The comedian Harry Enfield has killed off almost as many characters as he has created. His latest project sounds like the strangest yet: a film his next-door neighbour asked him to appear in – in exchange for a baked potato
Harry Enfield used to live next door to the man who owns Spudulike. One day the potato-based entrepreneur rang him up and said: "I'm going to make a film with my own money, and I think it could be quite fun. It will only take two weeks. Would you mind being in it? I can't pay you, but I'll give you a free potato." Enfield didn't even stop to think. "Yes," he said.
"Well, of course! He was my next-door neighbour." If my next-door neighbour rang me up and said he had never published a magazine before, but was starting one, and would I write for it, I don't think I'd be wildly keen. "Really?" Enfield looks surprised, then grins. "Well, I'm nicer than you." Didn't he even ask to see the script? "Actually," and he searches his memory, "I probably did read it – just to make sure I didn't have to have sex with anyone. You know what low-budget British films are like: people are always having sex with each other. And I didn't want to do that." He looks faintly appalled. "Not at my age."
When I first heard about the film, I wasn't sure I'd even want to watch it, let alone have acted in it – for the simple reason that it is written entirely in verse. "It doesn't sound very good, does it?" agrees Enfield. "When you say it's all in verse, as soon as you say that people go," and he pulls a worried face, "'Oh.'" Acts of Godfrey started out as a poem, evolved into a story, and then expanded into a feature film script; the publicity blurb calls it a "modern twist on Shakespeare", but I'm not sure that makes it sound any more appealing. "And really," Enfield says, "it's more Chaucerian, really. It's a moral tale. Everyone's a bit rough. They're more Wife of Bath," he laughs, "than Portia." How did he know it would work? "Well, it might have been a terrible idea. You never know."
It turns out to have been one of the most inspired ideas I've come across in a very long time. Set in a country-house hotel, where a motivational selling course is taking place, the film follows the complicated lives of a cast of crooks, conmen and casualties as they contest the line between ambition and amorality. Simon Callow stars as Godfrey, the mischievously meddlesome narrator, while Enfield plays a sinister creep who seduces grieving widows, via tip-offs from a corrupt undertaker, in order to steal their life's savings.
You'd think it would be really annoying to have them all talking in verse, but at first it is rather intriguing, and then charming, and then very funny, until you almost stop noticing – and by the end you are left wondering why on earth more films aren't made this way. I have no idea why it works – but it does. Ingeniously scripted, darkly comic, cleverly plotted and completely original, the only downside I can report is that afterwards my partner and I couldn't stop talking to each other in rhyming verse.
The last time Enfield appeared in a feature film, in 2000, he was playing a teenager in Kevin and Perry Go Large. That was only 11 years ago, but he turned 50 this year, and looks closer to late middle age than adolescence. We meet in Soho at the Groucho Club, but he has the manner of a bloke you'd find nursing a pint in the corner of a local, ruminative and wry, almost wistful. He talks quietly, often in short sentences, and when he points to a picture of Boris Johnson in his paper and calls him a "self-publicist", I get the impression that is the worst thing you could say about anyone in Enfield's eyes. His whole bearing is so studiedly inconspicuous, I'm not even sure I would have recognised him if we had passed in the street – but then, that may be because after 15 years of TV ubiquity, in the past decade Enfield more or less disappeared.
Kevin and Perry Go Large marked the high point of the comedian's fame. His sketch show for Sky One that same year attracted what are known as mixed reviews and, two years later, his next project, Celeb, a BBC comedy about an ageing rock star, never stood a chance of competing with Ozzy Osborne's reality show, which came out at the same time and enjoyed the dual advantage of being both funnier and true. Celeb bombed, and the critics were merciless, so I had wondered if that was why Enfield withdrew from our screens.
"No," he says mildly, "not really. One has to get a slagging once in a while. If people like you, and you disappoint them, they get very hurt by it. People are much more vicious about comedy than about anything else. If it's drama they go: 'Oh well, that didn't really work.' But comedy, they get angry. And people who never thought you were ever very funny go: 'Fantastic, we can really have a go now. Great! The tide has turned, so I can say I never really liked him.'"
His voice, normally kind and avuncular, assumes the acid venom of his critics. "People get very angry, because I think they think that comedians who don't make them laugh must still think that they're funny, and therefore they are arrogant. It's like, if you're watching something and it's not funny, but they clearly think it is funny, then you think: 'You arrogant fuckers.'"
Enfield hasn't read a single review of his own work since getting a bad one in a local listings magazine in 1984, and although he says: "Celeb didn't bother me, because I didn't write it," he did take particular care not to read the papers at all for months.
"But then I got a lovely letter from Dominic Lawson [the then editor of the Sunday Telegraph and a personal friend], saying how sorry he was. It was like he'd written to Lucy [Lyster, Enfield's wife] to say sorry that I'd died – but he hadn't, he'd written to me to say that I'd died. It was very sweet, really nice, but it was like an obituary. That's when I knew how bad it must have been in the press," and he begins to laugh. "Dominic hadn't even rung up. He'd thought: I can't ring, 'cos Harry's probably crying, and I can't quite deal with him crying on the phone."
I ask if it was the low point of his professional life, and he thinks for a minute, then chuckles.
"No, the low point was probably being booed off the stage at the Royal Albert Hall at a charity gig for Nicaragua in 1985. It was the first time I'd ever done Stavros, and I got slow-handclapped off. A Nicaraguan had got on stage before me and said how he'd lost his whole family, and I think they thought I was taking the piss." He lets out a hollow laugh. "I got off after about two minutes."
As it turned out, Stavros – a Greek kebab shop-owner, with the catchphrase "Hello everybody peeps!"– was to be one of the characters that turned Enfield into a massive star – along with Loadsamoney ("Look at my wad!"), Tim Nice-But-Dim ("What an absolutely bloody nice bloke!"), Smashie and Nicey ("Poptastic!"), Know-It-All Guy ("You don't wanna do it like thaaaat!"), and the Scousers ("Dey do dough, don't dey dough?"). For a sizeable chunk of the 80s and 90s, it was scarcely possible to go anywhere without hearing one of these catchphrases, for Enfield's humour – edgier than The Two Ronnies, but safer than The Young Ones – had insinuated itself into the national consciousness and defined family entertainment for that era. Enfield describes it as a rip-off of Viz, and has often said he deliberately devised characters with catchphrases because they appealed to children, and children controlled what families watched on TV – so the strategy clearly worked. But he also presents his success as practically accidental.
Enfield grew up in an upper-ish middle-class family, was privately schooled and went off to York to study politics, "because I thought I was quite interested in it, and didn't know what to do with my life". Having failed to make a convincing punk in his teens, at university he decided to dress in suits and go about scowling at everyone – "Which I thought would make me look cool. And it did! I used to quite intimidate people – which was nice. That hasn't happened since." He had no ambition to perform? "No," he says, "absolutely none," then chuckles. "I think nothing's changed. I sort of muddle along. That's what most people do, isn't it?"
But he made friends with a fellow undergraduate, Brian Elsley – now a successful screenwriter – and the pair created a comedy double act which went down well at the Edinburgh festival. They moved to Hackney in east London, met Paul Whitehouse in a pub, moved into a squat on a council estate, and began writing sketches, which soon found their way on to Channel 4's Saturday Live. By 1990, Enfield had his own BBC2 sketch show, co-starring Whitehouse and Kathy Burke.
Enfield and Burke's teenage characters Kevin and Perry ("That is so unfair! I HATE YOU!"), became his most enduring act but, to many fans' dismay, Enfield killed off other popular characters in their prime. It has always been said that he did away with Loadsamoney as soon as he realised, to his horror, that Essex boys had mistaken the obnoxious lout for a hero.
"No," he says at once, "that's absolute rubbish. There was a thing at the time that said basically: 'Oh, the working classes obviously don't understand this is irony, so Harry's had to kill him off.' And it was incredibly snobbish, and absolutely not the case that somehow the working classes are incapable of understanding satire. They can, and they did. They knew it was satirical, and everyone who did it – ie used the catchphrase – did it to take the piss out of themselves.
"No, I killed Loadsamoney off 'cos all he talked about was making money and shagging women, and he had two dimensions, so we were just bored with him by the end. I've had a huge career of killing off characters. Low attention span. Done that, that works, done. I can't get out of bed if I've got to do the same thing over and over again."
Enfield was also growing bored with being a celebrity. Making a load of money, he found, "definitely doesn't help your ambition – or not mine, anyway. Once I felt like, oh well, that's enough money, that was sort of that." False rumours of depression and alcohol problems were probably inspired, he thinks, by jokes he made to interviewers decades ago – but as he never reads his own press, he couldn't understand why he kept being asked about drink and depression. The reality was that in the late 90s he simply fell in love, got married, had three children, and didn't want them growing up with a celebrity dad. "My priorities are to be as normal and boring as possible. Go to the gym, walk the dog, look after the kids. Lucy has a whole huge business now [selling children's clothes], so that's a good excuse too. She can earn the money, and I'll just keep pottering along."
His children didn't even know he was a famous comic until a few years ago, when they found a video of one of his old shows. "They said: 'What's this? Can we watch this?' So I put it on the telly and we were all sitting there, and the doorbell went and it was the police, 'cos my bike had been stolen. So they came in and I was aware they were aware my children were all like this," – and he mimes staring at a screen – "and you could just see their minds going: 'He sits them down in front of the telly and makes them watch him every day!' And I couldn't say anything, 'cos we were all pretending I wasn't me."
When The Office came along in 2001 and created a craze for comedies of embarrassment, a part of Enfield felt relieved to see fashion shifting away from his style of humour. He pursued a couple of film projects, "and as with film projects, they took about two or three years to not happen. And then I thought: Well, fuck this, I'm going to go back to working with Paul [Whitehouse]. I'm going to go back to doing what I enjoy again." Since 2007 the pair have made three series of their own sketch show, Ruddy Hell! Harry and Paul, for BBC2, but its impact has been fairly low key. "We're doing another one, so there'll be one more. But I should think the BBC will sack us soon." Why? "Well," he shrugs indifferently. "Getting on a bit."
Enfield keeps apologising for being boring. He hates talking about himself, and says he really just likes going to the pub and talking rubbish with his mates. He has never taken drugs, because back in the 80s, "one or two of my colleagues started acting like complete wankers. I'd say: 'Why are you acting like a complete wanker?' and they'd say …" – and he taps a nostril. "As Paul puts it, he's suffering from post-nasal depression." He recalls a friend coming round to his house once, whom he had hoped to cast in his series, "and he was really nice and sweet for about 20 minutes, and then he went to the loo and came back and started telling me for about an hour what a wanker I was. And I thought: Oh God I definitely don't want to do my series with him. And it's only 6.30! He's already telling me what a wanker I am, and he's clearly not going to leave. I've got five more hours of being told what a wanker I am. And it was before mobile phones, so I couldn't text anyone to say I am trapped! So no, it never really appealed to me."
Before he leaves, he says he is trying hard to think of something interesting to say. "I slept with Angus Deayton in the summer." Enfield takes his family to Glastonbury every year, and brought Deayton along last summer so he could see if he liked it. The image of Deayton and Enfield sharing a tent is certainly striking, so I ask if they camped among the general melee.
"Absolutely not! Who do you think we are, Decca? Oh God, the general melee's frightful. And the lavatories – No, no, no. We get something called Hotel Tent where you pay an outrageous sum of money and they basically set up a tent and give you bouncy mattresses and pillows and lots of lavvies."
So how was it, sleeping with Deayton? "Well … He didn't snore."
Acts of Godfrey opens at selected cinemas from 27 January and will be available online at actsofgodfrey.com
