Paul Whitehouse: My life would mean very little without my children

Paul Whitehouse has said life would mean “very little” to him without his children.

The comedian, who has four daughters, said he thinks about them all the time.

Writing a letter to his younger self in The Big Issue, he said: “I don’t fear mortal illness or anything like that.

“Yes, I want to prolong my life as much as I can but only to the point where I can still do what I enjoy doing and be around for people. Obviously I’m getting older and I’m conscious of my own mortality but I do think that if you put in the exercise and eat well you can prolong your active life so much.

“I used to be so the antithesis of that. But that’s what I tell my younger self: ‘put that fag out, get your hair cut, put that can of coke away… what’s the substance I’ve just found on you? That’s going down the toilet. Get yourself down the bloody gym’.

“And he’d laugh in my face and say, ‘shut up old man’.”

He added: “Life would mean very little to me without my kids. They’re the thing I think about all the time.

“But if I could go back to one single moment of deep and unstinting joy, with an almost spiritual dimension, it was when I was in Corfu when I was 22.

“I’d gone out early in the morning, my friends were in the house, and there was no one around. So I was lying on the beach, the sun was just hotting up so it was warm but not too warm, the low light of the sun was glinting off the surface, and I was listening to Aretha Franklin belting it out and I was thinking, there is nothing better than this.”

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