James Whittingham 

James Whittingham credits the beginning of his career in entertainment to his first major acting role at the tender age of five.  James played the role of The Wolf in a kindergarten puppet show performance of Little Red Riding Hood. With his new found talent and love of performing, James took home that puppet and collaborated with his best friend Jeff Pederson, putting on puppet shows for the neighbourhood kids.  Sometimes local children paid money to watch the performances; sometimes James paid the local children to watch his shows. Performances became more elaborate over the years, as lights and sets were added. In grade six, James built an intricate puppet show stage in his backyard for outdoor performances, but a fierce summer storm blew down the stage while he was on vacation with his parents. To ease his little brother's dismay, Bill Whittingham bought James an 8mm film camera to preserve his shows. James made several films involving puppets over the next few years. In high school, he was somewhat of a class clown. Grade 12 saw James create an underground humour newspaper called Sticky Fingers, which had a press run of 3,000. That same year, he was asked to appear in Rough Cuts, a community cable TV variety program. Rough Cuts was to be the first pairing of James and his future comedy partner Kevin Allardyce, both having minor speaking roles in a short comedy segment directed by Brett Bell.

James continued to develop his craft, contributing to the writing and producing of a half hour comedy called Gumshoe, with Kevin in the lead role of film noir private eye Peter D. Peter. The acting‑filmmaking bug bit James, resulting in the decision to pursue film production in university. Many of his films were surrealist experiments, but the more dramatic pieces featured his friend Kevin in major roles. Among James' most prolific student work are Orange Integrity, a personal autobiography/biography that included a sound track of secret recordings of his mother talking about him on the telephone, and Empires, a 16mm dramatic short that screened internationally. James completed the requirements for his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film and Video at the University of Regina in 1992.

Throughout the years, James continued to work with the same group of people ‑ performer Kevin Allardyce; collaborators Brett Bell (Strike Me Silly, The James and Kevin Show), Jack Hilkewich (The James and Kevin Show) and Dean Evans (Bad Cops); and even director of photography Darryl Kesslar (Empires, The James and Kevin Show). It was Jack Hilkewich who recognized the potential of the comedic chemistry between James and Kevin, and saw a use for it when he was working as a producer at Access Communications Channel 7. Jack wanted a comedy segment for his teen show

What's Up, and asked the duo to improvise in a segment where they would interact with strangers during a day at the fair. The segment got an immediate response from young viewers, and James and Kevin were soon doing regular segments for the series. But just when this was happening, Brett Bell's Strike Me Silly, a half hour 16mm comedy, was enjoying an overwhelmingly positive response at its world premiere at Local Heroes in Edmonton. The film saw James and Kevin teamed up for the first time in major roles ‑ Kevin as the son of a bowling alley owner who has to fill in for his ill dad, and James as an escaped psychiatric patient who thinks he's the devil and wants to bowl a few games before he's sent back. Strike Me Silly's numerous international screenings include The John Candy Comedy Film Festival in Ontario where it won Second Place.

By the end of the first season of What's Up, James had written and produced a one-hour special tying all of the comedy duo's short segments together. The James and Kevin One Hour Special features James and Kevin as big stars hosting their first live special. An angry fan shoots James, and, as fans watch him dying outside the TV studios, Kevin reminds James of the good times they had and all the places they've visited. The show featured cameo appearances by actor Nicolas Campbell and the real life Dr. Henri Heimlich, inventor of the world famous Heimlich manoeuvre. Dr. Heimlich hammed it up by attempting to convince TV audiences that James helped him develop his famous manoeuvre. In 1994, The James and Kevin One Hour Special won the comedy series' first of five Best Cable Production awards at the Saskatchewan Film and Video Showcase Awards. James and Kevin hosted the awards the following two years, sharing hosting duties with CBC National anchor Peter Mansbridge and actress Cynthia Dale the second time around.

After university, James worked for The Provincial in Regina, a province‑wide network newscast on CTV, and for three years as an award‑winning producer, director, videographer and editor of E‑Clips, a weekly half hour entertainment magazine series for Access Communications. It was at this job that James met musician‑comedian "Weird" Al Yankovic and convinced him to appear in an upcoming segment of the James and Kevin Show called Bad Cops.  Bad Cops, a short action‑comedy film by Dean Evans, was a six-minute parody of action film trailers. It was so realistic, that a year after it first aired, people were still calling the television station asking when the film was going to be in theatres.

Eventually, James and Kevin had their own half hour series on Access Communications (currently airing on SCN with one segment appearing on a Comedy Network program). The audience response was overwhelming as Access Communications enjoyed unprecedented ratings from the young demographic that previously hadn't tuned into the channel. The James and Kevin Show won numerous awards including Best Host/Presenter at the 1995 Showcase Awards and a Best Performance nomination for the 1996 Yorkton International Short Film and Video Festival.  It also won the Golden Sheaf Award for best Cable Production that year and a national award for Best Entertainment Program at the Canadian Cable Television Association Awards.

James and Kevin produced several regular segments for CBC Radio Saskatchewan’s Morning Edition where they performed their man-on-the-street shtick but without a camera.  In 1996 James developed and wrote The James and Kevin Show Web Site, which gained international recognition as a leading comedy and multi‑media site. It won Yahoo's Pick of the Week award in August 1997. The site features web and other pop culture parody as well as streaming multi‑media from the Access Communications series.  The American magazine Computer Life was so impressed with the video clips on the site from James and Kevin’s Access Communications series, it wrote that, “…they give (the content on) Comedy Central a run for its money.”

Dan Redican, a performer in a comedy group that influenced a young James and Kevin in the mid‑eighties, soon hooked up with the duo. Redican was an award‑winning writer and performer in CBC Radio comedy series, The Frantics, and in the subsequent Frantics’ Four on the Floor television series. He later went on to become an accomplished writer, actor and producer (CBC’s The Kids in the Hall, MTV’s The Jenny McCarthy Show to name a few). When Redican was called upon to write, produce and direct hosting vignettes for the 1997 season of CBC's Just for Laughs, he immediately thought of his new friends from the prairies, James and Kevin. Kevin and James Vignettes of Glory, as they were officially called, starred James and Kevin in the streets and theatres of Montreal during the 1997 Just for Laughs Comedy Festival. Three one‑minute vignettes appeared in each of the ten Just for Laughs episodes, which aired nationally that year. 

James had a stint in Toronto after Just for Laughs hit the airways, experimenting with a stand up comedy act and writing for Dan Redican's Running With Scissors with Mr Interesting radio comedy series (CBC). James also paid the rent by working as a freelance web developer and doing small jobs in the Toronto film industry. His most unique experience was an assistant to the Oscar winning director Peter Bogdanovich (Paper Moon, Texasville, Mask) for the Disney film A Saintly Switch. During this time, James also returned to Saskatchewan regularly to perform with Kevin on stage and in television commercials. Stage appearances included CBC Radio's Madly Off in All Directions with Lorne Elliot, and as the opening act for Bowser and Blue for an audience of 1,000 at the Saskatchewan Centre in Regina.