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| Help | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Comedy |
| Starring | Paul Whitehouse Chris Langham |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 6 |
| Production | |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC Two |
| Original release | 27 February – 3 April 2005 |
Help is a BBC television comedy series first screened on BBC Two in 2005. Written by and starring Paul Whitehouse and Chris Langham, it concerns a psychotherapist (Langham) and his therapy sessions with a variety of patients, almost all of whom are played by Whitehouse.
BBC Two is the second flagship television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. It covers a wide range of subject matter, but tends to broadcast more "highbrow" programmes than the more mainstream and popular BBC One. Like the BBC's other domestic TV and radio channels, it is funded by the television licence, and is therefore free of commercial advertising. It is a comparatively well-funded public-service network, regularly attaining a much higher audience share than most public-service networks worldwide.
Paul Julian Whitehouse is a Welsh actor, writer and comedian. He was one of the main stars of the BBC sketch comedy series The Fast Show, and has also starred with Harry Enfield in the shows Harry & Paul and Harry Enfield and Chums. In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, he was in the top 50 comedy acts voted for by comedians and comedy insiders.
Christopher Langham is an English writer, actor, and comedian. He is known for playing the cabinet minister Hugh Abbot in the BBC Four sitcom The Thick of It, and as presenter Roy Mallard in People Like Us, first on BBC Radio 4 and later on its transfer to television on BBC Two, where Mallard is almost entirely an unseen character. He subsequently created several spoof adverts in the same vein. He also played similar unseen interviewers in an episode of the television series Happy Families and in the film The Big Tease. He is also known for his roles in the TV series Not the Nine O'Clock News, Help, Kiss Me Kate, and as the gatehouse guard in Chelmsford 123. In 2006, he won BAFTA awards for The Thick of It and Help.
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Peter Strong, the diffident psychologist, has an obsession with his receptionist Rebecca (played by Alison King) and also has regular appointments with his own therapist (who is also played by Whitehouse), the only times when the scene leaves Peter's office. Other performers are Mark Williams and Olivia Colman in cameos as patients, Alison Senior as a patient's wife, and Langham's real-life daughter Emily as a patient's precocious daughter. Two of the most frequent patients are Gary (the only role Whitehouse plays with no make-up), who initially uses his therapy sessions to escape from his wife; and Monty, an elderly Jewish taxi-driver whose wife is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Others include an Eastern European father, a magician and a TV presenter.
Alison Rosamund King is an English actress and model. She has had television roles as Lynda Block in the Sky One drama series Dream Team, and in Coronation Street as Mrs Fanshaw and later as Carla Connor. She won Best Actress at the 2012 British Soap Awards.
Mark Williams is an English actor, screenwriter and presenter. He is best known as Arthur Weasley in the Harry Potter films, and as one of the stars of the popular BBC sketch show The Fast Show. He also played Brian Williams in the BBC series Doctor Who, and Olaf Petersen in Red Dwarf. “ More recently he has appeared as the title character in the BBC series Father Brown.
Sarah Caroline Olivia Colman is an English actress. She is the recipient of several awards, including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, four British Independent Film Awards, the Volpi Cup for Best Actress and a BFI Fellowship.
The show was released on Region 4 DVD, but has so far remained unreleased in the UK. Since August 2014 all episodes have been available on YouTube. Interviewed by Ben Thompson for The Guardian in 2005, Langham said, of his writing partnership with Whitehouse:
YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, the Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders.
The way Paul works is to try and come up with a phrase that suits a particular voice ... That's the grain of sand around which the pearl of a character forms. Once he's found that voice, he's volcanic - it all comes out of him in a stream of consciousness which I can't type fast enough to keep up with. Then my rather less glamorous and exciting job would be to take that stuff and shape it, which was fine by me, as I'm kind of obsessed with structure. [1]
In 2007 the development of Pedro, a character in the proposed second series - which was never made - became a focal point of Langham's trial.
