Paul Whitehouse: the psychopath in me

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/feb/24/paul-whitehouse-nurse-interview

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As I walk along the corridor, I can hear Paul Whitehouse up ahead, har-harring away inside one of the BBC’s goldfish bowl offices. “Security wouldn’t let me in at first,” he tells me with a filthy guffaw, as we meet. “They didn’t recognise me.” Well, Whitehouse is one of the greatest shape-shifting comedians of his generation, a man so revered by Johnny Depp that he agreed to guest-star on The Fast Show.

“Johnny said I was the finest actor of all time, but that’s a bit silly, isn’t it – how does he know? I recently did a little cameo in a film of his, Through the Looking Glass, and he said, ‘Hey man, I’m going to look after you, make sure you’re OK.’ Never heard from him again. So Mr Depp can piss off!” He roars good-humouredly. “He’s got a new wife, hasn’t he? So I’ve fallen off the radar. But I’ve got his email address, so I’ll get him back.”

Whippet-thin and with grey flecks in his hair, Whitehouse looks reassuringly ordinary in blue jeans, bottle-green cardie and white shirt. His latest co-star, Esther Coles, is sitting beside him at his request, effectively repeating her role as his support and comic feed in his new series, Nurse. The cult BBC Radio 4 comedy by Whitehouse and Fast Show co-writer David Cummings about a community psychiatric nurse and her “service users” (ie patients) has now made it to TV for a four-parter, with Whitehouse playing most of the service users.

New characters – such as a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder – join the existing ones, who include Billy the agoraphobic psychopath and his bullying friend (Simon Day). To avoid any whiff of condescension in what is admittedly risky comedy, the patients invariably have the last word during the visits by the increasingly harassed nurse Liz, played by Coles. “All Esther has ever wanted to do is plunge a lot of syringes into a lot of buttocks, har-har,” says Whitehouse. “But she acts it all in such an unactressy way it’s like being with a real nurse – not that central-casting notion of a slightly posh woman going into that world.”

Nurse also mines Whitehouse’s great capacity for pathos – except he can never resist sabotaging things with a laugh. “I sometimes think I do a bit too much sadness. I ham it up. Sometimes I think, ‘Gor blimey, come on, tell us a joke!’ But most comedy characters have some kind of mental-health issues, don’t they? It was always in my mind to do a TV version of Nurse, because mental health is such a neglected area.”

It took Whitehouse a long time to sidle into the spotlight, as a sidekick to Harry Enfield, after first appearing on shows by Fry and Laurie and Reeves and Mortimer in 1990. For years, this university dropout-turned-plasterer hid behind his pen, creating Enfield’s most famous characters – Stavros the kebab-shop owner and boastful plasterer Loadsamoney – before becoming a star by performing his own Fast Show material. “I did feel I had tricked my way into showbusiness because I didn’t do standup and stuff like that,” he says. “Yet when I look back, I realise I’ve come up with a lot of good characters in my time. I can hold my own in conversation with any comedian. And comedy is classless anyway.”

Born in the Rhondda Valley and raised in a suburb of London, Whitehouse now lives in Islington. His father, Harry, worked for the National Coal Board (above ground) and his mother, Anita, a talented singer who left school at 14 and was briefly a mental-health nurse, eventually became an opera understudy at Covent Garden. “My parents were rampant proles with lower-middle-class aspirations, like most people of their generation. If you could get out of going down the mine, you did. And the class system is funny, it’s made people laugh for centuries. The one person who can call out King Lear on every occasion is the Fool.” Would he ever like to try his hand at Shakespeare? “I feel I do enough straight acting in my comedy. There’s enough room for poignancy there. And I know my limitations: I’m not very good at other people’s scripts, to be honest. If I’m writing my own, I know what I can do.”

In 2000, after Whitehouse’s eight-year marriage ended, he and David Cummings wrote the TV series Happiness, “a trawl through middle-aged male misery”. So is there any autobiographical connection with Nurse? “It’s about problems that affect all of us, such as loss, love, loneliness and fear,” he says. “It’s only nominally about mental health. I don’t want to sound trite, but we’re all treading a fine line between what’s normal and what’s not. Most people have had counselling for something, like a physical illness or marriage guidance. I did have therapy – I think pretty well everyone has in this day and age, haven’t they? We all have problems. I don’t really want to go into my own situation, but there are elements of me in all the Nurse characters, otherwise where do you find the inspiration? Billy the agoraphobic psychopath is quite a frightening man and he’s in me somewhere.” He bangs his chest. “He even scares me.”

Whitehouse is now 56 and feeling it more. “As I get older, I identify more with Herbert, the old boy living alone in Nurse, who is pondering what happens when the male libido goes and what happened to his lost loves. We are all prisoners of our past to some extent. But Dave and I decided to undercut the poignancy by having Herbert say, ‘I really do need to masturbate now.’ It wasn’t gratuitous, because his libido was holding back the tide of sadness that was going to overwhelm him.” He pauses. “Yes, it’s going to be a weird thing when that sex drive goes.”

Middle age also makes him fret about potential heart problems, especially when he had to put on a fat suit for another Nurse character, the bed-bound Graham, who is a prisoner of both his obesity and his insanely overindulgent mother. “I was in prosthetics from six in the morning, and they pumped ice-cold water into the suit’s inner vest to stop me from overheating. Great for the scene, but probably not good for my heart.”

Through The Looking Glass – the forthcoming sequel to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, in which Depp plays the Mad Hatter and Whitehouse voices the March Hare – threatened to be something of a heartstopper as well. “For the voice, I just imitated a little old fellow from the Highlands.” He mimics straining for the right sound. “I practically had a heart attack doing it. You do one bit in front of a mike, and six months later they get you back to do another, then they stitch it together. I don’t know what the Americans in the studio made of this madman squeaking for about half an hour.”

It turns out that he’s not being needlessly concerned about his heart. Later, at the official launch for Nurse, Whitehouse announces he’s had “three stents, four daughters and five Baftas”. Afterwards, Whitehouse tells me that, a few years ago, he had the stents inserted in his arteries to help the blood flow. “I didn’t see the need to talk about it,” he says. “I keep very active.”

Last year, Whitehouse and Enfield appeared in Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos, a gleeful send-up of BBC2 for its 50th anniversary. Another significant anniversary looms this year: it is 25 years since the pair began performing together. “I love doing stuff with Harry,” he says. “We are very comfortable with each other, very easy, like an old married couple – but better. The BBC seem keen to celebrate that. And we might do a tour called The Putting Our Mums in a Home tour. What will my mum say? Oh, she’ll laugh.”

•Nurse is on BBC2 on 10 March at 10pm.