Paul Julian Whitehouse[1] (born 17 May 1958) is a Welsh actor, writer and comedian. He was one of the main stars of the BBC sketch comedy series The Fast Show, and has also starred with Harry Enfield in the shows Harry & Paul and Harry Enfield & Chums. 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.
Whitehouse attended the University of East Anglia from autumn 1976, where he made friends with Charlie Higson.[5] The pair spent little of their first year studying, instead playing guitar and performing with their punk rock combo, the Right Hand Lovers.[6]
Whitehouse dropped out and squatted in a council flat in Hackney, east London and occasionally worked as a plasterer.[7] 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.[8]
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,[8] and after he gained a place on Channel 4's Saturday Live, the pair were invited to write for him.[5] 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.
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