Paul Merton

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Image:Paul Merton.jpg Paul Merton (born Paul Martin July 91, 1957) is a British actor, deadpan comedian and writer, who is best known as a panellist on the BBC TV show Have I Got News for You and Radio 4's Just a Minute, and as the host of Room 101.

His style is characterised by describing extremely improbable scenarios with a straight — even mournful looking — face. He rapidly grabs hold of any chance to expand on a subject and stretch its credibility to snapping point. This works beautifully in improv and exceptionally well when he is played off against more straight-laced guests on panel shows; it has, however, been less successful when Merton uses this form of high-fantasy in a scripted form, as with his sketch shows.

In 2003, he was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy. In The Comedian's Comedian, a 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians, he was voted the 20th funniest comedian in the universe.

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Personal Life

Born in Parsons Green, London to an English father (a train driver on the London Underground) and a mother of Irish Catholic extraction. When his mother returned to work to as a nurse, Paul and his younger sister were looked after by their grandfather who lived with them in their council flat.

He failed his eleven plus, and famously received an unclassified grade for metalwork at CSE before moving on to Wimbledon College just as it became comprehensive. After leaving Catholic school, Merton worked at the Tooting Employment Office for ten years.

Merton married the actress Caroline Quentin in 1990, but they divorced in 1998. Merton's second wife, Sarah Parkinson, died on September 23, 2003, of breast cancer.

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Career

He often claims that he was inspired to go into comedy at a young age watching clowns at a circus, remembering, "I had no idea that adults could behave like that." He gained his earliest professional credits under his birth name, including an appearance as a yokel in an episode of The Young Ones. On joining Equity he found that the name Paul Martin was already taken, so he renamed himself after Merton, the district of London where he grew up.

Though he had harboured serious ambitions of becoming a performing comedian since his school days, it was not until April 1982, at the Comedy Store in Soho, that his dream was realised. He recalls that, on only his second or third night, he found the dour role that was to inform his comic approach ever since.

One of these early routines at the Comedy Store involved the report of a policeman who had been given a hallucinogenic drug. This routine was very popular and went on to be included in his television series. Merton recalls, "I walked all the way home to my bed-sit in Streatham. I was on a cloud. And that one night got me through every single bad gig after that — and there were a lot of them. I was so lucky to get that encouragement early on. It kept me going over the next eighteen months of just dying the whole time."

In 1986, while performing in the Edinburgh Fringe, he was mugged while helping a friend put up posters. He was kicked in the head and had to go to hospital. A year later, Merton returned to Edinburgh. His one-man show was receiving very good reviews. However, while playing football with fellow comedians, he broke his leg, and whilst in hospital, he suffered a pulmonary embolism and contracted hepatitis A. He lost the £3,000 he had paid up front for the theatre and would have been in worse trouble had the Comedy Store not held a benefit for him. "I was getting the reviews of my life — they were saying 'Go and see this man!'", he said. "And I was in a hospital bed. They should have said 'Go see this man and take a bunch of grapes with you'."

His breakthrough as a television performer came as a result of the improvised comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway? from 1988 onwards, which moved to TV from BBC Radio 4. Have I Got News for You started in 1990, and two series of his own sketch show Paul Merton: The Series followed soon after. Between 1993 and 1995 he was amongst the regular cast members on the Radio 4 improvisational comedy series The Masterson Inheritance. Since 1999 he has been the host of Room 101, a chat show in which guests are offered the chance to discuss their pet hates and consign them to the oblivion of Room 101. Besides his regular radio appearances on Just a Minute, he has also joined the I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue team for the occasional programme.

Shortly before becoming a household name on HIGNFY, Merton had suffered a mental breakdown and booked himself into the Maudsley psychiatric hospital for six weeks, about which he has since talked frankly. He had begun to hallucinate conversations with friends.

He has been a member of the London improv group The Comedy Store Players since 1985, and still regularly performs with them.

After seven nominations for a BAFTA award for Best Entertainment Performance, Merton finally won the award in April 2003, ironically defeating fellow HIGNFY star Angus Deayton who was fired from the show in October 2002.

He was linked with taking over as host on Countdown, but decided not to pursue this.

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Quotes

"My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I've endured over the past twenty-five years."
(To previous Room 101 host Nick Hancock): "Are you familiar with the concept of Room 101?"
(Paul reveals that Boris was born in New York)
Paul Merton: "You've lost the accent remarkably well."
Boris Johnson: "I was born in New York because I wanted to be near my mother."
(On an episode of Have I Got News For You, Missing Words Round)
Angus Deayton: "I made Thatcher (what?) boasts Nigel?"
Paul Merton: Swallow!
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Note

  1. Many sources give a birthdate of January 17, 1957. The date given above is in Who's Who and The Internet Movie Database.
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Bibliography

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External links

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