn’t know where to start.”
At the heart of this, I think, is that they both feel they remain outsiders,
comedy dilettantes just struggling to be funny in any way they can.
Whitehouse, for example, is insistent that The Fast Show, in which he
starred with Charlie Higson, was never intended to be the avant-garde
spectacular identified by critics and fans.
“It didn’t seem that unconventional or new to us,” he says.
“I never felt it was spectacularly ground-breaking, not like Monty Python,
Pete and Dud or The Young Ones. And Harry Enfield and Chums had more in
common with Dick Emery than with any out-there, cutting-edge comedy.”
Perhaps the pair’s most original contribution to the tradition is the
simple quality of joy in character. How do they decide which ones work? They
don’t really know.
“Well,” says Whitehouse, “some things you can’t do any more. Monty Python used
to take a pop at accountants, but you wouldn’t dream of doing those kind of
people now. And there was that whole thing about laughing at the British
Establishment — we haven’t got that. We do things like our Harley Street
surgeons just because we like them. We thought there was no way the young
people would get that, but they do.”
There is, beyond the comedy, a reflective but amiable melancholy about these
two. This is before the death of Perkins, so perhaps it is simply the fact
of ageing. Perhaps more than Enfield, Whitehouse feels the pressure of being
the middle-aged clown.
“Well, you know the thing we do — it’s very childlike comedy. It’s a healthy
thing when you’re young or old, but in middle age it’s slightly
embarrassing. If you see somebody riding a Harley-Davidson at 80, you go,
‘Woah, yeah!’ But riding one at 50? — ‘Oh, come on!’ ”
That said, they seem more than content to continue what they started at the
Brunswick, in Hackney, all those years ago.
“Paul makes me laugh more than anyone else when he goes off into a
character, and he always did, even when I was working in television and
doing other things with other writers,” says Enfield. “It just wasn’t as
funny. Everybody has a mate who makes them laugh more than anybody on
television, and Paul is mine.”
It’s not about growing old, sex or class, it’s not about being
avant-garde, hip or smart, it’s not about the spirit or politics of the age.
It’s about making people laugh. And that, as every great comedian from
Hamlet’s Yorick down to Tommy Cooper and Harry and Paul has known, is
only ever about one thing: the defiance of death. And that, this week, is
also about putting the show to bed as Geoffrey Perkins would have liked it.
Harry & Paul, BBC1, Fridays, 9pm
www.bryanappleyard.com
