Where did Harry Enfield go? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was omnipresent. Forget his fellow Saturday Night Live stars Ben Elton, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, it was Enfield who defined the era. His character Loadsamoney became the signature tune, or supreme critique, of Thatcherism – depending on your perspective. Kelvin MacKenzie and the Sun adored the flashy plasterer, meant by Enfield as a parody – while Margaret Thatcher used the catchphrase to counter accusations she had created a greed-is-good culture, saying, "We are not a loadsamoney economy." So many of Enfield's creations became household names – the parody DJs Smashie and Nicey, acne-ridden lisper Tory Boy (part based on a young William Hague), upper class twit Tim Nice-But-Dim, the Scousers, Stavros the Greek kebab shop owner, and teenage losers Kevin and Perry (who went on to become film stars in their own right). And then Enfield disappeared.
As Laurie became an unlikely Hollywood hero and Fry and Elton branched out to become one-man industries, Enfield was invisible for most of the noughties. Then, in 2007, he returned with his old friend Paul Whitehouse in a sketch show with new characters – balder, greyer and thinner than we remembered him. Now at 49, Enfield is back with a third series of Harry and Paul. Typically for Enfield, it has not been without its problems.
We meet at the office of another of Enfield's old friends, the writer and film-maker Richard Curtis. The office, in London's Notting Hill, is flush with the trappings of Curtis's success. The walls are lined with framed photographs of the gorgeous and the famous, from Kate Moss and Gwyneth Paltrow, to Bono and Hugh Grant. Look close enough and you'll even spot a picture of Enfield surfing in the sun, back in the day.
So what happened – did he walk out on fame, or did fame walk out on him?
A bit of both, he says. It was the new millennium, and he wanted a change. He was knackered, didn't feel funny any more, and had a young family to take up his time. "I was happy just being at home looking after the kids. There was always plenty to do, and I didn't feel like doing any telly."
Was he getting lots of offers at the time? "No." He smiles. "No."
Perhaps more than anyone, it was Ricky Gervais who did for him. "It was the time The Office had come out and it was so good, so accurate and I just thought, it makes me look unbearably uncool going round doing stupid characters. And a lot of people started aping The Office, doing things with no jokes. And I couldn't really think of a no-jokes sitcom so I just thought, well, I'm washed up." He says it all with such equanimity. Enfield's got a pleasant, malleable face, and he's lugubrious in the cheeriest of ways.
He did try to reinvent himself as a screenwriter, but that didn't work out either. He wrote two romcoms, neither of which have been made. As we're talking, I'm staring at a photo of Richard Curtis. Why didn't you get him to help, I say. "Well, he makes successful films." Couldn't he have made yours successful? "It's not the way it works, is it. The problem is, I'm not well known enough. I wanted to direct it, but I couldn't really get a cast. You need Hugh Grant if it's English. I sent one of the scripts to Hugh, who I know vaguely, and he played me for about two years. He would not say no. He said he liked it, 'But I don't want to act.' That's what he always says. Then I gave up on it." So you dumped him? "No! I haven't dumped him. If he phoned up tomorrow..."
Actually, Enfield says, it wasn't simply that he didn't want to do comedy; when he did it, it wasn't good enough. In 2000, just as he was completing the Kevin and Perry film, he made a series for Sky. It was called Harry Enfield's Brand Spanking New Show, and that's what the critics gave it. A spanking. Deservedly so, says Enfield. "I didn't think anybody would see it because it was on Sky. I've seen a bit of it recently, and it's got some really good characters in it, but they're all over the top, because I didn't have time to learn it. So I'm panicking trying to learn the words. I'm loud and shouty, and it's just painful."
Did he allow it to go out like that because it was for Sky? "Yeah. Yeah, definitely." And if it had been for the BBC? "I wouldn't have accepted the series. At the time I was just interested in editing Kevin and Perry, so I was not there in my head."
Enfield's diffidence can be surprising. As a young man, studying politics at York university, people thought he was an arrogant git, "because I always wore a suit and never smiled". And he was, he says. He'd come from a fairly posh background – his family was sufficiently lofty for Virginia Woolf to refer dismissively to his grandparents in her memoirs ("I would rather be dead in a field than have tea with the Enfields"). His grandmother was a leading communist, his father, Edward, a Labour voter and assistant director of education for West Sussex (before piggybacking on his son's success to become a well known broadcaster in his own right) while Enfield has always been a bit of a political maverick – liberal with a smattering of Catholic conservatism (though he's pretty much had it with God), and libertarianism (he loves a good hunt).
After Labour came to power, he was one of the famous faces Tony Blair invited to Downing Street to celebrate the new dawn, and he had a set-to with Peter Mandelson. "There had been a poll in a paper, and he'd come out as the least popular member of the government. I just said, 'Well, you're credited with getting Labour in by making them more popular, so by your own logic you should fall on your own sword.' And he just looked at me and said 'Why don't you go and tell the prime minister that?' So I did."
Enfield recently bumped into Mandelson. "He said 'I remember you, you came up to me at a party and said, 'You are the most loathsome creature that has ever crawled upon the earth, I despise every fibre of your body.' I said, 'I never said anything like that.' It's brilliant isn't it? It's clearly what he thinks of himself."
Enfield is hard to pigeon hole – so often self-effacing, sometimes brilliantly assertive. Maybe this is why he appealed to such a wide range of people in his heyday. While Ben Elton and the alternative comics were largely for the students, Enfield also carried along the working class and the older generations who had been brought up on Dick Emery and Stanley Baxter.
He established himself gradually on the comedy circuit – gigging at Edinburgh, doing voices on Spitting Image (Jimmy Greaves, David Steel), creating his characters on Saturday Night Live, and then his own BBC show.
When he started out he was so calculated, he says. "I thought, I want the biggest audience possible so I need to get catchphrases, because kids control the telly – that's when we all only had one telly. And then I thought, once I've got the kids, I'll put something in for the older people – we'll do the DJs, that's probably a bit more highbrow." It worked a treat.
But even in the early days he had an uneasy relationship with fame. He would tell himself that it wasn't him being stopped in the street, it was his characters. While many of his contemporaries milked the TV quiz show circuit to boost their profiles, on the rare occasions Enfield appeared as himself he didn't enjoy it. "I don't like doing me. I make a product. It could be Maltesers or Rolos, but it happens to be comedy – and you don't know who makes your Maltesers do you?"
Oh come on, everyone knew you in your heyday. "Probably at the time," he concedes reluctantly. "Then, of course, you have to do loads of interviews. It's like what happened to Lily [Allen] when she got famous..." For three years Enfield lived with Allen's mother, Alison Owen, and became "common-law step dad" to her children. "Suddenly Lily's bloody everywhere and she's doing every bloody interview, because you're told to. You're young and you do it. It's only later you get a bit savvy."
So did he advise Lily to keep her counsel? "Yeah." Does he find it strange that he is asked more about Lily than he is about the three children he has with his wife Lucy? "No, it's good. I don't want my kids talked about. It's one of the reasons I thought that if I could just make a go of being a writer, that would be good, because I don't really want my kids growing up with me famous."
In his mid-30s, while still a TV regular, he got depressed. He was doing well enough, but felt creatively blocked. "I found it quite hard coming up with stuff, didn't know what else I wanted to do, and didn't seem to be moving forward." He smiles. "Then I resigned myself to never moving forward." The trouble is, he says, he gets bored with his creations. He likes to kill them off quickly. Even Loadsamoney, who seemed to be around forever, only appeared 10 times on Saturday Night Live.
Was he aware of his old friends diversifying and achieving more? "Yeah!" he says generously. "Look at how successful Richard [Curtis] and Hugh [Laurie] have become. They're amazing." Perhaps he didn't have the hunger of, say, Elton, who has always seemed phenomenally ambitious.
"As are Hugh and Richard actually."
Did he ever think he could knock out a novel or two? "No, I can't write a novel. I don't have a story. I can't write a sitcom."
He was convinced he was done for, until Little Britain and Catherine Tate came along and revitalised the sketch show format. "Little Britain happened and it was so deliciously uncool." In what way? "It was just like panto – just characters with silly catchphrases, going back to the old days and dressing up as women, puke and all that stuff."
By now, he felt he had regained his sense of humour, and approached the BBC. "So I said to Peter Fincham, who was then at the BBC, I'd like to do a show, and he said 'Well I think you're a bit too old and washed up.'"
Didn't that make him feel crap? "No, I completely understood where he was coming from. You've got no profile, you haven't been around for years, should you be doing it at your age?" He pleaded for a chance, went away and devised new material with the help of Whitehouse.
They then returned to the BBC for an audition. "Peter said he would do it, but it wasn't going to be my show because Paul had a better profile now, so it had to be a joint show."
This time round it's different, he says. Sod the mass ratings, they're doing it for themselves. There's a nostalgic feel to the show – with lots of references to Cassius Clay and On The Buses. One sketch features the Beatles, with white hair and walking sticks.
"We're just doing stuff for people who don't watch much comedy, but might like us." People who used to watch comedy? "Yeah, when they were younger. There's a whole generation of us who secretly think, wouldn't it be nice if the Beatles had not taken any drugs and were still loveable people in a Dick Lester film."
Despite his enthusiasm, Enfield will never be his own best publicist. He admits he is already bored with some of the characters. "I get bored far more quickly than Paul does. Once Paul does it he loves it and wants to do more, and I just think I've done it. I didn't want to do any of the old stuff in this series, and he was going, 'No, you've got to do that character it's popular.'"
Then there is the matter of ratings. They weren't great for the first two series. "The new head of BBC1, Jay Hunt, got us in and said, 'I think it's the best show you've ever done, fantastic, but we're reviewing having sketch shows on BBC1.' So I said, 'Are we going to be fired?' And she said 'No no no no.' Then BBC2 said, we think you should come to us … I think they're probably right."
"The way I see it is this," he says, with a new-found positivity, "we were on BBC1 and now we're on BBC2, so we've been promoted from the premiership to the championship."
Harry and Paul starts on 27 September, BBC2, 9.30pm
