Harry Enfield and No Chums! review – the head of our comedy state takes a trip down memory lane

Barbican Centre, London
From Stavros to Wayne Slob, Loadsamoney to DJ Dave Nice, the 64-year-old distilled whole characters and social types

To younger audiences, Harry Enfield may be best known for his Prince-turned-King Charles in Channel 4 satirical soap opera The Windsors – and it’s in character as the monarch that he enters the stage for this Audience With … event, reviewing his whole career. By the end, he’s staked a strong claim to be considered head of our comedy state, with a show anthologising a formidably comprehensive array of personae, catchphrases and showbiz anecdotes from Enfield’s 40-plus years making funny TV.

Not for the first time in career retrospectives like this, I came away marvelling at just how many indelible characters and sketches of Enfield’s have entered common currency; have become totems, indeed, of the times in which we live(d). Not that Enfield makes any such claims for himself; there’s nothing self-congratulatory about this show. Quite the opposite: the 64-year-old wears his iconoclasm like a badge of pride, with material that’s often as indelicate as the best of the jokes with which, back in the 80s and 90s, he made his name.