Comedian Russell Howard has shut down reports that he is retiring from TV, renouncing the rumours as “clickbait”.
The British comedian, 44, best known for his show Russell Howard’s Good News, as well as regular appearances on comedy panel show Mock the Week, made comments in press interviews that implied he would not be making any more TV, instead focusing on his live stand-up shows.
However, in an interview with ITV’s Lorraine on Tuesday (14 January), Howard debunked these claims, confirming he had no plans to leave TV work behind just yet.
Rumours surfaced last week when in an interview with the Have a Word podcast, Howard said: “I don’t do TV anymore, I just do stand-up and my podcast. I had a pretty good run, I just prefer doing stand-up. I was all over the world and it was just fun.”
Speaking to host Lorraine Kelly, Howard said that reports of his alleged departure from TV had been a misunderstanding, and headlines about his retirement were “clickbait”.
Sharing more about his thoughts on the TV world, Howard said “I was just doing a load of interviews and I was waxing lyrical about how much I adore doing stand-up. It’s just a different process to TV — in TV there are loads of people working here and it’s a team, whereas stand-up you’re on your own. So it’s quite nice sometimes just working on your own.
“Then somebody was like, ‘Howard quits TV’. It was all over the press, it was really weird.
“It was like, ‘you won’t believe the shocking reason why’. We all do that with clickbait. It’s ‘you won’t believe what Piers Morgan said’ and then you click it and you’re like, ah, I believe it. It’s never surprising.”
Reassuring fans that he would still be appearing on TV, Howard said that he just prefers doing stand-up shows.
Speaking of his new podcast, Russell Howard’s Five Brilliant Things, where he interviews famous people about things they love spending their time on, Howard explained where the idea had come from: “I was interviewing Greta Thunberg and I didn’t want to talk to her about climate change, I was interested in what it was like being in the middle of this circus. It turns out one of her favourite things is making frog hats. It was a really strange, weird interview but you got a window into her. When you talk about things you love, you give away quite a lot of yourself.”
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He said of the podcast: “it would be fun to do that on TV but at the minute, I thought I’d just make it as a podcast.”
Howard explained that while “TV is fun”, stand-up comedy will always be his first love. He added: “Writing a book I couldn’t do because I don’t want to sit and entertain myself but doing stand-up is what I love doing.”
