Harry Enfield is bringing a character the BBC refused to broadcast to Swansea, as part of his first ever solo tour.
The comedy icon plays Swansea Building Society Arena on Monday 12 October with Harry Enfield and No Chums, his first live shows since touring with Paul Whitehouse in 2015.
The show mixes storytelling with sketches, taking audiences behind his best-known creations: Loadsamoney, Stavros, Wayne and Waynetta Slob, Smashie and Nicey and the Surgeons among them.
And there is one act he has been saving for four decades. “There is one character that the BBC wouldn’t go for,” Enfield said. “Geoffrey Perkins drew the line at that one. But I’m going to do it onstage, so if you buy a ticket you’ll see that.”
Some old favourites have moved with the times. “DJ Nicey is back! He has a podcast and it’s very, very, very right-wing. He keeps getting cancelled and coming back. Angry Frank is still angry.”
Loadsamoney, the cash-waving plasterer who defined the late eighties, has also had an update. “Money is everything now. The rich have got richer. The poor have got poorer. I imagine that he now runs Pimlico Plasterers and he’s gone to live in Dubai in case Labour tax him more.”
The 64-year-old admits the tour came about almost by accident, after Fane Productions approached him. “It sounded fun. You know, if people ask me to do something, I tend to do it. Otherwise, I’m just quite happy sort of pottering around, really.”
Nerves, he says, are no longer a problem. “When I was young and used to do characters in clubs I was really nervous. That’s why I stopped as soon as I could. Now I’m so old I don’t care anymore.”
The stripped-back format was his idea after the 2015 tour with Whitehouse, when the pair “spent all our money on making it a slick show with loads of costumes and sets”. He suggested a simpler evening of chat and sketches. “The next thing I know, he was doing that with The Fast Show reunion tour.”
Rewatching his old shows to prepare left him pleasantly surprised. “I thought they were really funny. We really got something right about a lot of things. And now I can see when I watch that stuff that Paul was a f***ing genius.”
He remains devoted to the Slobs. “I love Wayne and Waynetta. I love them all, actually. I’m very proud of them. I do a bit of Wayne and Waynetta in the show, they are probably great, great, great grandparents by now.”
To those who suggest his characters punch down, or that he should not have played kebab shop owner Stavros, he is unrepentant: “They are all just comic book characters. My thing is always mischief, not malice. Anyone who wants to take offence has got no sense of humour as far as I’m concerned.”
There is a soft centre too. Enfield helped bring up Lily Allen while he was the partner of her mother Alison Owen, and says the singer’s latest album “is a work of genius”. A seven-year-old Lily even appeared in one of his Old Gits sketches, giggling every time she passed the camera.
The tour opens at Exeter on Saturday 10 October, making Swansea its second night, before more than 30 dates across Britain and Ireland through to the end of November.
Tickets for the Swansea show are available at fane.co.uk. The arena’s autumn also brings Queen drummer Roger Taylor, who closes his only UK tour of the year there on 29 September.
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