Bob Mortimer: My on-stage scare after heart op
COMEDIAN Bob Mortimer amazed and delighted fans when he returned to the stage just three months after a lifesaving triple bypass operation.
But the star today reveals how he was nearly forced to abandon his 2016 comeback when his heart rate soared to dangerous levels during an energetic song and dance number.
The comic wore a heart monitor on stage, and had been told by doctors to stop the performance if he hit 153 beats per minute – about twice the normal resting heart rate.
But after he and comedy partner Vic Reeves had finished their opening routine at the Leeds Arena, the device showed a reading of more than 160.
‘I had to decide at that moment do I stop? What do I do?’ he recalls on Desert Island Discs today. ‘But I carried on,’ he says.
Mortimer, 59, also tells presenter Lauren Laverne how he had been blighted by debilitating shyness for the first 30 years of his life.
‘It’s a crippling thing,’ he says. ‘It can be very lonely knowing that you have things to say but you daren’t say them. Knowing that you could contribute to something but you don’t dare quite do it.’ The father of two – who married partner of 22 years, Lisa Matthews, half an hour before his operation – also tells how he and Reeves had sometimes wished they were bigger stars, but adds: ‘Now, as I’m older, I think we got lucky. It’s the perfect place to be.’ Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 at 11.15am today.