‘I like to think that comedy is a meritocracy’

Jack Whitehall’s father is a showbusiness agent who packed him off to public school but, he tells Chris Harvey, connections count for nothing if you’re rubbish

Jack Whitehall is sitting on a sofa, drinking coffee and occasionally munching on an almond biscuit. It’s the morning after the final date of a 55-night stand-up tour, which came to a rather underwhelming close at the East of England Arena. “The last event they had in there was the Peterborough biscuit festival,” he explains. “There was no dressing room or toilet backstage, so I had to use this weird box in a dog ring that was over the way. It was the most depressing end to a tour I’ve ever had.”

He has found that a sense of emptiness generally follows the buzz of being on stage each night, bringing the chance to reflect on the more embarrassing moments. “Maybe I’m two years older, or have drunk too much, but I had maybe four times on stage where I completely blanked and I didn’t know what was next or where I was in the show; one in particular in Brighton where I just completely forgot. It’s so horrible – you feel so vulnerable and at sea.”

Before he next embarks on a tour, he’s planning to develop strategies in case it happens again – unless he decides to give up stand-up for good, which he thinks he probably will at some point. That would be a bold decision for the 28-year-old, who has graduated from a Best Comedy Newcomer nomination at the Edinburgh Festival in 2009, to stadium-scale fame. In 2011, he also embarked on a TV acting career as the posh, entitled JP in Channel 4’s student comedy Fresh Meat; one year later, in his own co-written sitcom Bad Education, he played a teacher who is more immature than his pupils.

We’ve met in a central London hotel to discuss his latest role, in the BBC One adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s 1928 debut novel Decline and Fall. Whitehall grew up with it. “It was my dad’s favourite book – he gave it to me when I was at school.” His father, with whom he once shared a TV chat show, is Michael Whitehall, a former showbiz agent who used to look after Judi Dench and Colin Firth. “I phoned my dad and said, ‘ You’ll never believe what’s arrived in front of me’, and he said, ‘Don’t f--this up’.”

He plays Paul Pennyfeather, an Oxford undergraduate who is sent down for indecent behaviour after becoming the victim of a prank by the Bollinger Club – a thinly disguised depiction of the Bullingdon Club – then finds himself teaching at a grotty public school in Wales. It’s a very black comedy. “That’s what appeals to me, more than Wodehouse – Waugh’s humour has a darkness, a real cruelty to it,” Whitehall says.

Pennyfeather is an innocent surrounded by grotesques and thus Whitehall is almost the straight man. “I have always enjoyed doing that,” he says. “I don’t have to be the source of the comedy.” I’m not sure whether to believe him. It’s hard to capture but in person there’s a sort of playful looseness to him, close to what someone is like when they’ve had a few drinks and “let go”. Words slide into other words as though sounding consonants is just too much like hard work; laughter is always close.

He’s a terrible corpser, he says, and on Decline and Fall he was often reduced to fits of giggles watching David Suchet play the school’s principal, and acting opposite Douglas Hodge as the alcoholic schoolmaster Captain Grimes. Whitehall pitches his performance carefully. His character is the only one who has self-awareness, and he displays considerable subtlety to stay in step with a brilliant cast.

The mini-series is a lovingly crafted attempt to capture Waugh’s capricious, taboo-breaking humour; his mockery of the Welsh has survived, although the adaptation stops short of depicting the overt racism of some of the characters towards a black American jazz musician. Perhaps even more difficult to deal with, though, is the character of Grimes. He is based on a schoolmaster who Waugh met when he was teaching in Wales shortly after leaving Oxford University, and whom he described as “monotonously pederastic and talks only of the beauty of sleeping boys”. Grimes is,

‘I like Waugh’s humour – it has a darkness, a real cruelty to it’