Has Paul Merton got news for you
By Tony Watts - Editor - 17/07/2007
An awful lot of comedians are very serious people to meet. Life, for them as much as for anyone, is a fairly serious business. For many of the greatest comedians and comic writers – from Hancock and Milligan through to Caroline Aherne – being funny has masked an often tragic outlook on life.
But not Paul Merton. As he observes: “I naturally tend to see the funny side of life. Humour is essential for our survival. It makes us who we are. Looked at in the right way, there’s nothing that can’t be laughed about.”
And laugh Paul does – long and loud, regularly punctuating our conversation. When something strikes his funny bone there’s an automatic response. And there’s no sense that this is anything but genuine. He’s a man who has had a tough hand of cards in his life, including divorce from comedienne Caroline Quentin, the death of his wife to cancer and a spell in a mental hospital when his long awaited rise to success put him into a form of overdrive.
But looking and talking to him it’s hard to see where the battle scars might lie. He can best be described as boyish – a few grey hairs are starting to appear, but it would be easy to mistake him for pushing 40 rather than the 50 mark that he passes this month. Small things tickle his fancy and he is the master of spotting the idiosyncrasies of life - which is one reason why his comic style is so appealing.
That and his blinding ability to take flight with an idea and twist it, on the hoof, into surreal shapes. It’s no surprise that he earned his comedy stripes doing improvisation.
That ability certainly comes to the fore on the wonderful and timeless Just a Minute, and on HIGNFY, his wit balances perfectly with Ian Hislop’s waspish and often coruscating satire.
“I’m always wary of trying to define what humour is,” he says. “It’s very easy to go and prove the opposite. Yes you can have the edgy humour about difficult subjects, but there’s cosy humour as well. Ian, well Ian really cares about stuff,” he says, breaking off to laugh. “And that’s great for the show.
Ian Hislop might act as the social conscience of the programme, giving the great and the not so good a piece of his mind, the lawyers watching anxiously for comments that might need excising; but while Paul might represent the “softer side”, he too can slide in the stiletto with the best of them. When the show’s original compere Angus Deayton was roasted in the media over his sex and drugs activities, it was Paul who went on the show wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the front cover of the News of the World.
Very shortly after that Deayton lost his job. Since then, of course, a revolving door of people have famously occupied the centre seat, a dizzying array of personalities who have performed the function with varying degrees of success. And if, I ask, Paul was tasked at the gates of Paradise to name the perfect line up on the show, who would be the compere? That stumps him for, as he says, “It’s far easier to say who you wouldn’t have rather than who you would.”
Would that “no list” include Neil Kinnock I suggest? “Ah yes, he laughs. “Normally the show can take between an hour or an hour and a quarter to make. The one with Neil Kinnock took two and a quarter hours because he was so slow and nervous.” Watching that programme was like seeing a car crash, but in very slow motion, demonstrating that sticking with the day job is advice that many politicians would be well advised to follow.
“Then of course, there’s Boris!” It would be no exaggeration to say that Conservative MP, former Spectator editor and Liverpool aficionado Boris Johnson leapt to public awareness through HIGNFY. He was famously done up like a kipper by Hislop over his friendship with someone with a distinctly dodgy past. Johnson accused the programme of leading him into “a bear trap”, and went on, Paul says, to write a very critical piece about the show. Even funnier, from Paul’s perspective, is the fact that Lord Tebbitt followed suit. “He wrote in the Mail on Sunday that the programme with Boris proved that it was all rehearsed. I was slagged off by Norman Tebbitt, which I suppose is some sort of badge of honour.
“But when he accused me of not being able to improvise, well, I was lost for words.”
But as to his ideal host? He plumps for Des Lynam, the old smoothie himself, and a man who can make reading off an autocue as natural as anyone in the business. The programme has been running for 17 years now and shows few signs of flagging: apart from the fact that the line up changes each week, with the compere often setting him or herself up for all sorts of nonsense from the panellists, there’s the constant supply of fresh subjects to dissect.
And while Hislop may be the journalist and Oxford Graduate, while Paul famously failed to get his CSE in Metalwork, it’s the latter who often proves to be more abreast of events in the news – albeit they are often the oddball stories that have caught his attention.
So why, I ask, did someone so intelligent do so poorly at school? “I didn’t get a particularly good education,” he says. “I was the first comprehensive intake at what had been a grammar school. I wanted to do French, not Metalwork, but never got the chance. But it doesn't really matter now – I’ve ended doing what I want to do in life.”
And one aspect of his career that he particularly enjoys is the opportunity to share his love of other comedians with the public. When we meet he is sporting a t-shirt with Harold Lloyd on the front, and his studentship of comedy has embraced a successful series of programmes on the silent greats as well as a fascinating set of remakes of classic Galton and Simpson comedies. It would be fair to say that he chose a hard act to follow in Tony Hancock, but that doesn’t seem to be his greatest strength.
However, toss him a subject and you can only marvel at the way he will spin comedy out of the most unlikely of material.
So where does his inspiration come from? “All over the place I suppose,” he muses. “I was 12 when Monty Python came out, so it obviously made a big impact upon me. But a lot of it didn’t seem that funny at the time.”
“It’s the same with a lot of humour,” he says, “Spike Milligan’s Q. More recently, The Office and The Fast Show. When they came out people thought they were good but not that good. It’s often the same when you come up with something new. People take a while to catch up.
“When Spinal Tap was released no-one had seen spoof documentaries. They just thought it was about a film about a crap rock and roll band.”
So how does he feel about approaching 50? “Well I suppose it’s a bit of a benchmark. But getting older isn’t the same as it was. When Paul McCartney sang “When I’m 64”, being 64 was in your dotage, It’s not now.”
He picks up a copy of Mature Times and threatens to throw it at me. “So from July I can join your loyal band of readers – but not until then!” he laughs.
Image: courtesy of The Western Mail