Ahead of his comedy impro show at Hampton Court Festival on June 17, Have I Got News For You star Paul Merton talks to Helene Parry about the ups and downs of a life in comedy
Comedian Paul Merton is best known as one of the quick-witted team captains on long-running television comedy news quiz Have I Got News For You. Week in, week out, he keeps the nation laughing with his deadpan, often surreal comments on current events. Remarkably, the show will celebrate its 25th anniversary this autumn, an outcome that Paul himself admits he would never have imagined.
“We filmed the pilot episode on a very warm day in the summer of 1990,” recalls Paul. “The audience really didn’t want to be inside a studio.”
In his autobiography, published last autumn, Paul recalls that, during that first recording, he and fellow team-captain Ian Hislop stumbled through ‘a morass of uneasy banter and tedious bickering over the scores’. Afterwards, he thought: “Well, that’s the last we’ll see of that idea.”
But that’s why you try new things, he believes: “You find out what’s wrong with them, and fix them.”
And fix them they have. After a quarter of a century, the show still tops the Friday night ratings. “With our latest series, we’ve had 4.7 million viewers, and when you add the iPlayer and iPad audience, that’s another half a million.”
Paul attributes the show’s longevity to several factors.
“Five people are on the show every week, but only two of them were on it the week before. It’s fresh. And the news agenda is ever-changing. From the start Ian and I wanted to play to an intelligent audience. We engage the higher parts of the human being – that’s a nice phrase, isn’t it? - and people like that. When we started, our approach wasn’t unusual, but our stock seems to have risen, while others’ has fallen.”
His dream guest host for the show would be comedienne Victoria Wood. “I’m a great admirer of hers. I could see her being very good at hosting it.”
His autobiography, Only When I Laugh: A Memoir, takes the reader through his South London childhood. He recalls how a teacher - ‘a nun who looked like an angry pint of Guinness’ - berated him for writing ‘ridiculous stories about things that aren’t true’. A few years later, a school careers adviser suggested that Paul’s future lay in stacking shelves in a supermarket. Yet the comic imagination that his teachers tried to quell has made him a household name.
This June, Paul will be demonstrating his quickfire brilliance at the Hampton Court Palace Festival. For the first time the event will feature an evening dedicated to comedy. On Wednesday June 17, a stand-up show by comedian Alan Davies will be followed by a performance from Paul Merton’s Impro Chums. This group, comprising Paul, Mike McShane, Lee Simpson, Richard Vranch and Paul’s wife Suki Webster, will take suggestions from the audience and turn them into a series of sketches, plays, musicals, and interviews – all completely improvised.
“It’s a bit daunting, looking at the size of the stage,” he says of the Hampton Court venue. “It’s like a runway. But open-air gigs are fun.”
Paul Merton’s Impro Chums is currently touring around the UK, winning rave reviews. He clearly relishes improvised comedy and likens it to playtime at school: “I think people enjoy watching adults at play. If you spark each other off in improvisation, it creates a really good spirit. It’s the spirit of the playground.”
He is equally adept when working on his own scripts. He had his own TV sketch show, Paul Merton: The Series in the early 1990s, co-writing and performing a mixture of stand-up routines and surreal sketches.
“We were as visual as we could be,” he recalls. “In one sketch about a video game, a house turned into a 3D world. We filmed a canoe coming down the stairs on a cascade of water. The set designers built a giant water tank. It took them 12 hours to build and fill this tank, for a 20-second shot on screen. It was a joy, watching people make and design this stuff.”
Another happy experience came in the form of four televised Christmas pantomimes, which proved so popular that they are now repeated every Christmas on TV. In Cinderella, Paul and Ronnie Corbett appeared in matching mini-dresses and high heels as the Ugly Sisters, opposite Frank Skinner as Buttons and Alexander Armstrong as Prince Charming.
“The Ugly Sisters’ costumes get a laugh as soon as you appear,” says Paul. “You’re on to a winner before you even speak. And it was wonderful working with Ronnie Corbett.”
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. In his book, he talks candidly about the time he suffered hallucinations and paranoia that led to a spell as a patient in Maudsley Hospital, a psychiatric hospital. It later emerged that his problems were caused by anti-malaria medication, but the experience is a reminder of the fragility of the human mind.
Despite these darker moments, he is glad to have told his own story.
“I’m a big fan of showbiz autobiographies,” he says. “I read lots when I was a kid. When you’re in your 50s is a good time to write one. If people are interested in you they’ll want to read about you, and you’ve lived a bit more by then.”
His latest writing project, he reveals, is a screenplay for a film that he is writing with wife Suki. He won’t be drawn on the details, but discloses that the film will be a romantic comedy thriller.
At home with Suki, he likes “to read, or watch wildlife shows or American cop shows. I’ve got a big screen TV at home and a collection of restored silent films that I never get tired of watching.”
Of the many high spots in his career, nothing has come close to an encounter with the late, great Spike Milligan when he was a guest on Have I Got News For You.
“After the recording, I was on the way back to my dressing room when I passed Spike, and thought of everything his humour had meant to me when I used to listen to The Goon Show. Spike walked past me, and without stopping said ‘Paul, you’re a very funny man.’ I stood there, flabbergasted. It was my proudest moment on the show and it happened backstage!”
Alan Davies and Paul Merton’s Impro Chums will be performing at the Hampton Court Palace Festival on Wednesday June 17
