Paul Whitehouse

Audio Interview: Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse

Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse tell Richard Bacon that they are thinking of going on tour.

Strawberry Enfields forever

Comedy legends Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse sing I Wanna Old Your Hand - as they play an ageing Beatles band in a sketch.

This inconsistent sketch series milks its now-familiar characters for laughs in tonight's final episode. Although jokes have been too few in the series, its strength has lain in some nicely observed characters, particularly Paul Whitehouse's ageing showbiz hanger-on, Ian Craig-Oldman.

This strange sketch show - featuring ex-Fast Show actors Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson and Simon Day being "interviewed" in a variety of different personas - continues. There is rather a lot of forgettable material with one or two edgily funny gems, such as a vociferous argument between a nationalistic British plasterer called Martin Hole (Whitehouse) and an African traffic warden (Felix Dexter) who wants him to move his van.

Bellamy's people aren't on fabulous form tonight. There are still lovely moments, many of them revolving around forgetful pensioner Humphrey Milner (Charlie Higson), but most of the sketches never quite achieve lift-off. When, for instance, Gary gets out of his depth with lairy good-time girl Tulsa Kensgrove and her gang of mates out clubbing in Watford, you keep waiting for the flash of satire to break through the squealing, but it never does. It's well performed, but shows like BBC3's Pulling have made women's drunken banter funnier. Paul Whitehouse is still on good form: his "sixties bad boy" Ian Craig Oldman tells a story of youthful debauchery that sounds like a racier, younger Rowley Birkin QC from The Fast Show. Then his patriotic plasterer Martin Hole gets into an argument with a parking warden (Felix Dexter) and the show breaks off in a whole new direction.

Not the best of the satirical run but bound to raise a wry smile or two. This week, we find Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) hitting the road to investigate what has happened to the United Kingdom's reputation for good manners.

Interviews with the usual Little Britain-ish characters culminate in a toe-curling ­showdown between Paul Whitehouse's England-shorts wearing painter and decorator Martin Hole - and an aggrieved traffic warden.

In the second episode of Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson's comedy, the fictitious Radio 4 talk-show host, Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) has left the studio to meet some of his listeners, ostensibly to find out what it means to be British. In reality it's just a good excuse to showcase a terrific stream of comic performances, each of which is brilliantly observed. Tonight, there's a hotel-management student who reveres the land of Shakespeare and Jimmy Savile, a posh architect from the Cotswolds who happens to be black, a brigadier and colonel representing the face of the modern British Army ("We're primarily concerned with building bridges") and, best of all, a poet and national treasure from Yorkshire who seems remarkably familiar.

The Fast Show is back. Only they've tweaked the format, introduced a spurious linking theme and changed the title to Bellamy's People. But otherwise, it's Charlie Higson, Paul Whitehouse and their repertory company, frequently unrecognisable beneath mountains of prosthetic make-up, parading a quick-fire array of quirky, comic creations.

Based on Radio 4's spoof, Down the Line, the show has late-night phone-in host Gary Bellamy abandon his cosy studio for the open roads of Great Britain and, as the credits are at great pains to point out, Northern Ireland, to meet the people.

These include reformed bank robbers, self-appointed community leaders, opinionated plasterers, hysterical female fans and two elderly sisters, divided by their extreme political views, who converse in a gibberish language of their own making.

Bellamy's People isn't startlingly original and is gently amusing rather than thigh- slappingly funny, but it is still worth watching for the beautifully observed performances and the occasional flash of genius in the script. My favourite line came from Higson's elderly country gentleman, proudly showing off his computer. "If we don't keep up with the times," he muses, "we might as well just lie down in the road and be run over by the next pantechnicon."

In taking this show from what started out as a radio parody show and putting it on TV, the essential element of humour seems to have been exsanguinated from it.

That's not to say that some of the actors didn't put in good performances, they did - notably an understated Rhys Thomas as Bellamy - but the show seems to have been too liberally daubed with tar from the same brush as Little Britain, and I have to say, that show didn't appeal to me either.

It's not that I'm lacking in the ability to be amused by the quirky, but when done often enough, quirky becomes clichéd. And I felt that most of the characters in Bellamy's People - though some were original in concept - became an embodiment of all that I suspect the writers, Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, were trying to avoid.

The show seemed to want to seek out eccentricity and capitalise on it, and fair enough, if it had been a little less eccentric, might well have worked, but some were simply too 'eccentric' to be remotely believable. Take for example the sisters living together; one a fan of a Nazi regime, one a communist and n'er the twain shall meet without forced dialogue it would seem.

That said though, I did find the sweetly drippy Mr Khan character was fun; his call to get more Muslim shows on TV, such as Strictly No Dancing was amusing.

But to every silver lining there's a cloud and white van man was way too overdone, but arguably one of the more realistic characters. We've all met the type of course, but again, white van man has been done to death.

Overall, I guess there's a possibility that as it goes on, Bellamy's People might grow wings and fly, but though it's not a total dodo, it might well be on the verge of extinction unless it manages to attract that most sought after of comedy prefixes, 'cult'. If it does, it might live, but otherwise, I think this one could well be destined for a retrograde step back into its original habitat, and perhaps it should never have been taken from there in the first place.