Enfield and Whitehouse

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ENFIELD'S U2 SEND UP
By Nicola Methven, TV Editor 06/04/2007

COMEDIAN Harry Enfield and his old pal Paul Whitehouse are to poke fun at U2 stars Bono and The Edge in their all-new sketch show. The pair have reunited on BBC1 for the first time since Harry Enfield and Chums left the screen in 1994. In the controversial sketches Bono boasts he's discovered a cure for all ailments - including hayfever. The Irish rocker, an avid campaigner against Aids and poverty, raised eyebrows after mega-rich U2 moved one of their firms to Holland to avoid tax.

But Harry, 45, insisted: "It's all quite affectionate. It's as much about us as it is about the people we're doing. When we insult Bono and the Edge, we insult our whole generation." He added that old favourites like the Self-righteous brothers, famed for their cry of "Oi! No!", will be left out of the latest show. "It's all new, which is a bit risky," he said. Whitehouse, 48, added: "It's like going back in time - but with less hair."

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I saw a trailer for this last night and I reckon it will be pretty good. Enfield was playing a loud-mouthed american tourist in one sketch that looked like it might have legs over time...

[maycm]

Brilliant!

I love Harry and Paul. Hopefully they havn't gone stale over the years.

[luke]

wicked

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Well, I watched this tonight (BBC Scotland didn't show it on Friday) and I was pretty unimpressed. I did laugh a few times, but it felt pretty soulless in general.

[maycm]

I saw it too - can post if anyone wants to watch.

Several good digs at Chelski in there, and a few other chuckles,but not up to the standard we expect yet.

[6ULDV8]

I have seen 2 so far & I too am not impressed

I was expecting more from their combined talents.


Perhaps it's down to their age?

I do have a theory tho'...

Tristram Shapiro as director?

I worked with him at Hat Trick Productions & he was an OK person to deal with but had high expectations (of himself due to his dad etc)...
I have watched as he has climbed the ranks in Hat Trick & such, first working in the Elstree side of hat trick as the head of 'tickets & audiences... to floor managment, his stint with the beeb doing various jobs (on shows such as Vicar of Dib' etc) & a stint back at Hat trick.

To be blunt, as soon as I saw his name as director on this new show I pretty much knew why it sucked.

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Whitehouse and Charlie Higson: Making (radio) waves
When Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson followed 'The Fast Show' with a spoof on phone-ins, they created an uproar. And their plans don't stop there, they tell Ciar Byrne
01 October 2007

Paul Whitehouse is demonstrating how a Cockney approaches the world. He thrusts his hands in front of him in a pugilistic pose. Then, with a flourish, he puts his hands behind his back, adopts a la-di-da expression and acts out how the Royal family approaches the world – because doors are always being held open to them rather than slammed in their face.

The prompt for this little scene is Rhys Thomas, the actor who plays radio phone-in host Gary Bellamy in Down the Line, the Radio 4 comedy devised by Whitehouse and Charlie Higson. "There will never be a DJ on Radio 4 who sounds like me," complains Thomas, a former DJ himself who used to work on London indie music station Xfm, and who in real life is not a million miles away from his cheery, Teflon-man character, although his accent is not as pronounced as he seems to think. Whitehouse rolls his eyes. "Well, there is now," he tells him, before adding in a stage whisper: "He's terrible. Always bangin' on about his class."

I am chatting with Thomas, Whitehouse, Higson, their co-star from The Fast Show Simon Day, and actor Felix Dexter, about their new audiobook of the Sony award-winning Down the Line, which is released today. In fact, the interview is more like being let in on one of the sessions in which they record the improvised comedy, which spoofs radio phone-ins.

When Down the Line first aired, it fooled many members of the public and press, who thought it was for real and lost no time in contacting the BBC to make clear their disapproval. This was not the sort of programme they expected from Radio 4. Whitehouse says, "Because Radio 4 is funded by the licence payer, their brief means that they can't play too fast and loose with the format. So we were really pleased when they said they'd do it."

The truth soon dawned that it was in fact a clever parody of the intolerance and inanity inherent in such phone-ins, and a second series – which has since been broadcast – was soon commissioned.

Although they might have found a bigger audience for the comedy on another station, Whitehouse and Higson chose Radio 4 because of the publicity they knew it would get there. By recording it outside of the BBC, they hoped to bring something fresh to Radio 4 comedy. The creators are now planning to take the concept to television – the first time they will be reunited on screen since The Fast Show ended in 2000.

"We believe it was God," says Higson, when I ask how they came up with the idea in the first place. Whitehouse chips in: "I think evolution is as difficult a concept to comprehend and prove as creationism, not that I'm arguing for creationism." Higson again: "I bet evolution is a step in the right direction, but I don't think it's the full answer."

The conversation appears to have steered off course, but there is a point. Whitehouse insists that he came up with the idea all on his own and Higson contradicts him: "That's the God theory. The evolution theory is that we had similar ideas knocking around and they gelled." Whoever came up with the idea, it provided the perfect vehicle to test-drive some new characters. "It's a good way to try out some new characters in an unforced format, largely improvised, there's no financial restrictions – we thought that would be a great way to work together again and perhaps it could be the first step towards a larger project," says Higson.

The phone-in format was also liberating because it allowed the comics to explore topics that usually have to be tiptoed around. Whitehouse says: "Political correctness is not a requirement for those characters and so it certainly doesn't have to be in our case." In the first episode of the show, which deals with racism, Dexter plays a man with a plummy accent, whom Bellamy refuses to believe is black. The series has also tackled religion – one irate caller shouts at Bellamy, "You wouldn't say that if I was a Muslim" – and organised crime. One of the characters that will surely have an afterlife is a career criminal called Tony Beckton, played by Day.

I put it to them that Down the Line conveys a pretty poor view of British people – at least the sort that call in to radio shows. "You've got to make people grotesque – that's what's funny," Higson explains. Part of the joy of the radio phone-in for Day is observing the colloquialisms that people use. He mentions a dustman he knows who says "Sees ya later" as an example. "He was going to have a seizure later," interjects Whitehouse.

The team attempted to recreate the feel of a radio phone-in during recording sessions by putting Thomas in a room on his own with a telephone. He then received "calls" from a core team of actors as well as "a loose association of friends and ex-wives" on several different topics – ranging from the serious to the silly (in one episode, callers were asked to think up a name for a new colour). They recorded hours of material, which were then pruned back to half-hour long shows.

Radio gave them the freedom to develop characters such as a 25-stone man – which on television would have required a fat suit – as well as regulars, including a man who simply asks "Vot is point?" in every episode. Whitehouse explains: "Some callers to those shows are quite lonely people and to build up that relationship with regular callers is quite important." With the exception of one or two gags that were set up in advance, Thomas was not told what the callers were going to say.

For many people, Whitehouse and Higson will be forever remembered for The Fast Show. The sketch series, which ran from 1994 to 2000, injected new life into a tired genre, inventing a raft of brilliant characters with memorable catchphrases, including Swiss Toni, the car salesman played by Higson who compared everything to "making love to a beautiful woman", Rowley Birkin QC, an incomprehensible drunk old barrister, and Ken and Kenneth, the "Suit you, Sir" tailors.

Since it came off air, Higson and Whitehouse have pursued individual projects. Whitehouse worked with Chris Langham on BBC2's Help, in which he played a series of clients who visit a therapist. More recently, he has worked with Harry Enfield in BBC1's Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul. Higson, meanwhile, has become better known to a new generation for writing a series of books about the young James Bond.

Reunited by Down the Line, the pair are now ready to work together on more television projects. They want to take Bellamy onto television screens, but believe that a radio phone-in would be too static a vehicle. Instead, they plan to create a spoof of the genre of programmes that has recently sprung up in which a big name presenter travels around the country focusing on a different theme, from the landscape to architecture to art – such as Griff Rhys Jones's BBC1 show Mountain, Robbie Coltrane's B-Road Britain on ITV1 and David Dimbleby's How We Built Britain, on BBC1.

Higson explains, "One of the things we're thinking of is doing a parody of one of those types of shows where a TV journalist goes out around the country in a personality vehicle." He adds that it will be based on "Dimbleby in his Range Rover, Jamie Oliver in his Volkswagen, Billy Connolly on his three-wheeled bike. They're all the same."

Although they would like to retain the improvisational element of Down the Line, they admit that it is harder to do on television. Radio makes you "less nervous", says Whitehouse. "You can get at stuff more easily vocally," adds Dexter.

They are also planning to bring back The Fast Show for a one-off appearance to promote the release of a box set collection of DVDs of all the series later this year. "They don't have enough money to publicise them," says Higson, only half-joking. Fans of the comedy will be relieved to know that the familiar faces will remain unchanged. Whitehouse insists: "The thing about sketch characters is they never should develop."

The audiobook of 'Down the Line' is out today on BBC Audio, priced £15.99

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Harry and Paul: old masters at a ‘young man’s game’
With their sketch show back on BBC1 next week, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse tell James Rampton why silliness is the secret of their success.
28/08/2008
www.telegraph.co.uk

Two ancient, unsmiling Soviet leaders stand on the podium waving grimly at the passing military parade. They are very much relics of a Jurassic Age of politics, a pair of old timers out of touch with the modern world. This skit – the title sequence from a new series of the BBC1 sketch show Harry & Paul – is a neat joke at its stars’ expense.

Harry Enfield, 47, and Paul Whitehouse, 50, are one of TV’s most durable double acts. In person, the comedians, who have collaborated since meeting in a Hackney pub some 30 years ago, mercilessly take the rise out of each other, in the way that only close friends can. “My job in the partnership is to raise the mood,” says Whitehouse. “I tell him, ‘Come on, Harry, still being in telly is not the end of the world!”

They begin by explaining the self-referential joke in the title sequence. Enfield, who is quieter than his effervescent partner, says that, “The point of that is to show that we’re dinosaurs.” Whitehouse butts in, “We’re acknowledging that this is a young man’s game. The fact that we’re still on telly at all at our age is a bonus. When we appear on BBC1 on a Friday night, young people will ask, ‘Who are those two old men?’”

It’s a good line, but on the evidence of the first episode of Harry & Paul (perhaps wisely, they have dropped the prefix “Ruddy Hell!” since the last series), the comedy veterans still merit their place at the heart of BBC1’s Friday night schedule.

Like all sketch shows, the series opener contains the odd miss alongside the hits. But for all that, it is replete with the trademark qualities Enfield and Whitehouse have patented over the years: deftly observed, beautifully performed characters, who remain just the right side of outright caricature.

Watch in particular for the fast-talking, impossibly clever surgeons, the posh builders, a mischievous Nelson Mandela and a couple of new additions: Clarence and Henry, the elderly Radio 3 DJs who are obsessed with rap and have pimped their Toyota Yaris (“A listener has sent in a chocolate sponge cake in the shape of an Uzi – how thoughtful!”); and a multilingual Premiership football manager able to rant at his players in dozens of different languages.

These are unashamedly broad-brush characters designed for a mainstream audience. But, says Enfield, who during the 1990s collaborated with Whitehouse on several successful series of Harry Enfield’s Television Programme and Harry Enfield and Chums, they never intended to be trend-setters. “The danger of being in fashion is that one day you’ll be out of fashion. You’re cutting off your nose to spite your face if you try to be self-consciously cutting-edge.

“I’ve never felt cutting-edge. Maybe Loadsamoney was for a few months, but after that I’ve just done family stuff. What Paul and I do is not fashionable – it’s a load of silly characters mucking about.”

It is a boom time for comedy double acts – the Mighty Boosh, Mitchell and Webb and Armstrong and Miller are all attracting critical plaudits and substantial audiences. Do Enfield and Whitehouse ever feel threatened by the new kids on the block?

“I actually think the Mighty Boosh and Peep Show and Armstrong and Miller are all really good. That makes us sound down with the kids, doesn’t it?” says Whitehouse with a grin.

The duo are also big fans of Little Britain, whose popularity inspired the return of Enfield and Whitehouse last year. “For a while, with the success of shows like The Office and Nighty Night, all comedy seemed so cool,” Enfield recalls. “I had no desire to go back on telly because that was not what I did. Then Little Britain came along and it was big and totally uncool. I thought, ‘Hooray, it’s cool to be uncool. I might have a chance now.’”

He and Whitehouse grabbed that opportunity last year – and now they’re talking about further series. “We’ve got loads of stuff for a third series in the laptop,” says Enfield.

“We just hope we get an audience with this one,” Whitehouse deadpans. “But of course, on a worldwide scale, it’s not much of a problem. Compared with what’s happening in, say, Darfur or South Ossetia, finding an audience for your comedy show is not that significant.”

“Well, I don’t know,” says Enfield. “Think of the publicity the Russians have got for their invasion. I think we should invade the Mighty Boosh. We should get a tank and take them over. We would agree to leave, but then stay indefinitely.”

# Harry & Paul starts on BBC1 on Friday 5 September at 9.00pm

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Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield:
They aim to make people laugh
Bryan Appleyard

Geoffrey Perkins, British television’s greatest comedy producer, died at the age of 55 just a few days before the start of Harry & Paul, his latest series. Perkins understood Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse better than anybody. “He gave me my confidence,” Enfield says. “He was gentle, incredibly clever and very wise . . . But he was also strict. He always got to the centre of an idea. He knew how to cut out the flab and get to the punch line.”

Perkins represented, as do Enfield and Whitehouse, a comedy generation that bridged the gap between the edgy avant-garde — Pete and Dud, Monty Python and The Young Ones — and the comfortable, old-school theatrical — Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies. He also knew something that the rest of us take too much for granted: that there is some indefinable combination of class, manners, provinciality and surreal whimsy that makes Britain a uniquely funny place. Harry & Paul, which began on Friday on BBC1, is a suitable monument. “We’re going,” says Enfield, “to put it to bed as he would have liked it.”

The new series is a fast sketch show filmed entirely on location. Its predecessor, Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry & Paul, had studio inserts, but both men decided that this was holding them back.

“You can put on a slightly more disciplined performance,” says Whitehouse, “when you are not worrying about the studio audience. You get conscious of them, and that’s not the best way for us now we are old and nervous.” “I get more nervous,” says Enfield, “and shout too much when the director says, ‘Do the whole thing again’, and you ask why, but there’s only this voice in your ear.” “Poor old audience,” says Whitehouse.

He was 50 in May and, in the same month, Enfield was 47. Enfield is comfortably rounded, Whitehouse uncomfortably gaunt. They look, as they should, like two funny and friendly middle-aged blokes — a solicitor and a bookie — you might meet in any pub. Whitehouse reckons he’d still be a jobbing plasterer, knocking back pints in the Brunswick on Morning Lane, in Hackney, if Enfield hadn’t led him into comedy.

“Yeah, that same old pub.”
“It’s been knocked down,” says Enfield.
“No! The Brunswick’s been knocked down?”
“I told you. I called you from there.”
“Nice job, plastering,” I offer by way of consolation.
“I still do the odd bit of plastering, if you want to come and mix up for me,” says Whitehouse. “It’s very satisfying.”

Neither has ever had consistent success, so, unlike, say, John Cleese or Peter Sellers, they have never been able to sit back and rest on their comedy-grandee laurels. They are not big film stars — they should be, they are both comedy actors of the first rank — and, perhaps because of too much channel and comedy competition, they don’t have a nation-building slot like the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special. Rather, they live from show to show, and are all the better for it. Harry & Paul has plainly been honed and loved into existence.

It is, of course, a sketch show, a very British form that is currently in rude health. Will you, I ask Whitehouse, now be doing sketch shows for ever? He looks bereft.

“Oh, for ever! Please can I die?”
Sudden life-changing offers aside, the real answer is yes.
“I prefer the sketch show myself to sitcom. I enjoy that sort of cornucopia of ideas.”
“We have a low attention span,” says Enfield.
“Yeah, we don’t want some plodding old sitcom story.”

Sketches, of course, mean they can both do what they do best: create a bewildering variety of characters. Their gifts in this area are unmatched — Johnny Depp once called Whitehouse “the finest actor of all time” on the basis of his limitless character-creating abilities. The new show has new cast members: a brilliantly multilingual football manager, the Dragons’ Den bastards, the writer and the landlady, as well as the continuation of the girls of the superbly observed Polish cafe, the posh scaffolders, Nelson Mandela and so on. The setups, however, still linger on the eternal themes of class, youth and age, and simple silliness. So, Enfield is humiliated for being old in the Polish cafe, the scaffolders discuss Brit Art while breaking off to grab their crotches at the sight of a passing girl, and Mandela steals the iPhone of a wheelchair-bound Fidel Castro before pushing him off a cliff — absurd and liberating.

Part of the trick is the shock of simple brutality lying comically beneath the surface. It’s always funny. So, Whitehouse turns to me as Enfield leaves the room. “What a c***,” he says, with perfect timing, Enfield’s foot barely having crossed the threshold. Sparkling water emerges from my nose. It’s the immediacy of the savage subversion, the absolutism of the implied statement that people usually don’t mean what they say.

Neither of them, however, wants to be pigeonholed. They both get uncomfortable when I attempt to pin down themes. “I don’t really like political satire,” Whitehouse says as soon as I use the word “satire”. But what about Loadsamoney, the very emblem of what was perceived as the callous greed of the Thatcher years? “We didn’t do it as satire,” says Enfield. “It’s just that everything was very right-on at the time, and we wanted to do the opposite.” He remembers fondly coming on as Loadsamoney at a benefit show for striking nurses and shouting: “Get back to work, you scum!” They applauded. “That’s fun to do,” says Whitehouse, “when comedy subverts what you are supposed to be doing and the audience goes along with it.”

Slightly more embarrassing, there’s the matter of Stavros, Enfield’s opaquely accented kebab chef. “My son’s got a teacher called Stavros, a maths teacher, about 38 years old. He’s very polite and nice to me, but I can see behind his eyes he’s saying, ‘You ruined my childhood!’ I’ve never brought it up — it’s just too embarrassing.”

Basically, they insist, it’s all about the process of being funny with whatever material is available. This is a process, as they both readily admit, with a history and a tradition. That tradition has always seemed to be split between the avant-garde and the theatrical, a split embodied in their differing personalities. Whitehouse veers towards the avant-garde, mentioning The Young Ones and Monty Python as influences, while Enfield leans towards the theatrical, becoming positively lyrical on the subject of The Two Ronnies.

“The Young Ones went for the old stuff, too, they went towards Tommy Cooper,” he says, “but The Two Ronnies were much more surreal than you think. I remember a fantastic sketch with just people walking along the street as if they were driving — overtaking and being fantastically rude. It was brilliant.”

The pair are also in awe of the American tradition of character-led comedy drama. Above all, there is The Simpsons. “I think it’s just genius. There’s always a truth to every episode,” says Enfield. “Homer is so like every man — pumped up but vulnerable — and Marge is just so loyal.” “It’s unsentimental,” says Whitehouse, “unlike a lot of acted sitcoms, and they can do an incredible range of material.”

So, do they yearn for the American system of enormous investment in shows, with vast teams of writers? “I’d love it,” says Enfield, “I’d love to do any sitcom that had heart and meaning . . . I’d love to do something like that, but I can’t see it happening. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

At the heart of this, I think, is that they both feel they remain outsiders, comedy dilettantes just struggling to be funny in any way they can. Whitehouse, for example, is insistent that The Fast Show, in which he starred with Charlie Higson, was never intended to be the avant-garde spectacular identified by critics and fans.

“It didn’t seem that unconventional or new to us,” he says. “I never felt it was spectacularly ground-breaking, not like Monty Python, Pete and Dud or The Young Ones. And Harry Enfield and Chums had more in common with Dick Emery than with any out-there, cutting-edge comedy.”

Perhaps the pair’s most original contribution to the tradition is the simple quality of joy in character. How do they decide which ones work? They don’t really know.

“Well,” says Whitehouse, “some things you can’t do any more. Monty Python used to take a pop at accountants, but you wouldn’t dream of doing those kind of people now. And there was that whole thing about laughing at the British Establishment — we haven’t got that. We do things like our Harley Street surgeons just because we like them. We thought there was no way the young people would get that, but they do.”

There is, beyond the comedy, a reflective but amiable melancholy about these two. This is before the death of Perkins, so perhaps it is simply the fact of ageing. Perhaps more than Enfield, Whitehouse feels the pressure of being the middle-aged clown.

“Well, you know the thing we do — it’s very childlike comedy. It’s a healthy thing when you’re young or old, but in middle age it’s slightly embarrassing. If you see somebody riding a Harley-Davidson at 80, you go, ‘Woah, yeah!’ But riding one at 50? — ‘Oh, come on!’ ”

That said, they seem more than content to continue what they started at the Brunswick, in Hackney, all those years ago. “Paul makes me laugh more than anyone else when he goes off into a character, and he always did, even when I was working in television and doing other things with other writers,” says Enfield. “It just wasn’t as funny. Everybody has a mate who makes them laugh more than anybody on television, and Paul is mine.”

It’s not about growing old, sex or class, it’s not about being avant-garde, hip or smart, it’s not about the spirit or politics of the age. It’s about making people laugh. And that, as every great comedian from Hamlet’s Yorick down to Tommy Cooper and Harry and Paul has known, is only ever about one thing: the defiance of death. And that, this week, is also about putting the show to bed as Geoffrey Perkins would have liked it.

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Harry Enfield sparks diplomatic storm
By Simon Kirby
07.10.08

Comedians Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse have sparked a diplomatic row. The Philippine government is furious about a sketch on their BBC1 show Harry And Paul last week in which a Filipino maid was ordered to have sex with a neighbour.

Its embassy in London wrote to the BBC, the Government and the Press Complaints Commission protesting against “this slur on our domestic workers”. In Manila, the Philippine foreign secretary summoned the British ambassador to discuss the matter while women's rights activists denounced the sketch as “revolting and racist”.

The British Embassy in Manila said the BBC had editorial independence and its views were “completely independent” from the Government. It added that Filipinos in Britain “make invaluable contributions to our scientific and service sectors, and enrich UK culture”.

A BBC spokeswoman said she was unable to comment as the letter had not yet been received.

Watch the video HERE

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I left a comment on that video saying that the whole joke was in laughing at the terrible attitude of the rich twat, not the maid, but it seems I was pissing in the wind!

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Joke thieves
Crooks steal Enfield's laptop

Thieves have stolen Harry Enfield's laptop, containing gags for his next BBC series, and demanded a ransom for its return. But the 48-year-old comic refused to pay the £750 they asked for, and instead alerted police – who are now trying to trace the criminals.

Enfield is said to be 'deeply upset’ after thieves broke into his wife Lucy’s Mini Clubman parked outside their £6million West London home. A few days later they called to make their demand. The Mail on Sunday reports that Enfield had made no copies of the gags, and say TV chiefs 'fear the thieves could sell Mr Enfield’s comedy ideas to rival comics or production companies'. The laptop is also believed to contain a list of celebrity phone numbers.

Enfield is working on a third series of his sketch show with Paul Whitehouse, Harry & Paul, which has been moved from BBC One to BBC Two. But production company Tiger Aspect played down the importance of the material, saying: ‘We’re still some way out from filming. The computer contained some rough ideas for the show which had not reached script form. This doesn’t endanger the next series.’

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£750 for a pile of Harry Enfield jokes? They probably thought he'd jump at that... haha

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Harry Enfield: 'I don't like doing me'
His characters were once the talk of every office and school yard. Then Harry Enfield disappeared. He didn't want to do quiz shows, his writing stalled. Now he's back doing what he does best: other people
Simon Hattenstone
The Guardian,
25 September 2010

Where did Harry Enfield go? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was omnipresent. Forget his fellow Saturday Night Live stars Ben Elton, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, it was Enfield who defined the era. His character Loadsamoney became the signature tune, or supreme critique, of Thatcherism – depending on your perspective. Kelvin MacKenzie and the Sun adored the flashy plasterer, meant by Enfield as a parody – while Margaret Thatcher used the catchphrase to counter accusations she had created a greed-is-good culture, saying, "We are not a loadsamoney economy." So many of Enfield's creations became household names – the parody DJs Smashie and Nicey, acne-ridden lisper Tory Boy (part based on a young William Hague), upper class twit Tim Nice-But-Dim, the Scousers, Stavros the Greek kebab shop owner, and teenage losers Kevin and Perry (who went on to become film stars in their own right). And then Enfield disappeared.

As Laurie became an unlikely Hollywood hero and Fry and Elton branched out to become one-man industries, Enfield was invisible for most of the noughties. Then, in 2007, he returned with his old friend Paul Whitehouse in a sketch show with new characters – balder, greyer and thinner than we remembered him. Now at 49, Enfield is back with a third series of Harry and Paul. Typically for Enfield, it has not been without its problems.

We meet at the office of another of Enfield's old friends, the writer and film-maker Richard Curtis. The office, in London's Notting Hill, is flush with the trappings of Curtis's success. The walls are lined with framed photographs of the gorgeous and the famous, from Kate Moss and Gwyneth Paltrow, to Bono and Hugh Grant. Look close enough and you'll even spot a picture of Enfield surfing in the sun, back in the day.

So what happened – did he walk out on fame, or did fame walk out on him? A bit of both, he says. It was the new millennium, and he wanted a change. He was knackered, didn't feel funny any more, and had a young family to take up his time. "I was happy just being at home looking after the kids. There was always plenty to do, and I didn't feel like doing any telly."

Was he getting lots of offers at the time? "No." He smiles. "No." Perhaps more than anyone, it was Ricky Gervais who did for him. "It was the time The Office had come out and it was so good, so accurate and I just thought, it makes me look unbearably uncool going round doing stupid characters. And a lot of people started aping The Office, doing things with no jokes. And I couldn't really think of a no-jokes sitcom so I just thought, well, I'm washed up." He says it all with such equanimity. Enfield's got a pleasant, malleable face, and he's lugubrious in the cheeriest of ways.

He did try to reinvent himself as a screenwriter, but that didn't work out either. He wrote two romcoms, neither of which have been made. As we're talking, I'm staring at a photo of Richard Curtis. Why didn't you get him to help, I say. "Well, he makes successful films." Couldn't he have made yours successful? "It's not the way it works, is it. The problem is, I'm not well known enough. I wanted to direct it, but I couldn't really get a cast. You need Hugh Grant if it's English. I sent one of the scripts to Hugh, who I know vaguely, and he played me for about two years. He would not say no. He said he liked it, 'But I don't want to act.' That's what he always says. Then I gave up on it." So you dumped him? "No! I haven't dumped him. If he phoned up tomorrow..."

Actually, Enfield says, it wasn't simply that he didn't want to do comedy; when he did it, it wasn't good enough. In 2000, just as he was completing the Kevin and Perry film, he made a series for Sky. It was called Harry Enfield's Brand Spanking New Show, and that's what the critics gave it. A spanking. Deservedly so, says Enfield. "I didn't think anybody would see it because it was on Sky. I've seen a bit of it recently, and it's got some really good characters in it, but they're all over the top, because I didn't have time to learn it. So I'm panicking trying to learn the words. I'm loud and shouty, and it's just painful."

Did he allow it to go out like that because it was for Sky? "Yeah. Yeah, definitely." And if it had been for the BBC? "I wouldn't have accepted the series. At the time I was just interested in editing Kevin and Perry, so I was not there in my head."

Enfield's diffidence can be surprising. As a young man, studying politics at York university, people thought he was an arrogant git, "because I always wore a suit and never smiled". And he was, he says. He'd come from a fairly posh background – his family was sufficiently lofty for Virginia Woolf to refer dismissively to his grandparents in her memoirs ("I would rather be dead in a field than have tea with the Enfields"). His grandmother was a leading communist, his father, Edward, a Labour voter and assistant director of education for West Sussex (before piggybacking on his son's success to become a well known broadcaster in his own right) while Enfield has always been a bit of a political maverick – liberal with a smattering of Catholic conservatism (though he's pretty much had it with God), and libertarianism (he loves a good hunt).

After Labour came to power, he was one of the famous faces Tony Blair invited to Downing Street to celebrate the new dawn, and he had a set-to with Peter Mandelson. "There had been a poll in a paper, and he'd come out as the least popular member of the government. I just said, 'Well, you're credited with getting Labour in by making them more popular, so by your own logic you should fall on your own sword.' And he just looked at me and said 'Why don't you go and tell the prime minister that?' So I did."

Enfield recently bumped into Mandelson. "He said 'I remember you, you came up to me at a party and said, 'You are the most loathsome creature that has ever crawled upon the earth, I despise every fibre of your body.' I said, 'I never said anything like that.' It's brilliant isn't it? It's clearly what he thinks of himself."

Enfield is hard to pigeon hole – so often self-effacing, sometimes brilliantly assertive. Maybe this is why he appealed to such a wide range of people in his heyday. While Ben Elton and the alternative comics were largely for the students, Enfield also carried along the working class and the older generations who had been brought up on Dick Emery and Stanley Baxter.

He established himself gradually on the comedy circuit – gigging at Edinburgh, doing voices on Spitting Image (Jimmy Greaves, David Steel), creating his characters on Saturday Night Live, and then his own BBC show.

When he started out he was so calculated, he says. "I thought, I want the biggest audience possible so I need to get catchphrases, because kids control the telly – that's when we all only had one telly. And then I thought, once I've got the kids, I'll put something in for the older people – we'll do the DJs, that's probably a bit more highbrow." It worked a treat.

But even in the early days he had an uneasy relationship with fame. He would tell himself that it wasn't him being stopped in the street, it was his characters. While many of his contemporaries milked the TV quiz show circuit to boost their profiles, on the rare occasions Enfield appeared as himself he didn't enjoy it. "I don't like doing me. I make a product. It could be Maltesers or Rolos, but it happens to be comedy – and you don't know who makes your Maltesers do you?"

Oh come on, everyone knew you in your heyday. "Probably at the time," he concedes reluctantly. "Then, of course, you have to do loads of interviews. It's like what happened to Lily [Allen] when she got famous..." For three years Enfield lived with Allen's mother, Alison Owen, and became "common-law step dad" to her children. "Suddenly Lily's bloody everywhere and she's doing every bloody interview, because you're told to. You're young and you do it. It's only later you get a bit savvy."

So did he advise Lily to keep her counsel? "Yeah." Does he find it strange that he is asked more about Lily than he is about the three children he has with his wife Lucy? "No, it's good. I don't want my kids talked about. It's one of the reasons I thought that if I could just make a go of being a writer, that would be good, because I don't really want my kids growing up with me famous."

In his mid-30s, while still a TV regular, he got depressed. He was doing well enough, but felt creatively blocked. "I found it quite hard coming up with stuff, didn't know what else I wanted to do, and didn't seem to be moving forward." He smiles. "Then I resigned myself to never moving forward." The trouble is, he says, he gets bored with his creations. He likes to kill them off quickly. Even Loadsamoney, who seemed to be around forever, only appeared 10 times on Saturday Night Live.

Was he aware of his old friends diversifying and achieving more? "Yeah!" he says generously. "Look at how successful Richard [Curtis] and Hugh [Laurie] have become. They're amazing." Perhaps he didn't have the hunger of, say, Elton, who has always seemed phenomenally ambitious. "As are Hugh and Richard actually."

Did he ever think he could knock out a novel or two? "No, I can't write a novel. I don't have a story. I can't write a sitcom." He was convinced he was done for, until Little Britain and Catherine Tate came along and revitalised the sketch show format. "Little Britain happened and it was so deliciously uncool." In what way? "It was just like panto – just characters with silly catchphrases, going back to the old days and dressing up as women, puke and all that stuff."

By now, he felt he had regained his sense of humour, and approached the BBC. "So I said to Peter Fincham, who was then at the BBC, I'd like to do a show, and he said 'Well I think you're a bit too old and washed up.'"

Didn't that make him feel crap? "No, I completely understood where he was coming from. You've got no profile, you haven't been around for years, should you be doing it at your age?" He pleaded for a chance, went away and devised new material with the help of Whitehouse. They then returned to the BBC for an audition. "Peter said he would do it, but it wasn't going to be my show because Paul had a better profile now, so it had to be a joint show."

This time round it's different, he says. Sod the mass ratings, they're doing it for themselves. There's a nostalgic feel to the show – with lots of references to Cassius Clay and On The Buses. One sketch features the Beatles, with white hair and walking sticks. "We're just doing stuff for people who don't watch much comedy, but might like us." People who used to watch comedy? "Yeah, when they were younger. There's a whole generation of us who secretly think, wouldn't it be nice if the Beatles had not taken any drugs and were still loveable people in a Dick Lester film."

Despite his enthusiasm, Enfield will never be his own best publicist. He admits he is already bored with some of the characters. "I get bored far more quickly than Paul does. Once Paul does it he loves it and wants to do more, and I just think I've done it. I didn't want to do any of the old stuff in this series, and he was going, 'No, you've got to do that character it's popular.'"

Then there is the matter of ratings. They weren't great for the first two series. "The new head of BBC1, Jay Hunt, got us in and said, 'I think it's the best show you've ever done, fantastic, but we're reviewing having sketch shows on BBC1.' So I said, 'Are we going to be fired?' And she said 'No no no no.' Then BBC2 said, we think you should come to us … I think they're probably right."

"The way I see it is this," he says, with a new-found positivity, "we were on BBC1 and now we're on BBC2, so we've been promoted from the premiership to the championship."

Harry and Paul starts on 27 September, BBC2, 9.30pm