After his success in Fresh Meat, Jack Whitehall is touring the nation. Viv Groskop asks him: 'So, are you the next Michael McIntyre or the next Russell Brand?
It would make sense to hate Jack Whitehall. He's 23, he's cute, funny, talented and well on his way to becoming extremely wealthy and famous. At least he knows how annoying this is. "Whenever people think of you, they think of 'the young comic', if that's your calling card. That can run for ? what? ? maybe another two years?" He laughs. "I've been doing this for quite a long time now even though I'm fairly young. I hope people think of me as a bit older. I do have a beard. That makes me look very old."
His performance in this year's new Channel 4 comedy Fresh Meat, about a group of mismatched university freshers, by the creators of Peep Show, was well received. He's currently on a nationwide live tour, Let's Not Speak of This Again, with two dates at the Hammersmith Apollo, the first time he will have played a solo show there.
January will see the launch of his Channel 4 show Hit the Road, Jack, where he'll visit a different part of the UK every week, filming stand-up and messing around with the locals. He's already recorded one in a Glasgow working men's club.
Next year is set to be the year he becomes a household name. Keen panel show fans (and especially anyone who watches Mock the Week or 8 Out of 10 Cats) would argue he already is. He says: "I think I may have done too many panel shows. After a while people get bored of you. I might be a bit more selective in future."
Depending on who you ask, Whitehall is either the next Michael McIntyre or the next Russell Brand. When I put this to him directly, he swiftly sidesteps both those names and interjects Eddie Izzard's. So there is a plan, then. "I don't want to be just 'a man and a mic'. I'd really like to do an Eddie Izzard tour. A big creative tour. That would be my goal."
We meet at his management office in Holborn, central London, where he is trying on clothes for the Channel 4 show, talking non-stop and dancing around the place. He is as he appears on TV: very young and very English. And particularly keen to make sure I have a cup of tea. In the flesh he is more pale, spotty and studenty than I expected, complete with a nervous red rash on his neck which spreads upwards during our conversation.
He is wearing black skinny jeans, posh-boy loafers and a very silly hippy wooden bracelet. Weirdly, all this just serves to make him more attractive as a person. The smug, arrogant type he plays on panel shows is just a pose he dips in and out of for comic effect. This is part of the shtick: you should hate him ? you want to hate him ? but he turns it around.
Jack Peter Benedict Whitehall gets away with a lot. He comes from a ridiculously stereotypical upper-middle class background which included stints at Marlborough College and the Harrodian School in Barnes, southwest London. Twilight actor Robert Pattinson, two years his senior, was a contemporary at his prep school, the Tower House School, also in southwest London. His father, Michael, was an acting agent. In his heyday Whitehall Sr had Judi Dench, Colin Firth, Daniel Day-Lewis and Richard Griffiths on his books. (Griffiths is Jack's godfather, as is Nigel Havers.) His mother, Hilary, was an actress. The family house is now in Putney (he only moved out at the beginning of this year), and the Putney branch of Waitrose looms large in his consciousness ? and his anecdotes.
The flush on his neck really starts to play up when he talks about his parents. Maybe he is just a little bit embarrassed. "My mum looks after me a lot. I'm a bit of a mummy's boy. I really needed to move out and start being a bit more grown-up. And also I'd written so much about them. I needed to find other material." Does he have a girlfriend? The flush goes nuclear. "Not, like, a girlfriend. But there is someone who I am sort of? Yes, someone." He won't be drawn. Instead he starts remembering the time he had a girl round to stay at his parents' house and his father insisted on coming into his bedroom the next morning and reading out stories from the Daily Telegraph.
"Being at home was a bit odd when you've got a girlfriend and you're living at your parents' house. I don't know if it's a generational thing or just because my dad is a bit odd." The girl cringed and hid under the covers, while Whitehall found himself saying: "Yes, Dad, Simon Heffer is a very witty man."
His showbiz childhood was not as it appears, though, he says. "It wasn't all glitz and glamour and sitting on Judi Dench's knee. When I was old enough to be conscious of it, it was more about seeing the depressing side of it all. My dad had done really well in the 1980s, but then he chose to have a family. It's often the case with agents that once they have families, they're not just looking after their clients any more. A lot of clients left him." By the time Jack was about 15, Michael retired anyway.
His dad's background is good for random showbiz stories, though. He remembers the actor Leslie Grantham coming to their house to write his autobiography because (Whitehall claims) Grantham was not allowed to use the computer at home (it was after the online sex scandal in 2004).
In his late teens Whitehall Jr had one aim: "To nail stand-up." By the age of 19 he was offered his first weekend at the Comedy Store. "John Bishop was the compere and I had my mum and dad down and some friends." He beams. His parents are never far away in any of his stories: he did a double-act show at Edinburgh this year with his father. "Miranda came on. My dad tried to marry me off to her."
At school he was interested in drama, but "there was a drama teacher who never cast me. He always cast his sons. So I thought: the only way I will ever get cast in anything is if I write it myself." When he was at Marlborough, aged 17, he put on a show in a local Wiltshire pub with some friends. The local landlord, worried it would be a disaster, brought Whitehall a spare costume just in case. "He said [he puts on a yokel accent]: 'Jack, you can have this. Just in case everything goes wrong. This belongs to my son. It's a Darth Vader costume. He always cracks us up when he puts it on. If the jokes don't work? It's all yours.' When everything's going wrong on stage now, in the back of my mind, I just think: don't forget the Darth Vader costume."
He had a tough apprenticeship during his gap year, and later dropped out of art history at Manchester to concentrate on stand-up. "I did lots on the northern circuit," he says. "I did a lot of Manchester gigs, often poorly organised, with partisan crowds. It toughens you up quickly. If your material is not good enough, you know about it pretty quickly. I was this camp, posh Londoner, aged 19, doing gigs in Bolton? You mature quickly. I was really pleased I was able to do it." His TV break came with Big Brother's Big Mouth and has just grown from there. With the help of a million panel shows.
Now his career is being carefully masterminded. This is his first stint at the Apollo and he hasn't had a DVD out yet, despite having several hours' worth of material, generated from three Edinburgh shows. Considering that he gets offered everything going, it's a miracle he has held back. "Sometimes I don't think my agent shows me everything? Out of respect," he laughs.
He has turned down Strictly Come Dancing twice, although, he says, "it is the one thing I would actually quite like to do because I like dancing". He was quite tempted by Celebrity Masterchef because he would like to tell Gregg Wallace that his restaurant in Putney is rubbish. "There are a lot of things I would do if they were not actually aired on TV." And he has said no to being the face of Terry's Chocolate Orange. "I couldn't do it because I don't like them. And I couldn't steal it off Dawn [French]." Acting is looking like more of an attractive option, although he crashed out of auditions for Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, much to his disappointment.
He does worry about it all going wrong. "Live stand-up is my thing. I love being on stage and just messing around. But my worry is that the one night you get the reviewers in. I should get over the worry of what someone writes. I'm very conscious of other people's opinions and of people not liking me. It's when someone slams you and it's personal, that's when it upsets me. The shows are sold out so it should not matter. But it always does."
What's the worst thing he's read about himself? "One said that I can't do any sincerity, that I'm completely insincere. I thought that was a big judgment to make. You realise it's all subjective. There are some people you can never make laugh. You can't focus on them. But you do. All you focus on is the one person it isn't working for who is sitting there with their arms crossed. I hate myself doing it because it makes you look so mental. You can have a lovely show and think: 'There was this one woman and she really didn't enjoy it. I wonder what I was doing wrong.'"
He has a whole skit about his mother being obsessed with actor Robert Pattinson's progress compared to his own. "My mother and his mother used to do this one-upmanship thing in the supermarket." It's a joke but it feels like there's some truth in it, too. He is genuinely upset when he mentions the time he made his mum cry. Last year he was photographed "in possession of cocaine" in the pages of the News of the World. (The Sun later referred to him as "drug shame comic".) His mum wasn't able to go to Waitrose for some time, he says. He later made it worse by making a flippant remark at a press conference.
"I learned an important lesson: do not attempt to be humorous in certain situations. If I'm in an uncomfortable situation, I think I can say something funny to defuse it. Sometimes you can't."
He describes himself as "really lucky" and seems to be at least mildly aware of the danger of burnout. This year, since Fresh Meat, things have been "really intense" and he has to guard against feeling overwhelmed. "I take on quite a lot. There was one period when I was doing Fresh Meat and I was previewing my Edinburgh show. I was filming from six in the morning until 7pm and I'd get in a car and go to Oldham to do a preview. But if I had been sat around, I know I would get frustrated and twitchy."
When the tour is finished, all he really wants to do is get away and have some time off. "After the live dates I might go away for a bit." Where? "I might go away with my mum and dad. Somewhere really mad and out there. Like the south of France. And eat some cheese." He grins. This is indeed exactly the sort of thing he would do, and he is not ashamed of it. He is who he is. Good on him.
Fresh Meat is on Channel 4 on Wednesdays (jackwhitehall.com)
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/oct/23/jack-whitehall-comedy-tour-standup
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