TV Review: An Evening with Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse, BBC2

Harry & Paul

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. 

Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse are certainly going through a good period at the moment, with a tour coming up that has generated a lot of heat. From the start of this one-off they were on good form, with Enfield playing the fogey as Whitehouse went to collect him to take him to the studio as if he was merely the driver. In fact Whitehouse was a genuine driving force back in the days of the quasi-double act, even when his name wasn’t in the titles of the BBC’s Harry Enfield & Chums. 

This special took the form of an An Audience With… send-up, with celebrities in the audience played by the duo asking the questions and teeing up classic and not so classic clips. Whitehouse’s uber-Welsh Rob Brydon was hardly a stretch, but Enfield’s dumb show Harry Hill was so good that I did wonder if Hill had slipped into the audience when the cameras were elsewhere.

Actually Enfield probably had the edge when it came to impressions. I did a double-take watching his dopey Prince Charles and adored his bonkers Ian Hislop, who didn’t say much but constantly looked outraged.

As the programme went on there were odd moments that maybe didn’t quite work, such as Enfield blacking up to play Lenny Henry (in hotel bed, natch) to ask if the duo would ever consider blacking up, which cued a clip of the duo blacked up on Dragon’s Den. A similarly ploy was used when Eddie Izzard – Enfield in lippy and frock – asked if they would ever wear dresses.

Gradually the tone of the programme darkened as the audience turned on them. Ricky Gervais (Enfield again) probed them about picking on the mentally ill, while the real Kathy Burke playfully pointed out that when she worked with Enfield they got audiences of 13 million, but without her on the BBC they got 2 million (Enfield probably got even less on his Sky series, but that was glossed over).

There were, however, a moment when the duo could not resist showing how prescient they were, with a clip of them as DJs Smashie and Nicey hanging out with young children in a hospital long before the Savile scandal broke (though I suspect they had heard the rumours at the time they filmed it, just like everybody else…). This section also featured one of the most obscure jokes I’ve ever seen on TV – Enfield playing long-forgotten political pundit Brian Walden to ask them if they thought their old characters might have dated.

By the end of the show the audience had turned on the duo and was lobbing dung at them. But of course Enfield and Whitehouse had the last laugh, curing Stephen Hawking so that he could walk – but leaving him with the same robotic voice. A odd show certainly – and a risky one too, as there was always a chance that their early characters would outshine their later ones. But I think they just about pulled it off. Which bodes well for their forthcoming tour.

Watch An Evening with Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse on iPlayer here.

 

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