Harry Enfield is a British comic actor who rose to fame in the mid-late 80s on the TV shows Saturday Night Live and Friday Night Live (Channel 4's attempt to import the US format to the UK, which also featured Ben Elton and very often Emo Phillips, Stephen Fry, Josie Lawrence and many other people who later became very successful).

Enfield had two successful running characters - Stavros (full name Stavros Dukakis - a distant cousin of the then Democrat candidate) and Loadsamoney, a rather patronising parody of the nouveau riche former working class people who became successful in the short-lived 80s boom. He also had another running character on the show, Buggerallmoney, a Geordie relative of Loadsamoney who was rather less successful.

Although he was considered 'alternative' at the time, the basic strands of his comedy were already apparent - as fondue puts it above, 'Belittling Poor and/or Foreign People'. It was at this time he also started 'writing with' Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, who co-wrote the rather dull spinoff book Wad And Peeps with him, and also had some involvement in the Loadsamoney single. (Wad And Peeps however has a rather prophetic parody article from the year 2000 showing Enfield as a fat, unfunny, Jimmy Tarbuck like family entertainer.)

In the early 90s, after Friday Night Live ended, Enfield got his own show, Harry Enfield's Television Programme (later Harry Enfield And Chums, which set the tone for his career for the rest of the 90s - catchphrase based one-joke characters and a reliance on far funnier people to work for him - Whitehouse, Higson, Ian Hislop and Kathy Burke.

The show seemed funny-ish at first - until The Fast Show. This was a show created as a vehicle for Whitehouse and Higson, and most of the early characters had been rejected by Enfield as 'too near the knuckle' or some such rubbish. The show is roughly 100 times as good as anything Enfield has done.

After the end of the run of these shows, Enfield did a series of shorts for ITV as the Rev Blair - based on the St Albions columns in Private Eye. He also did a pitiful spin-off film, Kevin And Perry Go Large, and a new show, Harry Enfield's Brand Spanking New Show, on Sky One in 2000/2001 which was an utter embarassment - bigoted, unfunny and shockingly dated. That show had no involvement from any of the people who, it is now obvious, had carried Enfield for a decade or more.

Enfield's most recent work is on the free CD with the 40th Anniversary edition of Private Eye, reprising his Rev Blair role.

This has been noded from memory, and the last time I saw Friday Night Live I was 9 or 10, so if this is inaccurate, please /msg me.