Comedians on fishing, friendship and facing mortality
YOU MIGHT wonder how a programme about fishing could be particularly funny. But give Paul Whitehouse (an experienced angler) and Bob Mortimer (a complete novice) a couple of rods, then follow their expeditions to various fishing spots across the country, and you’re bound to get some laughs.
New BBC Two series,
was also a poignant trip for the long-time friends, as they’ve both suffered complex heart diseases in recent years. And as well as candidly discussing coming faceto-face with mortality, we will also see them chat about everything from fame to relationships and romance.
Whitehouse, 60, famous for cocreating BBC sketch show
knows the idea sounds corny. But he maintains this project with Mortimer “came out of real life”.
“We are old friends, and we both had heart problems and heart disease, and I was a bit more down the line of recovery when I found out about Bob, and I was sort of designated stent buddy of the comedy world, wasn’t I?”
“It was really nice of you, because I don’t go out or anything,” replies Middlesbrough native Mortimer, 59, who had a triple heart bypass in 2015.
“Paul knew it would be difficult to get me out and about again, so he used this ruse.”
But, the hobby of fishing didn’t come out of nowhere – it was something the pair had talked about in the past. “It’s something I’ve done always, since I was a kid, and you used to do it as a kid,”
Whitehouse, who was born in Wales but grew up in London, points out to his friend. “So we started going fishing, we enjoyed it and we thought it was quite a humorous idea, these two old idiots, really, behaving like children.”
It’s undeniable that Mortimer, known for his work in a double act with Vic Reeves, and Whitehouse make for a laugh-out-loud comedy duo. However, the show takes a slightly more serious tone at times.
Episode two sees the chatty pair have some conversations about death and their own funerals, after they walk through a graveyard on the way down to the river in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.
“When you’re told that you’ve got heart disease – not that we spend a lot of time agonising about it – it is there lurking at the back of your mind,” says father-of-four Whitehouse, who had three stents inserted in his heart a few years ago to help blood flow.
While each episode has a sort of theme, the comics explain they wanted to do a show that comes out of a “genuine shared experience”.
“We didn’t ever want there to be a voiceover to try to pretend that something happened, or that there was some reason for us going somewhere, so we’d got to kind of fill all that,” says Mortimer.
“The way to do it in other shows is you agree what you’re going to be saying. But we had nothing – this is really what two old blokes being friends is like.”
The show is certainly a great insight into both men’s personal lives, and it’s refreshing how open they are, particularly about their health struggles, in real life too. When Mortimer was told he needed heart surgery because his arteries were 95 per cent blocked, he admits it came totally out of the blue.
“I went to the GP because I’d just had the tiniest little distant pain just under my rib, and my mam had always said you go cold on your chest,” he recalls. “And then four days later I was being sawn open.”
The comedian actually wed his partner of 22 years, Lisa Matthews (with whom he has two grown-up sons) on the morning of the operation. “Doctors do that speech, ‘There’s a very small chance that we...’ and the wife was waiting... I couldn’t speak, I just wanted to weep.”
starts on BBC Two on Wednesday June 20.