Where did Harry Enfield come from? By that I mean, he mostly just seemed to arrive in the public conciousness in 1986, fully-formed, seemingly out of nowhere.
He began writing gags for Week Ending, and moved to Spitting Image in 1985, where he was also doing voices. He was an impressionist on the live circuit, though I can find no reference to him in the newspaper archive before 1986. He didn’t even appear on Saturday Live until the fifth episode.
Even one of his more obscure credits comes in May of 1986, here in The Stage, which had weirdly decided to transpose the two paragraphs of this short article, so you need to read them backwards.
What’s interesting about this is that Enfield’s first appearance on Saturday Live was the week that Michael Barrymore hosted it.
Stavros and Lord Henry gained some popularity, but still didn’t really break through into the press. Enfield went on tour at the end of 1987 though, with support from one Bing Hitler.
And here’s a review of that particular show, from the Reading Evening Post on 13th October 1987.
This short tour followed a few different appearances on TV, including popping up on Lenny Henry Tonite, Girls On Top, Hale And Pace, Filthy Rich And Catflap, and French and Saunders. And this, much forgotten one too.
It’s not really until the arrival of Loadsamoney that we see an large uptick in the coverage of Enfield. Like this double page spread in the Illustrated London News on 1st July 1988.
It wouldn’t be long until Enfield was given his own show, and I imagine he was being offered lots of opportunities for Loadsamoney to be the focus. Instead, he opted to make Norbert Smith – A Life.
The answer to the question posed at the end of this review was, of course, this:
