When Harry met Paul

AS in all good relationships, there’s some dispute over when comedy duo Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse first met. Enfield thinks their first meeting was while Whitehouse was at university in East Anglia.

“He probably doesn’t remember me from then because I was just a friend of one of his mate’s younger brothers, but he was very funny and very friendly,” Enfield recounts.

For his part, Whitehouse, 52, first remembers meeting Enfield in a pub in Hackney, when the comedian, who is three years his junior, impressed him with “quite a passable Prince Charles impression”.

Thirty years later, the two funnymen have worked together on Saturday Live and Harry Enfield and Chums, and are behind some of the most memorable comedy characters of the past two decades. There’s the upwardly mobile Loadsamoney, radio DJs Smashie and Nicey, and who could forget moody, incommunicative Kevin the Teenager?

After an eight-year break, the duo came back together on sketch show Harry and Paul in 2007. Now in its third series, Enfield says he’s proud of what they have achieved, although he doesn’t think their friendship is like a marriage.

“We don’t argue so how can it be like a marriage?” he says, going on to describe Whitehouse as “still the funniest person I know”.

Whitehouse, who has worked on projects such as The Fast Show and Bellamy’s People without Enfield, does agree with the marriage analogy – to a certain extent.

“We’ve got an open marriage, Harry and me,” he jokes. “We’re swingers within our marriage because we do stuff with other people.”

The two also both have habits which annoy the other one: Whitehouse finds Enfield’s ventriloquist impressions “bloody irritating”, while Enfield gets annoyed because Whitehouse “is on his phone all the time, and by that I mean ALL the time. He might stop for a couple of minutes but then he’s got to start to texting again”.

Quibbles aside, the pair hope that some of the spark is still left between them, and though their latest sketch show Harry and Paul has been moved from BBC1 to BBC2 for its third series, it’s still as funny and well-observed as ever.

The duo’s new characters include a corrupt Italian minister (played by Whitehouse) whose bawdy comments and ridiculous bargaining have to be translated by a straightfaced interpreter (played by Enfield).

There’s a couple of private members’ club chaps whose primary topic of debate is whether one famous man or another is “a queer”, and – Enfield and Whitehouse’s favourite – the sportswear-clad ‘dysfunctional family’, who cause chaos wherever they go.

‘THEY’RE just like a lot of people in this country are now, they just don’t fit in with any of the rules, they show where society has failed in quite a big way,” says Enfield. “I don’t know if they’re funny, but they’re accurate and I like that.”

Series two landed the pair – and the BBC – in hot water after members of the Philippine community took issue with a sketch.

The pair say their brand of comedy is not intentionally political. “I don’t think we ever really set out to make a point, we’re just trying to tell it like it is,” says Enfield.

“We’ve always done that with everything. I think Kevin was funny, but he didn’t really make a point, he was just saying, ‘Here’s what teenagers are really like’.”

Having said that, Whitehouse acknowledges that “all good comedy has either been challenging or daft”.

“I think with most of our characters, even if they’ve been horrible, we’ve tried to imbue them with a bit of warmth, perhaps with the exception of The Old Gits, but even they were like naughty schoolboys.

But we like to think we’ve got a degree of affection for our characters, no matter how horrible they are.”

Enfield is less specific. “I don’t know what a good sketch show is,”

he says. “We just make each other laugh, and we hope other people find us funny too.”

FROM the colour of the dress right down to the detail on the favours, most women have been planning their wedding day since they were old enough to know what it meant to hang a pillowcase over the back of their head and slowly march through the house.

But, with most weddings now costing an average of £20,000 and taking months of hard graft in the run-up to the big day, most couples would be forgiven for wishing a magic wand could be waved and the preparation done for them.

So, for the couples featured in the eight-part series Wedding House, it’s their lucky big day, as a team of wedding experts sets about creating their perfect tailor-made marriage ceremony in a stately mansion.

In this first episode, James and Sam are given their dream Alice in Wonderland-themed wedding, with the groom kitted out as the Mad Hatter and guests dressed as characters from the Lewis Carroll classic.