With Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson built a sketch programme that trusted the viewer to catch up, then left television to write books about a schoolboy James Bond. The comedy holds up, and it was always kinder than its catchphrases let on.
Fi1m perspective
A character walks on, says the thing he always says, and is gone before you have decided whether you mind. That is the rhythm of The Fast Show (1994), and it is the rhythm Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse built the whole programme around: sketches short enough that no joke is asked to carry a small play, and a half hour that moves on before irritation has time to settle. It trusts the viewer to catch up, and most of the time the viewer does.
Higson and Whitehouse met at the University of East Anglia in the late 1970s, and by the end of the 1980s Higson was writing for Harry Enfield and Vic Reeves. The Fast Show ran from 1994 to 2000, with specials later, and Higson was creator, writer, producer and performer on it. The pace was a decision, not an accident: the two of them designed it for an audience that had grown used to MTV and would not sit through a five-minute build. That decision is why it still plays. Nothing in it outstays its welcome, because nothing is on long enough to.
The knock against it, then and since, is that it is catchphrase comedy, and the creators themselves have half-conceded the point. We think the knock is only half right. The catchphrase gets a character on and off; what keeps you watching is that the people saying them are drawn with more affection than mockery, a gallery of British types the programme seems to like even as it laughs at them. We came away fonder of them than we expected to, which a catchphrase alone cannot manage. Where the programme does falter is when a character has been on a dozen times and recognition has become the whole joke, and Higson and Whitehouse do not always know when to retire one.
After the sketch show Higson did something few comedy writers manage, which was to leave. He produced and wrote Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) (2000–2001), created Swiss Toni, adapted Agatha Christie, and in 2015 created Jekyll and Hyde, a ten-part reworking of Stevenson set in the 1930s. He had written adult crime novels in the 1990s, one of which became the film King of the Ants (2004); from 2005 he wrote the Young Bond books, five novels about James Bond at Eton, and from 2009 The Enemy, seven volumes of horror for teenagers. We have not reviewed these and will not pretend to a view on the prose, but the instinct is the one from the sketch show: take a shape people already know, keep what they liked about it, and move quickly.
Start with The Fast Show. It will not keep you waiting for anything, least of all the end.
Biography
Charlie Higson is an English actor, comedian, writer and author. He was born on 3 July 1958 in Frome, Somerset, and studied at the University of East Anglia, where he met Paul Whitehouse.
Higson came to prominence as co-creator, writer, producer and performer on the BBC sketch series The Fast Show (1994–2000). He has written and produced other television comedy including Swiss Toni and Bellamy's People, and has acted in series such as Broadchurch (2013). He is also the author of the Young Bond novels and the young-adult series The Enemy.
