Jim Howick’s wicked sense of humour helped turn Horrible Histories, Ghosts and Sex Education into massive hits. Here, the actor and writer reveals how he’s always made it up as he went along
Jim Howick is sitting on a bench in Primrose Hill in London, drinking tea from a cardboard cup and minding his own business, when a dad on a bicycle zooms by on the asphalt path. Brakes squeal and the dad shouts breathless thank-yous at the bemused actor, before cycling on. This sort of thing has been happening to Howick quite a bit, he says, ever since Covid closed the schools. When parents were struggling to find ways to entertain their kids at home, the BBC’s Horrible Histories was much in rotation on iPlayer. “Essentially, we became childcare,” says Howick, who was a part of the original Horrible Histories cast from 2009 to 2014. Some of his sketch performances (as King John, as Napoleon) are up there with the show’s most beloved. Howick admits he revisits them himself from time to time, to be reminded with what gleeful absurdity he spent his late 20s, dressed in wigs, false noses and stuck-on Napoleonic sideburns.
He is 43 now, an actor and screenwriter in steady employ, 10 years married to a costume supervisor called Lauren and the owner of two schnauzers that the couple refer to as their children. He is a lifelong Star Wars fan, once describing himself as more Ewok than Skywalker in appearance. (Howick, richly bearded, is 5ft 5in.) Although he grew up on the south coast, in Bognor Regis, he has been a season-ticket holder at Spurs ever since he graduated from a London drama school in 2000. Howick’s humour is flavoured by the “ah well” befuddlement one associates with that deeply frustrating football club. As he reflects on an interesting career to date, Howick tells a story about his only job in a Hollywood movie, 2004’s Hellboy. He contracted hypothermia on set – too long under a rain machine – and ended up in hospital, on a drip.
