Harry Enfield reflects on 40-years of comedy and meeting Billy Connolly

“The first time I saw Billy Connolly, I was really freaked out,” Harry Enfield tells me. The Big Yin has almost certainly had that effect on people before, but in Enfield’s case it was perhaps more understandable.

“I was 13 and I was reading a pop magazine. The Sweet were at the top of the charts at the time. And it said ‘Brian Connolly’,” Enfield continues. “And there he was with a red head and a beard. And I thought, what? He’s completely changed his look. He had blonde hair. Anyway, they just got the picture wrong. It was Billy.”

Years later, he would come face to face with Billy Connolly backstage at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute at Wembley in 1988. Enfield said that he was “tongue-tied”.

“He said ‘Oh, hi, nice to meet you.’ And I was like, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much’ I don’t think I impressed him at all.” he said. “We just go stupid when we meet him and just grin at him like idiots.”

We are speaking as Enfield prepares to celebrate his career in comedy with his Harry and No Chums tour. The show is part autobiographical exploration, part character comedy, and sees him give fans a glimpse behind the curtain of his more than forty year career.

“People said you’ve never done one of those autobiography books or anything like that. They’d come out of Christmas. They’ve always got a face on the front and someone going, ‘Is this me? Who am I?’; And all that,” Enfield said. “And I thought, no, no, I haven’t, but I could do one on stage maybe. How I get into comedy, how we come up with characters and how I’ve done that all my life, how I still do it.”

It is also an opportunity to update some of those characters who became part of the national conversation, including one of his most popular - Loadsamoney, a character so prescient of the time he was created that Labour leader Neil Kinnock used it to highlight the policies of the Thatcher government.

“As we all know in this country, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. So he is now immensely wealthy and he’s fantastically proud of the fact that everyone else is poor except for him,” Enfield says.

Is it a case that comedy has become prophecy for some of his characters?

“I guess culturally, that does happen. I mean, certainly with Loadsamoney and the wealth and worshipping wealth, that was quite a new thing at the time. And now it’s just sort of accepted by so many people and borders have broken down”, Enfield says. “And the fact that money is now king, not democracy or human rights or anything, money is literally king and no government can say, ‘We’re going to put up tax properly to fund this’ because money leaves the country, then they haven’t got any money to do that with. So I guess there’s a bit of a prophecy there.”

It is also an opportunity for Enfield to explore some of those characters who were too controversial for television - “I nearly always get a question, are there any characters that were banned?”

The show arrives in Scotland in March. First at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on 24 March and then at Glasgow’s King's Theatre on 25 March. It will be a return to two cities that have had a profound impact on the Sussex-born comedian.

In 1982, he was spotted alongside Dalkeith-native Bryan Elsley at the Edinburgh Fringe. The pair had brought a comedic play to the festival that saw their first opportunities in TV.

“We sold a joke from it to this TV series, which actually had Lenny Henry in it. And the producer came along and he was from The Scaffold,” Enfield explains. “And afterwards there was a note saying, ‘Could you give me a ring? I’m from ITV and I’m doing this programme with Lenny Henry’. And he paid us 75 quid for one of our crap jokes, which was kind of a week’s wages at the time for one joke.”

Edinburgh has become somewhere he has returned to frequently over the years, including with fellow comic Craig Ferguson.

“I used to go on tour with Craig Ferguson and I remember doing a gig with Craig for some murderer who was out of prison, and he had started some charity,” Enfield tells me. “He came to a gig we did in Edinburgh and then said, ‘Would you do a thing for our charity?’ And I didn’t know who he was, but Craig immediately went, ‘Yes, I will.’ And I thought, why are you being so agreeable? And he said, ‘He’s a murderer.’ ‘Oh, brilliant.’”

But it is Glasgow that Enfield has described as feeling “like a real home place”. The comic was working on a sketch TV show in the city in the mid-1980s and lived in Kelvinside.

“I just liked the fact that everyone took the piss out of everyone all the time. And it didn’t matter where I went, people took the piss out of me, obviously because I’m English, but they just had that great sense of humour,” he said. “It’s the same as Newcastle or somewhere like that. It’s like that thing of taking a piss out of you all the time. And I’d grown up like that with all my friends and my dad and things.”

Enfield celebrates his 65th birthday in May and has been in comedy for four decades, but his characters are still finding new audiences through social media. He describes his secondhand experience of social media.

“It’s sort of funny. I was out in Australia and New Zealand, there are all these people who’ve seen me on TikTok, they’ve never seen me on tele,” he says. “Recently, Kathy Burke sent me this picture that she got from Stephen Graham, and it was like a picture of Stephen Graham and Kevin, the teenager, being interviewed in a police station together. And it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah that’s great’. It’s a lovely thing when you’re basically at retirement age and these things that keep cropping up, it’s really nice.”