When Jack Whitehall had his front door stolen in Fallowfield, he did what any self-respecting student would do. He taped a bin bag to the door frame and carried on as normal. Similarly, when a lightbulb went, he and his housemates just resigned themselves to that room being ‘just for the daytime’.
One of the UK’s most well-known stand-up comedians has much more in common with his character JP, the feckless posh boy from Fresh Meat - the Channel 4 student sitcom penned by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong - than you might think.
He says that when his landlord came to get the keys back from them as they were about to move out, he actually ‘started welling up’ on seeing what they’d done to the place. “It was disrespectful,” he admits.
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A couple of weeks later, one of his housemates would get a call from the aforementioned landlord, asking why there was rope, bloodstains and what looked like a crime scene in the basement.
“We’d had a murder mystery party,” he says. “He asked ‘is there anything you want to tell me? Has anything gone on in the house?’ which was pretty cool. His first instinct wasn’t to just rat us out to the police.”
Whitehall, who these days appears in Hollywood movies with The Rock and Emily Blunt, spent many years living in Manchester. Last week, he was back in town for a warm-up show, trying out his new tour material in Blackburn.
We meet at Indian street food institution Bundobust, off Piccadilly Gardens, but shoot a few pictures on Back Piccadilly, the slightly dicey alleyway behind. “I can do urban and gritty,” he jokes, having spent the bulk of his career sending up his own inescapable poshness.
He first arrived in the city after making a mess of his interview for Cambridge University. He found he’d made the right choice not long after when he was invited to spend a weekend with a friend who had made it to the famous college.
He’d been promised a ‘good night out’ but found himself at a dormitory port and cheese party where there was lots of ‘talk of literature’. He might have had a bin bag for a door, but Manchester was where he’d spend the best years of his life.
He only lasted two terms of his Art History degree after he realised that lectures on tapestries weren’t really going to help advance his comedy career. He started his own comedy night, with the on-the-nose title Comedy Sluts at the now-closed venue Sub Space, off Oxford Road, and booked some impressive emerging talent.
He compered before the likes of Matt Horne, Russell Kane and James Corden, as well as locals like Jason Cook, Steve Shanyaski and Dan Nightingale. He recalls booking John Bishop, then a well-respected local jobbing comedian but miles from the household name he is now.
There had been ‘an accounting error’, Whitehall says, meaning that they didn’t have enough money to pay him. So they gave him what they had, and made up the rest in laughing gas balloons. “He went off to do some late night radio interview on BBC Radio Manchester, and was spinning out.”
“I picked Manchester because I thought that I’d come here, coast through it, and quit as soon as I could convince my parents that stand-up was a viable career choice,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting to come here and completely fall in love with it and have the best time of my life.
“Instead, I couldn’t quit it. After I started getting paid, I continued to live in a student house in Fallowfield on Egerton Road for two years. It was like the Fresh Meat house, but about 10 times worse.
“I remember one of the first times I ever got paid properly for a set, me and my friend got over excited and went into the Northern Quarter with my pay cheque, and came back with a crossbow,” he goes on. “I don’t know why. We set up a firing range with a mattress in the garden, then realised not long after that having a crossbow in the house was not a good idea.”
It was during his two years running the club that he found his ‘schtick’, the persona that has seen him headline stadium shows around the UK. Without that time, he perhaps wouldn’t be where he is now.
“I thought ‘I’m going to own that I’m this posh fop and send that up, take the p**s out of it rather than shy away from it’. Over the space of that couple of years, I arrived at that place, and I created that persona that people now recognise as me on stage. And I had far more success as a comic the minute I unlocked that.”
He recalls returning to Manchester to play the then-MEN Arena on one occasion, and later the same evening finding himself in an unexpected lock-in at infamous Fallowfield off licence and newsagent Gaff’s. “It was the most surreal experience, playing the MEN and then back to a lock-in at a newsagents, but it was great.” The nostalgia is real.
One place he doesn’t miss is the old Comedy Store. “Jim Jeffries got punched while he was on stage,” he recalls. “A heckler came up and punched him in the face. So he downed the rest of his pint and carried on with his set. Very Jim Jeffries.
“That was a hard room. It was because it was a night out. People were there to get tanked up on Deansgate Locks, then you’d better be funny. Get it on the wrong night, and it was a bear pit.”
But it was at a biker pub in Oldham some time in the early 2000s that he had one of his most cringeworthy moments. “I remember very few specifics,” he says. “But it wasn’t great. It was a biker bar, and there was a load of biker memorabilia on the walls. Every comic got warned not to mention it. Except me. I made a load of jokes about it, and it turned out that the landlady’s husband had had a bike accident, or something like that, but no one had said.
“There might have even been a whole motorbike hanging up on the wall, so it would have been weird not to mention it. It was tumbleweed. Chased out of town. Not my finest moment. Basically never turn up to gigs late, and always do a bit of digging around. I learned that.”
When he came back to Manchester in 2010 to start filming Fresh Meat, in a mocked up student house in Whalley Range, something he’d do every summer for four years, he recalls being here for a few momentous occasions. “I remember the riots,” he says.
“I remember seeing some people looting a Lidl, and thinking ‘maybe the one advantage of looting is that you pick wherever you want’. I was here when Rangers had that European cup final and the whole city became a war zone. I was in Piccadilly, stuck in this ground zero of absolute carnage.”
He ‘fell in love with the city all over again’, he says, spending days and nights on end at King’s Arms in Salford, where a chunk of the series’ pub scenes were filmed. “It would switch back into being a pub as soon as we’d finish, so it was quite dangerous.”
“I’ve done drag on Canal Street with Belinda Scandal. I stayed at her house and she taught me how to do drag,” he says. “It was a great experience."
“I always used to open with a load of jokes about the Manchester Eye,” he says. “I was on it once with a friend. We thought it would be funny to moon the people in the Arndale Centre as we went down, failing to realise that it had about 20 rotations and then realising we’d committed far too early.
“We did it on the second rotation, so we had to go past the same people another 18 times on the Arndale viewing platform. Their look of disgust. Maybe that’s why they got rid of it. Complaints were made about a very pasty set of buttocks pressed against the window.”
So the city will always hold a special place in his heart, wherever he is. Which, increasingly often, is the US, or up until 2021 travelling the world with his father, acting agent Michael Whitehall on their hit Netflix series Travels With My Father.
Oh, and just in case you were wondering, The Rock is very nice. Whitehall appeared with him in the 2021 Disney movie Jungle Cruise, along with Emily Blunt, as sidekick foppish MacGregor Houghton (a sequel is reportedly in the offing).
“He’s great. Very nice man, very generous,” he says. “He did me over though on that film though. For the wrap present, he gave his stunt double the keys to a new truck. The guy started crying and everyone applauded. I bought my stunt double a candle.
“Dwayne didn’t give us the heads up to do our presents first. So I had to follow a truck with a single wick candle.”
Jack Whitehall’s Settle Down tour arrives at the AO Arena on June 21. Tickets are available now.
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