Paul Whitehouse

Paul Julian Whitehouse (born 17 May 1958) is a Welsh actor, comedian, presenter, and writer. He was one of the main stars of the BBC sketch comedy series The Fast Show and has starred with Harry Enfield in the shows Harry & Paul and Harry Enfield & Chums. He has appeared with Bob Mortimer in the BBC series Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing and has also acted in films including Corpse Bride (2005), Alice in Wonderland (2010) and The Death of Stalin (2017).

In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, he was in the top 50 comedy acts voted for by comedians and comedy insiders.^{[citation needed]}

Whitehouse was born on 17 May 1958, in Stanleytown, Glamorgan, Wales. His father, Harry, worked for the National Coal Board and his mother, Anita (née Jones), was a singer with the Welsh National Opera. The family moved to Enfield, Middlesex, when he was four years old, which led to his discovering his talent for mimicry:

At school I didn't say a word for the first four weeks – I called it my Silent Month. I think it was because everyone was speaking so differently from how it had been in Wales. Then, after four weeks, I came home one day and said, 'Muumm, I wanna go to Sarfend!' For her that was the end because I had lost my lovely Welsh lilt. So I became very conscious of speech and the effects it can have. But when I went back to Wales I would start talking all Welsh, 'like that, you see' before going all Alf Garnett while coming back the other way.

Whitehouse attended the University of East Anglia reading for a degree in Development Studies from autumn 1976, where he became friends with Charlie Higson. The pair spent little of their first year studying, instead playing guitar and performing with their punk rock combo, the Right Hand Lovers. Whitehouse dropped out and squatted in a council flat in Hackney, east London and occasionally worked as a plasterer. After Higson graduated in 1980, he moved in with Whitehouse, working by day as a decorator and performing at night and the weekends with his new punk-funk group the Higsons.

The pair began working as tradesmen on a house shared by comedians Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, which inspired them to start writing comedy. They moved to an estate where in a pub they met Harry Enfield, a neighbour with a stage act, and after he gained a place on Channel 4's Saturday Live, the pair were invited to write for him. Whitehouse created Enfield's character Stavros (a London-based Greek kebab shop owner), and then Loadsamoney (an archetypal Essex boy made good in Margaret Thatcher's 1980s); he also appeared as Enfield's sidekick Lance on Saturday Live. This success turned Whitehouse and Higson's career, and they began to appear on Vic Reeves Big Night Out and extensively for the BBC, with Whitehouse appearing on A Bit of Fry and Laurie as a man with a clinical need to have his bottom fondled, and Paul Merton: The Series, then on Harry Enfield's Television Programme, where he developed numerous characters including DJ Mike Smash of Smashie and Nicey, alongside Enfield as Dave Nice.

While watching a preview tape of highlights from Enfield's programme, Whitehouse and Higson were inspired to create a rapid-fire delivery comedy series which would evolve into The Fast Show (when shown in the United States on BBC America, the show was titled Brilliant). Whitehouse's characters included Rowley Birkin QC, Unlucky Alf, Arthur Atkinson, Ron Manager and Ted.

An online series of The Fast Show commissioned by Fosters led to six weekly episodes launched on 10 November 2011.