Paul Whitehouse

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.

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.

An Evening with Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse, review

What started out as embarrassing and puzzling show turned into a highly amusing special, says Christopher Howse.

Review: An Evening with Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse

After last year's brilliant Story Of The Twos to mark BBC Two's 50th birthday, Harry and Paul return to the channel to honour another great institution: themselves.

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.

BBC Two has apparently axed Nurse

The BBC has apparently axed Paul Whitehouse's Nurse television series after four episodes.

Liz's personal crisis comes to a head while Graham makes a breakthrough in this final episode. There's also a timely Top Gear rant from Billy the psychopathic agoraphobic ("If those presenters don't know how lucky they are, they need a slap"), and another gently libidinous rumination from Herbert, perhaps some long-lost cousin of Rowley Birkin QC. Paul Whitehouse plays eccentric eightysomethings so well that by the time he actually is one, there's a real risk he'll be mistaken for being in character.

Radio Times review

Paul Whitehouse and David Cummings's funny, moving and meaningful comedy about Esther Coles's community psychiatric nurse Liz allows some flashes of optimism in a most unexpected quarter this week: morbidly obese Graham appears to have found a girlfriend.

Of course everything remains trying for poor Liz in an episode that considers the scarcity of resources for the vital service she provides. We also meet a soldier with post-traumatic stress in scenes that are incredibly affecting - but also eerily plausible.

The techniques Liz uses are based on actual remedies and approaches that are being used right now.

BBC Two's newest comedy drama c]Nurse] is written by and stars Paul Whitehouse as a cavalcade of characters. Originally airing on Radio 4, the programme sees Esther Coles star as Liz; a community psychiatric nurse with a number of colourful patients. Whitehouse appears in almost every scene and in the first episode played a total of six characters. As with a lot of character-based comedy not every situation hit the mark especially one in which Simon Day played Whitehouse's former prison roommate. Whitehouse is now stranger to playing multiple characters having done so in everything from The Fast Show to those ubiquitous Aviva adverts. However I don't think his brand of humour quite fit the subject matter of Nurse[/] which at times felt quite dark. For a show that's billed as a comedy first and foremost I didn't laugh once but then again I didn't know if I was really supposed to. This was a problem for me as their was an imbalance of tone between Whitehouse's broad humour and the sensitive subjects that Liz had to deal with during her rounds. Whitehouse has perfectly mixed pathos and humour before, most notably in his underrated sitcom Happiness, however I don't think Nurse stands up against the comedian's former offerings. Thankfully there are some bright spots in Nurse most notably Esther Coles who is perfectly convincing as the harassed Nurse Liz. In my opinion I found the most successful scenes were the ones in which Liz was on her own talking to on her phone to her kids or her estranged husband. Similarly Liz's meeting with the brilliant Rosie Cavallero's Cat Lady was the first episode's most moving scene. This leads me to believe that Whitehouse's insistence on playing the majority of the characters is a hindrance to Nurse's overall success. Had he simply selected to play one role than I feel that I would've enjoyed Nurse a lot more than I actually did.