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Harry Hill has opened up about how stress and exhaustion led to bouts of paranoia, including one incident in which he was convinced he was the target of an assassination attempt.
At the time, the comedian was presenting his popular show Harry Hill’s TV Burp for ITV, in which he assessed TV clips from his surreal worldview.
However, the 61-year-old said in a new interview that the demands of the show led to a period of intense exhaustion, to which he “did not respond well”.
“The whole red carpet celebrity thing has never been me and, well, I did not respond well to stress,” he told The Times of his response to the attention the series brought.
He apparently became paranoid about tabloid attention after being photographed while out with his children in 2012, at a time when he was exhausted from his show’s gruelling production schedule. When he found a hole in his car windscreen, he was convinced that someone was trying to kill him.
The comedian also admitted that he was “very hard to live with” when filming the show and worried that being “constantly stressed and anxious” would impact his relationship with his artist wife Magda Archer, who he married in 1996.
“Around that time Magda did a painting called My Life Is Crap, which I worried was because of me,” he said. “But she is the one who grounds me.”
The Independent has contacted ITV for comment.
TV Burp ran for 11 years and won a number of prestigious prizes at the Bafta TV Awards and the British Comedy Awards. Hill was also nominated at the National Television Awards.
Following a UK theatre tour, Hill is back onscreen with a new YouTube comedy show, featuring guest stars including his friend and fellow comedian Stewart Lee, and Irish pop star CMAT.
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In an interview with the Beyond the Title podcast in December last year, Hill accused the BBC and ITV of failing to develop anything “new or risky”, claiming TV Burp would have been cancelled after one season if it was released today.
“It took us two or three series to get TV Burp right,” he said. “No one was keeping an eye on us, so somehow we managed to get away with that.
“We could easily have been cancelled after the first series and we would be now.”
Turning his attention to how commissioners operate today, he said: “It’s not just ITV, BBC One is the same. The danger is everything becomes a bit bland.
“If you look at Saturday night schedules now, it’s celebrity quiz show, celebrity quiz show, celebrity quiz show, really. There’s some really funny ones, but you think, ‘Really?’”
He continued: “It’s commercial TV, they’ve got to make money or they feel like they have to, so they don’t develop anything new or risky. Comedy is never right the first time. History is littered with it. You identify a spark in it and think, ‘We will get it right’.”
The Harry Hill Show is streaming on YouTube now.
