Harry Enfield

Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse: Legends, review

'A welcome silliness in an age of sour disdain'.

Interview: Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield

Paul Whitehouse talks new characters, comedy idols and Harry Enfield.

Harry and Paul interview

Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse are hitting the road for a gruelling series of shows re-creating their most iconic characters and marking their 25-year TV partnership.

'We get bored very quickly': Harry & Paul hit the road

Their catchphrases have long since entered the national conversation. But only now are Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse hitting the road. The Legends! tour will revive many of their most popular characters, from Enfield's minted yobbo Loadsamoney to Whitehouse's clubbable old drunk Sir Rowley Birkin, via cheesy Seventies DJs Smashie and Nicey, and highly cultured wolf-whistlers the Posh Builders.

Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse interview

Why, after 25 years of TV collaboration, have they finally decided to tour together now?

Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse interview

Their catchphrases have long since entered the national conversation. But only now are Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse hitting the road. The Legends! tour will revive many of their most popular characters, from Enfield's minted yobbo Loadsamoney to Whitehouse's clubbable old drunk Sir Rowley Birkin, via cheesy Seventies DJs Smashie and Nicey, and highly cultured wolf-whistlers the Posh Builders.

An Evening with Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse review

Now this was an odd programme. There's having your cake and eating it and then there is this. A tribute hosted by the tributees that put the boot into the tributees at the same time, while finally concluding that they are almost godlike.

While BBC1 aired Lenny Henry's Danny And The Human Zoo, it can only be coincidence that simultaneously on BBC2 Harry Enfield was himself blacking up as a black-and-white minstrel and reaching for his best Brummie accent briefly to play Henry himself in An Evening with Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse.

This was a long-overdue satire on the celebrity audience, planted-question-filled "Evening With" format, even if it was also a vehicle for a 25-year retrospective, hosted by the men themselves.

Dressing up as Melvyn Bragg in order to offer intellectual justification for some of your more questionable comedic decisions, not least blacking up to play Nelson Mandela, doesn't actually make them any more intellectually justified, especially when, on the other channel, Lenny Henry's childhood is being dramatised as an exercise in positive discrimination. But the impressions were, of course, hilarious. Ian Hislop, if he saw it, might never have the courage to sneer again.

To celebrate 25 years of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse as a telly double act, they assemble a mock "audience with" show, featuring the pair impersonating celebrities from Ricky Gervais and a foul-mouthed Stephen Hawking to, for reasons unknown, Bill Gates. Questions from the "celebs" are then used to introduce clips of their work together. They may not want to be remembered by the number of gags that fall painfully flat over what is, at best, a very mixed hour.

Why can't the BBC do good comedy anymore? Recently we've had truly awful things such as Citizen Khan, Mrs Brown's Boys and, currently showing, the embarrassing Mountain Goats. The last time the BBC managed to provoke a laugh from me was with Murder In Successville on BBC3, a channel soon to be shoved online only.

And there were laughs in the one-off special of Burnistoun, but this was shown in Scotland only. When it comes to the BBC's mainstream, UK-wide comedy, where oh where is the good stuff?

Maybe they feel this terrible dearth of excellent comedy, as they're giving us a reunion show with Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse looking back - yes, looking back - to the good old days.

The programme puts Enfield and Whitehouse on stage together in front of an admiring crowd and parodies the An Audience With... shows, but the nice twist is that when we flash to shots of the audience we see Enfield and Whitehouse in the crowd, dressed up as various famous people, and asking cheeky questions. Jimmy Carr, Harry Hill, Ricky Gervais and Prince Charles are all gloriously ridiculed and in between we have great clips of the comedy pair's old shows.