Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
NOW FOR SOMETHING PLETELY DIFFERENT!
He gave up medicine to be a comic. Now Harry Hill tells Rebecca Hardy why he’s taking a year out at the peak of his career – to write a spoof X Factor musical
light entertainment. Sir Bruce Forsyth is a hero, along with Morecambe and Wise and Spike Milligan. ‘The Generation Game was the big show when I was growing up. Brucie’s so clever it seemed a lot of it was ad-libbed, so it appeared really modern and sharp,’ he says. ‘He understood the medium of TV – that whole thing where he looks at the camera, that confidential thing. I do that on TV Burp a lot. It’s a great device.
‘I was interested in comedy from the word go. I’d always look at the credits to see who’d written the material. I was 11 I suppose, and interested in people like Barry Cryer who were writing jokes. That’s why I liked Spike Milligan so much. He was the full package. He wrote all his own stuff and performed it and, of course, it was very original.
‘And Morecambe and Wise were just great. For me, a lot of what’s funny is not so much the content but how it’s put across. A lot of those lines Eric Morecambe did wouldn’t be funny in anyone else’s hands – and I suppose the fact he wore glasses...’ he pauses. ‘If you’re a kid wearing glasses you do want to see people wearing glasses on TV.’
The glasses, it turns out, helped make Harry the person he is. The second of five children brought up in Staplehurst, Kent, he only ever wanted to fit in. He was five when his parents divorced, which was ‘embarrassing’. ‘Everyone’s divorced now, but in those days it was awkward. It required a lot of explaining about why your name was different to your mother’s. It was difficult.’ And he was eight when he began wearing glasses. ‘I didn’t realise everything was blurred until I put them on. When I came out of the opticians I thought, “This is fantastic.” But then I got teased – “Four- eyes”, “Joe 90” – so I didn’t wear them. I wasn’t bullied but all those things make you become the nerdy type, the shy one. You’re not the football player. You’re the four-stone weakling.
‘The gang I hung round with, none of us had girlfriends. I was wrapped up in my own little world. We had a thing about chemistry. Three of us had chemistry sets and we used to make fireworks. The other thing we used to do was play special agents. We had this whole spy thing. You had a little suitcase with a false bottom and a gun in it.
‘I was also obsessed with surviving a nuclear holocaust. All the time I was thinking, “I’ve got to paint the windows white, hide under the bed,” whatever you’re supposed to do. I had this tobacco tin which had all this stuff in: matches, sugar, a candle...’
So why on earth did someone with such a fertile imagination enter the decidedly dry profession of medicine? He shrugs. ‘I don’t regret it every day, but I think it was silly of me,’ he says. ‘What I should have done is go to art school. I spent five years working like a Trojan – I could have had more fun. I always studied hard. I didn’t find it easy but I was always looking to get ten out of ten in a test. It’s a work ethic and I honestly don’t know where it came from. Maybe it was because I
was one of a big family – I wanted to get attention. Then I had an epiphany at medical school. I was doing a revue and I was standing up doing this routine and thinking, “This is really easy and it seems I’m quite good at it. Wouldn’t it be great if that’s what I could do?” Then it took me a long time to pluck up the courage to work out how to do it.
‘I used to have this fantasy of John Cleese becoming ill and me treating him and him saying, “Oh, you’re really funny. Why don’t you write some sketches for me?” All the old comics used to talk about lucky breaks but I couldn’t really see how it was going to happen to me. We all know you have to basically find it.’
Which takes us to his first gap year. In truth, though, it wasn’t much of a break. Instead of taking up a full-time role as a doctor after qualifying, he decided to work weekends as a hospital locum to concentrate on breaking into comedy. ‘I’d have sleepless nights worrying,’ he says. ‘The risk was to my career as a doctor. Back then, no one took a year out. But when I applied my work ethic to stand-up comedy it happened step by step. I gradually improved.’
On paper, though, it all seems to have happened rather fast. In 1992 he won the Perrier Award for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe. Shortly afterwards BBC Radio 4 commissioned Harry Hill’s Fruit Corner and, within two years, he was given the BBC2 silent comedy series Harry Hill’s Fruit Fancies. His Channel 4 sketch show Harry Hill, which ran for three series until 2000, was soon followed on ITV by Harry Hill’s TV Burp. Throw in a children’s show, books, the voice- over for ITV’s You’ve Been Framed and producing Alistair McGowan’s sports-themed blooper quiz show You Cannot Be Serious, and it’s hard to see how he fitted in time to date his wife, let alone marry her, which he did in 1996 after being introduced to her by his best friend who attended art college with her. ‘You fall in love,’ he says. ‘It’s what you do.’
Boy, has Harry earned his gap year. Only, being Harry, it isn’t really a year off at all. He’s also working on a Harry Hill film and developing a spoof X Factor Musical with Simon Cowell. ‘Simon’s very funny,’ he says. ‘The musical takes the mickey out of him by building him up and saying how fantastic he is. He works very hard but the part I’ve seen is him laughing about himself.’ Rather like the comic next to me who’s packing more into his gap year than most of us do in a year of hard slog. Harry blushes. ‘I’m on a gap year from TV,’ he insists. ‘Unless something fun comes along.’ Harry Hill’s live tour starts on 7 February. For tickets, call 0844 248 5199 or visit www.harryhilllive.com.