Harry Enfield often tells people he’s retired, even though he hasn’t. “It feels better than saying ‘I’m not working’,” smiles the comedy legend. “I’m not ambitious, that’s the problem. I was when I was young. I look at people like Steve Coogan, who I knew back when we were both starting out, and he’s still doing all these brilliant films and TV shows. Whereas I’ve got a bit lazy, I suppose.”
Well, that’s okay, Weekend reassures the 64-year-old. Maybe he’s happier than Steve Coogan? “I doubt it,” he says. “But who knows?”
Anyway, now he’s officially “unretiring” for his first ever solo tour, Harry Enfield and No Chums!, giving audiences a chance to catch up with some of the most iconic comedy characters of the past half-century. Characters like Loadsamoney, the Thatcherite poster boy who’s now running ‘wealthiness retreats’, teaching rich people how to get ‘zenned up about all their lovely money’, and Dave Nice, the poptastic former Fab FM DJ who, inevitably, now has a podcast.
“It’s sort of the story of my life, peppered with characters,” explains Enfield, from his house in Cornwall. “I’ll do as many as I can. Loadsamoney, for example, feels more relevant today than ever, because the world’s full of billionaires. But I might not be able to do [truculent teenager] Kevin. I’m probably a bit too old for that.”
There will also be an audience Q&A, in which Enfield will reflect on “40 years of arsing about” in showbusiness. It’s a career he drifted into in his early 20s, while squatting in a flat in Hackney with future collaborators Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, and achieved vertical lift-off with Channel 4’s alternative comedy showcase Saturday Live, which introduced the nation to the likes of Loadsamoney and Stavros, a Greek kebab shop owner with a charmingly shaky grasp of English.
Loadsamoney began as a wheeler-dealer who’d melt anything down for scrap – “Paul’s got a great ear for characters, and he never shuts up about anything, so everywhere we went, he’d be going, ‘You see that railways track? You could probably get a couple of bob for that’” – before Enfield developed the character into a more general parody of the 80s nouveau riche. “We’d go to the pub in Hackney – years before Hackney became trendy – and all these guys would be in there with highlights in their hair, and snow-washed jeans, and they’d put a wad of money on the counter on call us student hippie squatter wankers,” he recalls. “They were all builders and things like that – proper working men.”
Enfield, by contrast, came from old money, growing up in Billinghurst, West Sussex, the eldest of four children in a well-to-do family. (His grandparents had been well connected enough to annoy Virginia Woolf, who wrote in her diaries that she’d “rather be dead in a field than have tea with the Enfields”).
He parlayed Loadsamoney’s success into a top five single, while Margaret Thatcher herself went on the defensive to insist Britain was “not a loadsamoney economy”. But he quickly grew bored of his creation, and when Harry Enfield’s Television Programme (later Harry Enfield and Chums) launched on the BBC in 1990, it introduced a new menagerie of comic grotesques, including Smashie and Nicey (with Whitehouse) Tim Nice-but-Dim, The Scousers and Kevin and Perry (with Kathy Burke).
While many of his ‘alternative comedy’ contemporaries had actively kicked against the old showbiz guard, Enfield’s character comedy arguably owed a bigger debt to the likes of Dick Emery and Stanley Baxter than it did The Comedy Store. “What I always wanted was to be popular,” he admits. “Back then, there was only one telly in most houses, and that was controlled by the teenagers. So I thought, ‘if we put something in there for everyone, then the whole family will watch’.”
It’s the reason, he says, why he leaned so heavily on catchphrases, like the know-it-all father constantly insisting, ‘you don’t want to do it like that!’ or Smashie and Nicey doing a lot for ‘charidee’. Though he lived to regret it, when those catchphrases were being repeated back at him in the street, dozens of times a day. “There was only one time I ever went, ‘you don’t want to be the 50th person who’s said that to me today,’” he recalls. “And I really regretted that, just seeing how crushed this person was.”
Some of those catchphrases have endured to this day, as anyone from Merseyside who’s been told to “calm down, calm down” in a mock Liverpudlian accent will attest. “Someone took his boss to court for saying that to him, saying it was racist,” smiles Enfield. “I think it got thrown out, but I found it quite funny.
“I guess my thing has always been ‘mischief not malice’,” he reflects. “A lot of people get cross and say to me, ‘you couldn’t do that these days’, and I always think, ‘well we could’. Because we were never malicious. It wasn’t dark, like Little Britain. Although I love Little Britain. I was a bit pissed off when [Matt Lucas and David Walliams] apologised for their stuff recently. Because they were just two people – one of whom is Jewish – representing all these different people from the melting pot that is Britain. I felt pretty strongly that they should be allowed to do that. There’s this new apartheid where you can’t do this unless you are that colour or that religion, which feels to me like a backward step,” he sighs. “But that’s my age.”
Playing Nelson Mandela as a drug dealer – complete with blackface – is something he probably wouldn’t do today, he says. But nor does he regret it. “That came from an interview I read with David Harewood, where he said he’d had to go to America to play real human beings, because the only roles for black actors in Britain were drug dealers and bank robbers. So the joke was, ‘what if we took the only politician in the world everybody loves and put him on the BBC – he’d have to be a drug dealer’. But I suppose these days it would be too much hard work [to explain the joke].”
“I think I was depressed. I wasn’t clinically depressed, but I had the middle-age sag”
Enfield began the new millennium taking his teenage terrors onto the big screen in Kevin & Perry Go Large. But he was already feeling disillusioned with life on the comedy treadmill. “I’d enjoyed the fact the film had been a success, but I hadn’t enjoyed the process of making it,” he says. “It was hard work. By the time we made it, The Office had come out, and it just felt like things were changing. Plus my kids were small. [He has three children with his wife Lucy Lyster, from whom he is separated, and also remains close to his former stepchildren Lily and Alfie Allen, whose mother, Alison Owen, he was in a relationship with in the early 90s]. So it seemed a good time to step back.
“When I’d started out, people in the alternative comedy scene were pretty horrible about the likes of Jimmy Tarbuck and Dick Emery, and I didn’t want to be one of those people who became the butt of the joke.”
He did agree to make a series for Sky TV (Harry Enfield’s Brand Spanking New Show), but he knew he didn’t have enough material, or the time to properly develop it. “I was editing the Kevin & Perry film, we’d just bought this bloody great house and I needed to pay the mortgage. I didn’t know what I was doing, and just shouted my way through the whole thing. It was painful to watch, but I naively thought, because it was on Sky, no-one would watch it. And then they kept repeating it for the next 10 years. Serves me right.”
Afterwards, he felt he was all out of ideas. Would it be too strong to say he was depressed? “No, I think I was depressed,” he says. “I wasn’t clinically depressed. But I had the middle-age sag.”
By 2007, he’d recovered his mojo enough to pitch a new sketch show to the BBC – only to be told he was over-the-hill. “[BBC One controller] Peter Fincham said, ‘it’s unbecoming for a man of your age’, and that sort of made me get the bit between my teeth,” he admits.
Didn’t they eventually say they’d only commission a series if Whitehouse – now with the success of The Fast Showbehind him – did it as well? “Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that,” laughs Enfield. “They thought Paul was the more marketable of the two. And quite right too – look at him now. Mortimer and Enfield: Gone Fishing doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?”
Enfield has described Whitehouse’s TV fishing buddy, Bob Mortimer, as Paul’s “new boyfriend’. Maybe he should team up with Mortimer’s comedy ex, Vic Reeves? “Yeah, I could,” he nods. “We could be really horrible about the other two.”
This is a joke, of course: he and Whitehouse remain great friends, whose Bafta-winning 2007-2012 reunion show Harry & Paul arguably stands as their finest work. Could they be tempted back for another series? And would the new generation of BBC execs even want them? “These days? I don’t know,” shrugs Enfield. “I mean, no-one’s come running to my door. And as I say, I haven’t really got much ambition to do it. But maybe if Paul said, ‘come on, let’s do it’. I usually need someone else to spur me on. I do sometimes think about writing a sitcom like ‘Til Death Us Do Part – one of those shows that was a really important conversation at the time. But even then, I end up thinking, ‘well Paul would be better at it than me’.”
Might Paul’s casting in HBO’s new Harry Potter series – scheduled to be in production for the next decade – put a spanner in the works of future collaborations? “Oh yeah, he’s been cancelled, hasn’t he?” Enfield chuckles, mischievously. “I won’t speak to him anymore. I’m morally superior to him, for not getting a part in Harry Potter. But no, hats off to him. Apparently it’s only a few days a year, and it keeps the wolf from the door.”
Would Enfield – whose recent acting roles include King Charles in Channel 4’s royal spoof The Windsors, and Shakespeare’s father in Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow – be up for a job at Hogwarts himself? “Yes please, I’d love to do it, thank you JK Rowling, you lovely person,” he says, with the playfully provocative air of a man who’s too old to have to worry about cancel culture.
Earlier this month, Enfield debuted his new live show in Australia (“I’m not sure anyone in Australia knows who I am,” he frowns), while the UK tour kicks off in York in March. Alongside the old favourites, he says we can expect at least one new character, based on a recent real-life interaction. “This bloke said to me, ‘You’re Harry Enfield, aren’t you? I used to like your stuff, but I thought you were dead’. I said, ‘Sorry to disappoint you’, and he said, ‘Alright mate, don’t get clever!’ I thought that was really funny. So I’m putting him in the show.”
For the record, though, Harry Enfield is very much not dead. In fact, he’s barely even retired.
Harry Enfield and No Chums tours the UK from March
This article was published in Waitrose Weekend on 27 November, 2025
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