Harry Hill gave up being a doctor to do standup and now he's heading to Yorkshire

With his trademark big collars and cartoonish stage persona, Hill has cornered the market in wacky comedy and if anything his new show, Pedigree Fun, which comes to York’s Grand Opera House next month, has turned up the silliness dial even further. But then given the parlous state of the world right now that’s perhaps no bad thing.

“I’ve never been one to tackle the big issues, but specifically with this show I thought I’d make it as silly as I can,” he says. “My aim is that people stumble out of the show thinking ‘what was that all about?’ So they’re laughing but they don’t know why they’re laughing.”

Hill’s comedy is all about surreal escapism which audiences seem happy to embrace.

“A lot of people are perhaps coming out for the first time in a long time to see comedy and so they do seem really up for a laugh.”

He had initially planned to go on tour five years ago and then changed his mind.

However, when the pandemic struck and he, like the rest of us, was forced into lockdown, he had a rethink.

“I hadn’t realised how much I missed performing live until lockdown stopped me from doing it,” he says. “To a large extent it was Covid saying ‘no you can’t do it’ and that made me think I’d better do it, because what if another reason comes in to stop me? As soon as someone says ‘no, you can’t do something,’ it makes you want to do it more.”

Although Hill started out in stand-up, he became a household name through his hit ITV series Harry Hill’s TV Burp, which ran for ten years.

“I used to do it (tour) every year and then when I got TV Burp I didn’t tour for seven years which seemed like a long time, and when I did the last tour I thought ‘I must do this more’, because I do enjoy it.”

He likes performing in front of a live audience.

“It’s an old cliché but it is that excitement of getting a reaction. It’s coming up with an idea, trying it out, knowing it works and then rolling it out in front of strangers. When it’s live there’s that element of surprise and that feeling that anything can happen. There’s a certain amount of audience interaction and you never know what people are going to do or say.”

He's surprised, too, by the demographics of his audiences.

“I’m quite old now and I just assume it will be old people, but there’s people in their mid-twenties who grew up watching TV Burp and people my age, plus younger people who watch Junior Bake Off. So it’s a very mixed audience which is very pleasing.”

Hill’s showbiz journey has been an unconventional one. He was born in Woking in 1964 and grew up in Kent, apart from a brief time spent in Hong Kong as a teenager. He trained as a doctor and it’s been erroneously reported that his first posting was at Doncaster Royal Infirmary (in fact, the furthest north he worked was Tooting).

“I only worked for two years full time and it’s funny, people come up to me and claim all sorts of connections. It also says on Wikipedia that I was a brain surgeon, which I wasn’t.”

He hankered after being a comic, but says it never felt like this was an option when he was growing up.

“I don’t know if it was because I was from a very middle class family, but there was no way I could have said ‘I don’t want to go to med school I want to be a comedian.’ Even the idea of going to drama school or arts school would have been madness. The whole idea was you got a qualification and get a job. It was all about prospects.”

During his time at medical school he performed stand-up shows but once he qualified this became impossible.

“In those days you were doing a hundred hours a week, so there was no way I could do both.” He decided to pursue his stand-up and pause his medical career. “I thought in my mind it would be for a year and I’d see how it goes, at least then I would have proved to myself I can’t do it, that was my mindset. And 32 years later…here I am.”

He says his stage persona developed over time. “I used to go to comedy clubs as a student in south London and the people I liked were the deadpan comedians – around that time Jack Dee had his TV show and I was a big fan of Stewart Lee. When I started I did a sort of deadpan style, a lot of comics when they start do an impression of someone they like, and gradually as I got more confident I began to experiment – an act kind of evolves, it doesn’t arrive overnight.”

There was no career-defining big break, though winning the prestigious Perrier Award for the best newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1992 was a significant moment. “A career in showbusiness is never down to one thing and actually after I got the best newcomer award at the Edinburgh Festival the following year I had terrible reviews because people came with expectations.”

Nevertheless, the award brought him to the attention of TV producers and execs on the lookout for new talent and his subsequent BBC radio series Harry Hill’s Fruit Corner proved to be the springboard for his TV career.

His numerous credits include hit shows like Harry Hill’s World of TV and Harry Hill’s Alien Fun Capsule, and he’s also the longstanding voice of ITV’s You’ve Been Framed and co-host of Channel 4’s Junior Bake Off.

For all his success on the small screen he still regards himself as a stand-up “who does a bit of TV” rather than the other way round, though he admits if he was a newbie today he’d harness the power of social media.

“If I was starting out now I’d probably be doing loads of stuff on YouTube, which is a fantastic platform for younger people because they haven’t got to get through that commissioner’s office.”

And with more than 30 years’ stand-up experience under his belt he has some simple advice for any up-and-coming performers.

“The important thing for young comedians starting out today is to know it’s not so much about what you say, it’s more about how you say it which is very easy to forget. It’s very easy to concentrate on your jokes and yes, you need good jokes, but at least half of it is about how you put them across.”

Harry Hill’s Pedigree Fun will be at Grand Opera House, York, Nov 2. and Wakefield Theatre Royal, Nov 3

For tickets visit www.ticketmaster.co.uk and www.harryhilltour.com