the times | Monday December 6 2021 5
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Big Mouth and appearances on sundry
panel shows, above all A League of
Their Own. The Sky sports show
granted him a social circle to which
public-school comedians have not
traditionally had access. Halfway
through our conversation he shows
me a picture of him in Mykonos with
Dele Alli, Wilfried Zaha, Jack Grealish
and a mystery woman.
Then came Fresh Meat, his first
dramatic role, and Bad Education, the
comedy he co-wrote and starred in as
an incompetent teacher. Money-wise,
he says even the Netflix largesse pales
in comparison to the money he
makes from touring. But Travels with
My Father was undoubtedly his big
break internationally, a semi-scripted
travelogue in which he and Michael,
his cantankerously Tory theatrical-
agent father, trundled around getting
into scrapes. It ended this year after
five series, two books and a live tour.
Did working together affect family
relations? “My dad and I have always
had a business relationship. I seek his
counsel on big decisions, although I
have to remember that an 81-year-old
man is possibly not the best industry
tastemaker right now.” Recently he
hired his younger brother, Barney,
to help to manage his publicity. “I
approach working with family with
trepidation,” he says, “because my dad
has had so many friendships with
clients that have fallen apart. With
family it’s even more complicated and
high stakes.” His sister, Molly, remains
off the books and has a successful PR
agency of her own. “She’s the centre
of the family, really,” he says. “The
glue that keeps us all together.”
If the early years of his career
hopped around opportunistically,
recently his path has had a clearer
shape. His ultimate aim, he says, is to
have control over his own comic films,
like his heroes Eddie Murphy and
Steve Martin. That meant finally
saying goodbye to A League of Their
Own, after a decade. “That was one
of the hardest things to walk away
from because it was so much fun.
But every time I got strapped into a
harness and had a rugby ball thrown
at my head I thought, I’m getting
further and further away from being
cast in a Wes Anderson film.”
With age has come more
responsibility around his public
utterances too. The Jack the lad whowas sometimes reported stumbling
out of nightclubs or saying the wrong
thing has become better at managing
the press. He sidestepped the minor
social media furore about Disney
casting him as a gay character in
Jungle Cruise — he lives with his
girlfriend, the unimprovably named
model Roxy Horner, in the house in
Notting Hill he bought at the
beginning of this year.
Aside from that, he says that he
doesn’t have many luxuries. “I don’t
buy art, I don’t buy wine, I can’t drive
so I don’t buy cars,” he says. Last year
he quietly donated at least £12,000 to
help to save the Manchester comedy
club Frog & Bucket. While he has to
watch what he says with diary
columnists, he is not yet pining for a
cabin in the woods. “If having a few
articles in the Daily Mail that make
me cringe every couple of months
means I don’t have to get up and get
the Tube at 7am, that doesn’t seem
that bad,” he says.
Stand-up is taking a back seat while
he focuses on films. Partly it’s because
he has exhausted his material. At an
age when his friends and peers are
settling down and starting families,
the kinds of topics comedians thrive
on, Whitehall’s life is mostly work.
“After my last tour I realised I had
run out of life experience to mine,”
he says. “I can entertain a crowd, but
I’m not there in terms of being able to
be introspective in a way that is
interesting and honest and truthful.
I’d like to come back to stand-up
when I have something that can
resonate more.”
Until then, there are Hollywood
films to be made — and vodka
cocktails to be imbibed. “The saving
grace is that it’s not, like, ‘Jack sold
out because he used to be such a
man of the people,’ ” he says, laughing.
“My life was never relatable.”I approach
working with
family with
trepidation
DAVE BENETT/GETTY IMAGESwell remembered because it isn’t
very good.
Eyes Wide Shut — Even with social
distancing as relaxed as it now is, it’s
hard to see how anyone in 2021
would want to stage the sort of party
held by the characters in Eyes Wide
Shut. It wasn’t so much that the party
took the form of a massed masked
orgy, which is a superspreader event
of impossible magnitude, more that
every single person in attendance
looked bored out of their minds.
The Omen — Young Damien
Thorn’s birthday party should have
been a joyous occasion, with food
and funfair rides aplenty. However,
the shine was taken off it a little by
the sudden suicide of his nanny.
Childcare staff murdering
themselves in front of dozens of
children in a bid to appease the
eternal fury of our dark lord
Satan is just one of the
many reasons why
children’s parties are
often quite bad.
The Birds — It
might not have
looked it at the time,
but little Cathy
Brenner’s birthday
party should have
formed the perfect
Covid-compliant party
blueprint. It was held
outside. It was sparsely
attended. It was just about
as drab and as miserable as
anyone could have imagined.
However, it was also terrorised by
a flock of militant and vengeful
seagulls, which was less than ideal.
Festen — And then we have the
worst onscreen party of all time.
Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen is a
start-to-finish nightmare. The whole
film is shot through with examples of
the very worst behaviour imaginable.
Violence. Racism. Sexual abuse.
Incest. It is relentlessly brushed over
by the partygoers, who just want to
have a good time. Obviously your
office Christmas party will never be
like Festen, because it is about a
family who have built up decades and
decades of unspoken resentments.
But, hey, isn’t it worth a shot? Bring
on December 2022.Was Kendall’s terrible 40th the
worst ever party on screen?
Stuart Heritage on the most cringeworthy bashes
O
nce again, the fate of the
Christmas party has been
left up in the air. The
spread of the Omicron
variant has weaponised
everything we used to like about
festive get-togethers — the people,
the dancing, the mistletoe — and
now firms are racing to call theirs
off before it’s too late.
And that’s probably a good thing.
After all, we all know that Christmas
parties are terrible. In fact, all parties
in general are terrible, as evidenced
by these catastrophic examples from
film and television.
Succession — Kendall Roy’s 40th
birthday party will go down in
history as one of the worst ever
conceived. The planning of it was bad
enough: Kendall’s guests had to walk
through a giant representation of his
mother’s vagina, plus the birthday
boy wanted to sing a song to his
guests while literally strapped to a
cross. As you would imagine, the
whole thing ended in misery and
tantrums and panic attacks.
Trading Places — Just as bad was
the Christmas party of Duke & Duke
Commodity Brokers in Trading
Places. This time, however, the
party was unravelled by just one
individual: recently dismissed
employee Louis Winthorpe III
(Dan Aykroyd), who turned up in a
ratty Santa suit, stole the food then
pulled a gun on everybody.
Die Hard — If you ever find
yourself wishing that your work
Christmas party wasn’t called off,
remember the fate of the 1988
Nakatomi Plaza partygoers. Not
only was it pretty awful to
begin with, thanks to its
contingent of coked-up
yuppies, but then the
whole thing had to end
thanks to the sudden
arrival of some
machinegun-wielding
terrorists. Count
yourself lucky that
all you have to do
this year is drink
a premix cocktail
over Zoom.
The Office — That
said, what should put
you off your work’s
Christmas party is the final
episode of The Office. A
relentlessly dispiriting get-
together from start to finish,
Wernham Hogg’s party was studded
with miserable small talk, awkward
silences, painful longing and
drunken aggression. This is really
what you’ll be missing this year. It’s
no great loss.
Office Christmas Party — This
comedy is only five years old, yet it is
barely remembered. That’s a shame,
because it acts as a compendium of
everything that can go wrong at a
corporate Christmas party. There are
drugs. There is sex. A celebrity shows
up for no reason, as does a prostitute
and her pimp. Company property is
destroyed. There is a full-blown riot.
Then again, perhaps the film isn’tCount
yourself
lucky all
you have
to do is
drink
over
Zoom
Dasha Nekrasova
and Jeremy Strong
in Succession.
Below: Ricky
Gervais, Mackenzie
Crook, Lucy Davis
and Martin Freeman
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