Comedian Harry Hill has revealed that his stepfather’s death from cancer inspired him to switch from medicine to stand-up.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, the television personality told host Lauren Laverne: “I thought, ‘here’s a man who’s worked all his life’. And [my stepfather and mother] had always talked about what they were going to do in retirement.
“And how old was he? Maybe 54. And I thought, ‘I don’t want that to be me’.”
Hill said that his rigorous schedule in healthcare instilled a relentless pursuit of success in his new profession.
“I was absolutely driven,” he told Laverne.
“I had gone from doing 80, 100 hours a week as a doctor, getting up at the crack of dawn. Suddenly I had all this time free during the day, so I really felt like I had something to prove. So I would get up and I would write jokes.”
Hill said he would make repeated calls to get bookings when he started doing stand-up in the early 1990s.
“I would just bug them and bug them,” he said.
“I was absolutely merciless in my pursuit of it. It’s not the funniest people that get on, it’s the pushiest. And I was pushy.”
Hill, whose real name is Matthew Hall, had his first stand-up gig at a Mexican restaurant in London’s South Norwood.
“My first gag got a laugh, and it completely threw me because I had been rehearsing it without laughs.”
However, he recovered and continued his routine, and even got another booking from it.
Hill went on to win the Perrier Award for best newcomer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1992.
He then created and presented Harry Hill’s TV Burp on ITV from 2001 to 2012.
Being a comedian means “I can get away with just about any silly behaviour”, he said.
Describing how he felt about being a doctor, he told Laverne about an incident soon after he qualified, when he had to break the news to a man that his wife had unexpectedly died during an operation.
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“I was completely out of my depth,” he said.
“I told him and he started crying, and I started crying. I thought this is – this isn’t good. What it makes you do is bottle up your emotions.”
Among the songs he chose as his desert island discs were “Hey Bulldog” by the Beatles, “Life During Wartime” by Talking Heads, and “Gay Bar” by Electric Six.
Hill said a “thick book you could use to kill small mammals” would be useful, and chose Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.
He said his luxury item would be a bucket and spade: “Where’s the fun of a sandy beach without the ability to make sandcastles?”
