‘It’s just two idiots and a lovely river’
Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer on life, death, comedy – and how they made fishing must-watch TV
On the first morning of filming the first series of Mortimer & Whitehouse:
Gone Fishing, one of the surprise television hits of last summer, Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer both had the same thought. “What have we done?” The comedians were beside the Derbyshire Wye, in the Peak District, with their fly-fishing rods and a camera crew. There was no plan, no script, nothing at all except “action – start fishing”, says Bob. “Beautiful backdrop, lovely river, two idiots,” says Paul.
They chattered on about “the autumn of our years” and neapolitan ice cream. Then Paul caught a fish. It was a wild rainbow trout that had swallowed a tiny artificial nymph. Bob brought the net down to the water’s edge: “And as I was landing it, Bob falls over and takes me out at the same time,” Paul says. “I’m in the mud, and I remember thinking, the angling world is going to crucify us for this.”
The opposite happened. Everyone loved the show. “Soothing and tender”; “warm and funny”; “the most therapeutic and relaxing show on television”, critics wrote. Fans who had watched the two for years with their regular comedy partners – Bob with Vic
Reeves on shows such as Shooting
Stars; Paul with Harry Enfield on
Harry & Paul – were seeing a different side of both. A second series is coming soon, and there’s a recently published book, Mortimer & Whitehouse – Gone Fishing: Life, Death and the Thrill of the Catch.
Paul, who had been fishing since early childhood, was the one with the angling skills; Bob had dabbled as a boy, but was basically hopeless. They discovered they liked fishing together after Paul appointed himself as the man to help Bob get over a triple heart bypass operation in 2015 – a brush with death that had left him “down in the dumps” and sitting around at home.
Paul, too, had experienced a serious heart problem – he’d had three stents fitted – but had also narrowly escaped with his life 12 years earlier, when he had to have his colon removed after an abscess exploded inside his large intestine.
In the show, they talk frankly – in alarming detail, sometimes – about their health issues. Bob cooks up a “heart-friendly” meal in every episode, and both mournfully yearn for the days when they could eat a steak and kidney pie.
Their openness struck a chord with audiences, and the response has surprised them. “It’s been much deeper than you usually get from comedy,” says Bob. “It’s really heartwarming.”
We’re sitting by the side of Regent’s Canal as it winds through north London. Paul has brought along a tiny rod, which he has baited with little balls of white bread, as he used to do as a boy growing up in Enfield, near the river Lea. “We won’t catch anything, we really won’t,” he says. “You always say that – it’s the fisherman’s curse,” says Bob, who is rolling bread into tiny balls and tossing them close to where the float is bobbing – occasionally popping them into his mouth as he talks.
Their chat has the same loose, meandering quality that it does on the show – a passing jogger is compared to a dressage horse, a youth riding a bike with no hands sparks a conversation about whether either of them could do that now, which takes a left turn that ends with Paul announcing: “All this nonsense about electric cars, we’ve still got to generate the power for them.”
“Eh up,” says Bob, in his soft North East lilt, “are you on some sort of rant?” “I am now,” says Paul, “yeah, I’m on it.”
A canal boat chunters by and a woman on it suddenly recognises Bob. “Oh, it’s Bob,” she cries. “Hello!” There is a sense that Bob and Paul could happily sit and do this for hours.
They suggest that fishing is a sort of “enforced mindfulness”, in which other things “gradually dissipate and fade away”, as Paul puts it. “I think it’s the perfect and most easily accessible form of mindfulness,” Bob says. “Stare at a float on a lake… it’s nine o’clock and then it’s 12 o’clock… and in those three hours nothing’s happened. It’s amazing.”
But isn’t that time commitment why people with busy lives feel they don’t have enough spare hours to take up fishing? “I didn’t think I had time for fishing before I fished,” Bob says, and then grins. “And now, I’m available to fish any time.”
Paul admits that he has been so busy this year with the musical version of Only Fools and Horses, which he co-wrote, and stars in as Grandad (he’s sporting the dyed barnet to match), that he’s barely had a moment to go fishing. “I think we’ve been twice, haven’t we?” he says to Bob, although he has plans to go with the actors playing Del Boy and Rodney later in the year.
He rhapsodises about the experience of sitting on a riverbank, describing it through the eyes of a wheelchair-using friend his father took with him to the River Usk in South Wales. “He watched the wagtails and dippers, dragonflies, trout rising, maybe a kingfisher – this extraordinary microcosm of nature – and you will not see those things, even if you go out rambling, you won’t see them like you do when you’re fishing, because as soon as you become still, it starts to come to you. If you’re walking through it, you’re disturbing it; if you’re sitting there immersed in it, it comes.”
Bob feels he is learning to love nature late in life. “I didn’t know these places existed, or I’d seen them on telly but didn’t know how you got to them. I’d never seen mayflies rise when they hatch…”
“They go from the larval stage to adult stage instantaneously,” Paul explains. “They come up to the surface and transform into these little fairies. It’s incredible.”
“It’s nice at 60 to be discovering a whole new thing,” concludes Bob.
They first got to know each other over 30 years ago, via Vic Reeves Big Night Out, the spoof variety show that Vic and Bob used to put on in south London in the mid-Eighties (“I used to drink a lot, blimey,” Bob recalls). Paul, at 61 a year older than Bob, and his pal Charlie Higson (the future Ted and Ralph of The Fast Show), turned up and performed a sketch, which went down badly. But a friendship developed, with Paul making regular appearances with Vic and Bob on their subsequent television shows, even though he was by now an established writer and performer with Harry Enfield. “When we did The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, you’d come along and play Nazis and things,” Bob recalls. “I’m the go-to for the Gestapo,” agrees Paul. In fact, they had been filming sketches with both playing members of the band Slade (with Vic as Noddy Holder) when the first episode of The Fast Show aired. “We were watching it in a hotel room, and I was like, ‘I can’t go in a room with all you lot and watch it,’” Paul says, “So I went for a walk.”
Did they hang out together when they were young, rich and famous comedians about town… meet you at the Groucho Club sort of thing? “Yeah, we used to go out and have
‘I didn’t think I had time for fishing before I fished. And now, I’m available to fish any time’
drinks, but you were a bit Grouchier than I was, weren’t you?” Paul says. “I was a terror,” admits Bob. “I would never say rich… but, yeah, hanging around with Damien Hirst and all that stuff.” Paul chirps up at this. “You’ve got one of his paintings, haven’t you? So, you are rich.”
“Then…” says Bob with a dramatic pause, “the children void. For 15 years, or something like that, I don’t know if I ever saw anyone.” (Bob has two sons, Harry, 22, and Tom, 20, with wife Lisa Matthews, whom he married half an hour before having open heart surgery; Paul has four daughters, Sophie, 26, and Molly, 24, from his first marriage, Lauren, 20, from a subsequent relationship, and Delilah, five, with his new partner.)
Paul suddenly becomes alert – “There are little fish in there, you know,” he says – and decides to refresh his bait. He recalls the time he hooked a big carp in a London canal as a boy, but it got away before he could land it. Mortimer talks of recapturing the joy of cycling off with his mates to fish, clearing nettles and climbing up the riverbank to find the stream.
What we see on screen harks back to the freshness and innocence of youth. “Between the age of 30 and going fishing, none of my friendships had any of that magic dust of when you were young,” Bob says. “There was a sort of functionality to them, just keeping in touch. ‘Oh, I should invite so and so, I haven’t seen them for ages.’” He compares it to the feeling of duty and the ceremony of going to dinner parties. “Even the words fill me with dread,” says Paul.
One noticeably boyish element of the show is how freely and cruelly they mock each other’s age and appearance. “You’re like a walnut in a scarf,” says Bob to Paul; “Everything about you screams ‘pensioner’,” says Paul to Bob. Do they ever upset one another? “No,” says Paul, “I do look like a walnut sometimes. We have no make-up or anything like that, and not many people grace our screens without it They don’t let you. Anyway, walnuts are really good for you. Difficult to get into, but once you’re there, oh, the benefits.”
Is the mockery peculiar to male friendship? “Women would never be abusive about physical appearance,” Paul says. “It’s a no-go area, but it’s an icebreaker for men.” “It’s terrible, really,” Bob avers, “to introduce someone, and say, ‘Oh, this is Paul, he’s a plonker’ – how sad is that?”
I ask them why, do they think, fishing is such an overwhelmingly male pursuit. Paul corrects me, and says women taking up fly fishing is one of the sport’s major growth areas.
He can be tetchy at times in the show, especially with Bob. Has he always been like that? Bob hoots. “I think it’s a fishing state of mind,” he says, “and I am literally like a mosquito… He gave me a right mouthful filming the first show of the new series in Wales, because I didn’t know a fish had taken his fly as I asked him yet another inane question.” The second series will be going out before the watershed,
though, so they’ve had to cut out the swearing. “I’m not normally a tetchy person, am I?” Paul insists. “I’m really not.”
The opening show sees the two attempting to catch a wild brown trout from the River Usk. It was particularly poignant for Paul, who was born in Wales, and often fished there with his father, who died last year. At the end of the episode, he goes off to scatter his ashes in the river; he recalls how beautiful the light was, as the sinking sun shone through the bridge on to the water. “It felt very fitting.”
Bob lost his own father, a biscuit salesman, in a car crash, when he was just seven years old. “I was so young when my dad died that I didn’t think it had affected me,” he says. “I had
such tiny memories of him, just little glimpses, I thought I had been unaffected. But then I realised, somewhere in my late 40s I think, that probably the defining thing in my whole life was losing my dad.”
They often discuss their own mortality on the show, too. In the new series, they go in search of the predatory perch, and attempt again to catch a pike, which eluded them last time round. They have identified six more species of fish they could catch if they were to be given a third series.
Paul acknowledges a debt to anglers who have fought to protect Britain’s waterways: “A lot of these species wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the efforts of anti-pollution angling groups.” Conservation is important to him. “Water abstraction is the biggest problem now. I can’t think of any major new reservoirs built in recent years. As more and more new houses get built, they just suck the water out of rivers. Those chalk streams in Hampshire and Dorset are an incredible little ecosystem that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
“I didn’t know this little world existed,” says Bob, “or how important it is to protect it.”
Our time is up. The fisherman’s curse has prevailed and we haven’t caught anything, but it’s been a morning well spent – just like in the show.
Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing returns to BBC Two this summer
One boyish element of the show is how freely they mock each other. ‘You’re like a walnut in a scarf,’ says Bob