HOWZAT

This counterbalancing is there in the relationship between Whitehouse and Higson. Ask ex-public schoolboy Higson where he was born and grew up and he answers, “Ultimately…”, only to be helped out by Whitehouse, who says, “Charlie was not born, he was formed.” “Actually it was Crawley, then Sevenoaks,” Higson resumes. The crucial fact is that they were at college together 30 years ago, at the University of East Anglia, and they were in the same residential block. “It didn’t really matter to us that I was from a Home Counties background and Paul was from Essex.”

“Actually, Charlie, I wasn’t from Essex. Enfield is on the cusp of Essex and Hertford.”

“Oh, oh, you’re from Hertfordshire then, are you?”

They made each other laugh, as they still do, and shared a love of punk rock, as they almost still do. They were the nucleus of a band called the Right-Handed Lovers. “We burnt brightly,” says Higson. “It was s***, actually,” says Whitehouse. “Twelve-bar pseudo-Stones and Chuck Berry, except slightly faster and out of tune.” “Punk was huge at the time,” says Higson. “It created such an uproar.” “I had to pretend not to like Zeppelin,” says Whitehouse. “There was a little group of us, and we were the new generation and we had something to say, hey hey we’re the Monkees. My sister pointed that out to me; she said, ‘What does that say about the younger generation?’ Not, ‘We want to overthrow the bourgeoisie.’ No, just, ‘Hey hey we’re the Monkees’.”

“Paul was only at UEA for a year,” says Higson. “He came down to London with most of the people I had made friends with at university in the first year.”

“You went and lived with my girlfriend,” says Whitehouse, “and a couple of other friends who were still there, and I dragged a couple down to London who had left the university.”

“After I graduated,” says Charlie, “I played in a band [The Higsons, 1980-86] and Paul worked for Hackney Council [as a plasterer]. I ended up moving to Hackney as well. I started working as a decorator.”

Sometimes they were on the same jobs. That’s when they were joined by the third parties – and fourth and fifth and sixth – of their own creation. First there was Stavros and Loadsamoney, true creatures of their time. Harry Enfield thought they were brilliant, incorporated them into his repertoire and got Whitehouse and Higson to develop the characters still further for him. Later came such watchable monsters as Ron Manager, king of the soccer pundits with absolutely nothing of interest to say, and Arthur Atkinson, with his similar eminence in the realm of unfunny comedians. They wrote stuff for the gifted and ambitious Harry Enfield, and were regarded by the Comedy Mafia (Whitehouse’s term) as “a couple of idiots from down the pub, which is to some extent what we were, except that we were bright idiots from down the pub”.

“Harry was a bit younger than us,” says Higson, “but very determined to get on TV. People like that, they didn’t form a rock band, they did comedy. He drafted Paul in as his funny friend, and Paul drafted me in because he didn’t have a word processor and I did. I enjoyed writing.”

Since those days Higson has had four novels published. “These ones weren’t published though.”

“What were they like?” asks Whitehouse, sounding interested.

“Ar, they’re in a box somewhere.”

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