Paul Whitehouse

Paul Julian Whitehouse (born 20 May 1958) is a British actor, writer, presenter and comedian.

He was one of the main stars of the BBC sketch comedy series The Fast Show, and has starred with Harry Enfield in the shows Harry & Paul and Harry Enfield & Chums.

Whitehouse was born on 20 May 1958, in Stanleytown, Glamorgan, Wales.

His father, Harry, worked for the National Coal Board and his mother, Anita ( Jones), was a singer with the Welsh National Opera.

The family moved to Enfield, Middlesex, when he was four years old, which led to his discovering his talent for mimicry:

"At school I didn't say a word for the first four weeks – I called it my Silent Month. I think it was because everyone was speaking so differently from how it had been in Wales. Then, after four weeks, I came home one day and said, 'Muumm, I wanna go to Sarfend!' For her that was the end because I had lost my lovely Welsh lilt. So I became very conscious of speech and the effects it can have. But when I went back to Wales I would start talking all Welsh, 'like that, you see' before going all Alf Garnett while coming back the other way."

Whitehouse attended the University of East Anglia reading for a degree in Development Studies from autumn 1976, where he made friends with Charlie Higson.

The pair spent little of their first year studying, instead playing guitar and performing with their punk rock combo, the Right Hand Lovers.

Whitehouse dropped out and squatted in a council flat in Hackney, east London and occasionally worked as a plasterer.

After Higson graduated in 1980, he moved in with Whitehouse, working by day as a decorator and performing at night and the weekends with his new punk-funk group The Higsons.

The pair began working as tradesmen on a house shared by comedians Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, which inspired them to start writing comedy.

They moved to an estate where in a pub they met Harry Enfield, a neighbour with a stage act, and after he gained a place on Channel 4's Saturday Live, the pair were invited to write for him.

Whitehouse created Enfield's character Stavros (a London-based Greek kebab shop owner), and then Loadsamoney (an archetypal Essex boy made good in Margaret Thatcher's 1980s); he also appeared as Enfield's sidekick Lance on Saturday Live.

This success turned Whitehouse and Higson's career, and they began to appear on Vic Reeves Big Night Out and extensively for the BBC, with Whitehouse appearing on A Bit of Fry and Laurie as a man with a clinical need to have his bottom fondled, and Paul Merton: The Series, then on Harry Enfield's Television Programme, where he developed numerous characters including DJ Mike Smash of Smashie and Nicey, alongside Enfield as Dave Nice.

While watching a preview tape of highlights from Enfield's programme, Whitehouse and Higson were inspired to create a rapid-fire delivery comedy series which would evolve into The Fast Show (when shown in the United States on BBC America, the show was titled Brilliant).

Whitehouse's characters included Rowley Birkin QC, Unlucky Alf, Arthur Atkinson, Ron Manager and Ted.

In 2001 and 2002, Whitehouse and Fast Show collaborator Dave Cummings co-wrote two series of the BBC comedy drama Happiness; Whitehouse also performed the lead role as a voice-over actor with a mid-life crisis.

He has appeared with Bob Mortimer in the BBC series Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, and has also acted in films including Corpse Bride (2005), Alice in Wonderland (2010), and The Death of Stalin (2017).

In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, he was in the top 50 comedy acts voted for by comedians and comedy insiders.

Whitehouse wrote, produced and appeared with Chris Langham in the 2005 comedy drama Help, also for the BBC.

In this series he took 25 roles, all patients of Langham's psychotherapist (except one, who is Langham's psychotherapist's psychotherapist).

The first series was broadcast May–June 2006.

The pair's collaboration resulted in Whitehouse taking the witness stand on 24 July 2007 in the trial of Langham, in regard to the charge of holding explicit images and videos of minors.

Langham claimed he downloaded this material as research for a character in the second series of Help, but Whitehouse's testimony only partially corroborated this explanation.

He appeared in the BBC sketch series Harry & Paul (formerly Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul), starring alongside Harry Enfield.

A second series was broadcast 16 January – 20 February 2007, during which they won a Sony Radio Academy Award.

A third series was broadcast in January 2008, a fourth in January 2011 and a fifth in May 2013.

Whitehouse starred alongside Charlie Higson in the BBC2 comedy series Bellamy's People, with the first episode broadcast on 21 January 2010.

The comedy evolved from the BBC Radio 4 program Down the Line.

The show originally had the working title of Bellamy's Kingdom.

An online series of The Fast Show commissioned by Fosters led to six weekly episodes launched on 10 November 2011.

In October 2014, Harry Enfield and Whitehouse revived the classic characters Frank and George ("The Self-Righteous Brothers") from Harry Enfield and Chums, in a sketch for Channel 4's testicular cancer awareness comedy series The Feeling Nuts Comedy Night.

In 2015 his sitcom Nurse, based on his Radio 4 series of the same name (see below), debuted on BBC2 on 10 March.

In August 2015, Whitehouse, alongside Enfield, in celebration of their 25-year partnership, presented An Evening With Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse.

In June and July 2018, Whitehouse appeared with his long-time friend and fellow comedian Bob Mortimer in a BBC2 six-part series, Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing.

The two friends, who both suffer from heart conditions, share their thoughts and experiences while fishing at a variety of locations around the UK, often with anecdotes about Paul's health and Bob's misadventures.

The fourth series of Gone Fishing began broadcasting in 2021.

The fifth series began in September 2022, and returned for a Christmas special in December 2022.

The duo returned for a sixth series broadcast on BBC.

Whitehouse and Charlie Higson produced and appeared in a spoof phone-in show Down the Line on BBC Radio 4.