Comedian Paul Whitehouse fought off a would-be mugger at a north London cashpoint while out buying medicine for his wife.
The 68-year-old star of The Fast Show and the BBC’s Gone Fishing was targeted on Friday night at the cashpoint beside the Sainsbury’s Local on Essex Road in Islington. A thief attempted to snatch his bank card — but Whitehouse fought back, wrestled the card back, and the perpetrator fled empty-handed.
His wife, Dr Mine Conkbayir, revealed the incident on Instagram, describing it as a “horrid start to the weekend” and urging the public to stay “super vigilant”.
“Yesterday, I had a bad reaction to some treatment, which has left me feeling rather rotten,” she wrote. “So, last night, Paul dashed out to get me some meds. He was mugged on Essex Road (Islington) — at the cashpoint beside the Sainsbury’s Local.”
“He did fight back and retrieved his card, with the perp scuttling away empty-handed. But that’s not the point, is it.”
Dr Conkbayir said she had initially kept quiet about the incident “out of respect”, but that Whitehouse — frustrated after returning from taking their daughter to football — agreed she should share what happened in the hope it might “help folk to be more aware when out and about.”
“So, please, everyone — I don’t mean to patronise, but please be super vigilant out there,” she added.
Cashpoint crime in London
Cashpoint robberies follow a familiar pattern. Thieves watch for distracted users — often targeting people late at night or in quieter spots — then strike at the moment cash or a card is exposed. Techniques range from simple snatching to “shoulder surfing”, where criminals watch victims enter their PIN before stealing the card, and distraction thefts, where one person engages the victim while an accomplice takes the cash.
Police advice is consistent: shield the keypad when entering your PIN, stay aware of who is standing close behind you, and if you feel uneasy, cancel the transaction and walk away. If you are targeted, officers say your safety matters more than your money or card — though in this case Whitehouse’s decision to fight back paid off.
Essex Road, a busy thoroughfare running through Islington, is exactly the kind of location where such offences cluster: high footfall, plenty of cashpoints, and enough passing trade for a thief to blend into the crowd afterwards.
A wider debate about street crime
The incident lands amid a heated debate about street crime in London. The capital has seen a string of high-profile cases involving celebrities in recent times — from phone snatches to bag thefts — and each one reignites questions about whether the streets feel safe.
Mayor Sadiq Khan has recently claimed that personal robbery rates are falling, pointing to targeted police operations and investment in neighbourhood policing. But for many Londoners, the statistics sit uneasily alongside their own experience — or the experiences shared by friends, neighbours and, now, familiar faces from television.
Cashpoint crime is notoriously underreported in official figures, partly because attempted thefts where nothing is taken may never be reported to police at all. Dr Conkbayir’s post is, in that sense, doing the work the statistics cannot: putting a human face on an offence that usually appears only as a line in a crime table.
Who Paul Whitehouse is
For readers who know him best from television, Whitehouse is one of Britain’s most recognisable comedy faces. He rose to fame in the 1990s with The Fast Show, creating a gallery of characters that became part of the national vocabulary, and has since starred alongside Bob Mortimer in the much-loved BBC series Gone Fishing.
He and Dr Conkbayir have been together for two decades after meeting while she was working at a shop in Islington. They married in 2019 and share a daughter.
The couple live in north London, and the Essex Road where the incident happened is close to home — a reminder that this was not a brush with danger in some unfamiliar part of town, but an attempted robbery on an ordinary errand, on an ordinary street, on an ordinary Friday night.
That ordinariness is precisely what has struck a chord. Messages of support flooded in after Dr Conkbayir’s post, with followers praising Whitehouse for fighting back and wishing the couple well. If the post achieves what she hoped, its real impact will be measured not in likes but in the number of people who think twice the next time they use a cashpoint after dark.
London Streets has been covering crime trends across London and the Brixton Tube station arrests this week.
