Early Career
Whitehouse attended the University of East Anglia in Norwich from Autumn 1977, where he made friends with Charlie Higson. The pair spent little of their first year studying, instead playing guitar and performing with their punk rock combo, the Right Hand Lovers, along with other university friends Kevin Buckland and Dave Cummings.
Whitehouse dropped out and lived with other drop-outs in a council flat in Hackney, east London and occasionally worked as a plasterer. After Higson graduated in 1980, he moved in with Whitehouse, working by day as a decorator and performing at night and the weekends with his new punk-funk group The Higsons.
The pair began working as tradesmen on a house shared by comedians Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, which inspired them to start writing comedy. They moved to an estate where in a pub they met Harry Enfield, a neighbour with a stage act, and after he gained a place on Channel 4's Saturday Live, the pair were invited to write for him. Whitehouse created Enfield's character Stavros a London-based Greek kebab shop owner, and then Loadsamoney an archetypal Essex boy made good in Margaret Thatcher's 1980s; he also appeared as Enfield's sidekick Lance on Saturday Live.
This success turned Whitehouse and Higson's career, and they began to appear on shows such as Vic Reeves' Big Night Out and extensively for the BBC, with Whitehouse appearing on A Bit of Fry and Laurie as a man with a clinical need to have his bottom fondled, and Paul Merton: The Series, then as performer on shows such as Harry Enfield's Television Programme, where he developed numerous characters including DJ Mike Smash of Smashie and Nicey alongside Harry Enfield as Nicey.
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