‘I am very definitely the poshest man ever to have hosted the Brits,’ says Jack Whitehall as he chews on a dreary-looking ham and cheese baguette.
‘The irony is that the biggest stories in British music this year have been grime and Stormzy [the working-class rapper from Croydon]. And there I am, at the absolute other end of the scale, fronting the whole show. I’m bloody terrified. This is the biggest gig in the business. I’m trying very hard not to freak myself out.’
Whitehall, 29, may be Bertie Wooster-style posh, but it has not stopped him becoming a comedy icon, with almost six million followers on Twitter. From Channel 4’s Fresh Meat to the BBC’s Bad Education and Netflix series Travels With My Father, it’s hard to get away from the comedian. Following a critically acclaimed, and for him, unusually straight role, in the BBC’s adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh classic Decline And Fall, he also made inroads into Hollywood, appearing with Julia Roberts in Mother’s Day.
Jack Whitehall, 29, may be Bertie Wooster-style posh, but it has not stopped him becoming a comedy icon, with almost six million followers on Twitter
Critics have accused Whitehall of having it easier than most stars, as it’s fair to say he was born with a silver spoon wedged firmly between his teeth. Something he acknowledged on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs last week when he explained that at his birth, both his godfather, Nigel Havers, and the gynaecologist who delivered him were wearing black tie. (The former – his father’s best friend – had been trying on jackets when he got the call to rush to the hospital, the latter had been speaking at a convention that same night.) The eldest child of celebrity agent Michael Whitehall and actress Hilary Gish, he grew up in west London and was sent to boarding school at 11, first to the Dragon School in Oxford and then to Marlborough College.
Being posh and privileged has ‘definitely helped me,’ he says. ‘I think because of who my father was and because of the people I knew, doors would open and I could get a leg up. But to survive in this business you have to actually be good, because comedy is a meritocracy and I had to make a lot of mistakes before I actually got good at it. And I never stop working, because I’m always trying to get better.’
Whitehall got his first break in television aged 19 as the host of Channel 4’s Big Brother’s Big Mouth. His schedule is now so rammed that, after six series, he’s had to bow out of the panel show A League Of Their Own – prompting ‘a huge amount of abuse’ from co-stars James Corden, Jamie Redknapp and Freddie Flintoff.
‘Liam Gallagher came up to me at the GQ Awards recently and told me my dad was much funnier than me’
‘They’re not happy with me,’ he says. ‘I’m getting lots of berating texts. I’m really sad about it, even though I spent a lot of time wearing latex and getting gunk thrown over me on the show. But I have no time.’
After initially wanting to act, perhaps egged on by his godparents, Havers and the late Richard Griffiths, he began performing stand-up after a brief spell at Manchester University. ‘I liked making people laugh,’ he says. ‘I always knew I was a bit odd. I was always dressing up and doing silly things as a child. Comedy just suited me.’
His first gigs were in small pubs and clubs around Manchester followed by shows in London, and while his posh persona is now well established, it took a while to find that voice: ‘There were various incarnations early on [where I] literally talked like Danny Dyer. My dad was horrified. “Why do you keep dropping all your consonants?” he told Desert Island Discs. By 2007, he was winning awards at the Edinburgh Fringe and was a finalist at the Hackney Empire New Act of The Year.
Whitehall is proud of grafting to get where he is. ‘Before you are successful, you have to be rubbish and you have to die on stage,’ he says. ‘You have to handle people not laughing at you, and you have to work out who you are. I performed at a pub in London in front of six people. No one laughed. I collapsed into a stuttering, stammering mess. But it teaches you because you have to learn what works.’
At 19, he became friends with fellow comic Mathew Horne and they ‘bullied the producers of Big Brother’s Big Mouth’ into giving him the job as presenter after Russell Brand left the show, but he confesses that he can’t watch those episodes. ‘They make me cringe,’ he says. ‘I didn’t really know what I was doing.
‘I had zero experience of television. I was making it all up as I was going along. I remember having to interview Lee Ryan, who was in Celebrity Big Brother [in 2009], and it being a complete car crash. I’d never done an interview before. He was being very eccentric and I had no idea what to say to him.’ He pauses and looks momentarily nervous. ‘I’m definitely not the best interviewer. I had Joan Collins on my Backchat show with my dad, and halfway through she got up and said she was going because she had a dinner reservation. I told her she couldn’t because we hadn’t finished the show. In the end we had to tempt her to stay with a lot of champagne – but she was absolutely prepared to walk out on me. Mortifying.’
In order to avoid mortification at the Brits he has asked for advice from his old mate Corden, who has hosted the show five times and whom Whitehall is rumoured to be replacing should Corden leave his presenting role on The Late Late Show. ‘He said, “Don’t make jokes that sound like jokes and don’t leave gaps for a punchline, because it won’t work.” I’m thinking of this show as my rehearsal for the Brits 2019, by which time I’ll be brilliant, though Liam Gallagher came up to me at the GQ Awards recently and told me my dad was much funnier than me.’
Whitehall (top right) with the cast of Channel 4 series Fresh Meat
Whitehall dated Humans actress Gemma Chan for six years until 2017, but his date for the Brits will be his mum.
His own experience of being a pop star is limited to a ‘house shout’ show at his public school, where he performed an overly enthusiastic rendition of the dance hit Numa Numa. ‘I went out there and gave it my all thinking I was doing brilliantly,’ says Whitehall. ‘After I’d performed, the housemaster told me he was going to drug-test me. He thought I was going so mad on stage I had to be on drugs. So I definitely won’t be singing at the Brits.’
Jack Whitehall presents the Brit Awards with Mastercard live on Wednesday at 8pm on ITV