Biggest Fans

Harry Hill is describing a heated family argument in which one of his three adult daughters recently really went for the jugular. "Not only did she question the quality of my parenting, she added, 'Look at you — you're not even famous any more!' " Hill drops his chin to reflect on that for a moment. The Rodin's Thinker pose sits rather at odds with the 61-year-old comedian's bald head, giant collar and off-duty tartan tank top. "Actually I think it's good she said it," Hill decides finally. "I think people in entertainment sometimes need to hear the unvarnished truth."

Fifteen years ago, Hill was undeniably famous. His hit ITV show, Harry Hill's TV Burp — in which he filtered TV clips through his surreal world view, pointing out such things as a shadow on The Bill that looked like an elephant carrying a handbag — was at its peak. Winning eight million viewers a week and three Baftas, he must, I assume, have been the highest-paid comedian in the UK.  "I definitely wasn't," he corrects me. "Peter Kay rang me up once, fuming. He said, 'The bloody tabloids are saying I made £20 million off my last tour. I didn't, I made £40 million!' Anyway, I was nowhere near that." Regardless, the show was a popular and critical hit, possibly the last mainstream teatime show to achieve that feat. "Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton once asked me for a photo, which seemed like a reversal of the natural order," he says with a grin. "And characters in the Queen Vic [the pub in EastEnders] started saying things like, 'That's the sort of fing 'arry 'ill would do!' in the hope we'd use the clip the following week, which was hilarious."

The show ran for a decade, but by 2012 the six-day-a-week production schedule had driven Hill to the edge of exhaustion. After being photographed while out with his children, he became paranoid of tabloid attention. When he found a hole in his windscreen, he even became convinced that someone was trying to assassinate him. "The whole red carpet celebrity thing has never been me and, well, I did not respond well to stress." Now, following a UK theatre tour of more than 60 dates last year to mark his 60th birthday, Hill is back on our screens. Not, it must be said, in a primetime slot on a "linear" channel, but on YouTube.

He recounts some career advice he once received from the Good Life actor Richard Briers. "He said, 'Go for the f***ing money every time, Harry.' " Hill admits to having done things for cash in the past — mainly 13 series of You've Been Framed — but he seems to be ignoring Briers now. He is funding The Harry Hill Show — essentially a rambling podcast but filmed in Battersea Arts Centre in south London — from his own pocket to the tune of £3,000 an episode, and making many of the props himself. "The £3,000 includes coffees, which is probably the biggest expense," he says. "That and my old tour manager's son, who's inside the Licky costume. He costs £175 a day." (Licky is the show's mascot, a giant ice lolly with a disturbingly long tongue.)

Hill didn't bother pitching the show to TV executives. "Everything on TV these days is a celebrity quiz," he says. "The freedom to do what I find funny is online." Commercial success may not be his main aim but he still needs sponsors, adverts and followers to make the show financially viable. "I still have to work," he says. "I still wake up thinking, what should I do next?"


The comedian Stewart Lee, an old friend, is his guest on the ramshackle first episode. "You're like a madman who's been incarcerated, playing with things he's found on the floor in his cell," Lee says at one point. The Irish pop star CMAT and the comedians Nish Kumar and Ed Gamble are among the other guests who have sat on Hill's sofa only to be licked by Licky and had their life story recounted by Sarah the friendly AI robot. ("Sarah" stands for "synthetic animatronic robot and helper".)

All guests are roped into playing a game of Name the Seed and doing a dance called "the Andy Burnham", before dressing in a giant hamster costume for a musical finale. "You're self-funding your own nervous breakdown," Kumar says in his episode. Or as one YouTube commenter puts it: "This is just The One Show for people with early-onset dementia. Definitely subscribing."

It is more than 35 years since Hill qualified as a doctor. He was already a hit in the medical student revues, but he decided to pursue a career in comedy after his stepdad, Tony, died of cancer in 1989, aged 55. Hill decided that life was too short not to chase his ambitions. "And some evidence suggests I wasn't really cut out to be a doctor anyway," he says. A 1988 diary he kept as a medical student at St George's Hospital in southwest London sombrely records his "mistakes so far". He once told a perfectly healthy woman she was having a heart attack. On another occasion he was told off for daydreaming while a patient suffered an aortic aneurysm.


Worst of all in Fight!, his 2021 memoir, he recalls responding to a 2am "crash call" at Ashford Hospital in Surrey when he was 24 and a newly qualified doctor. A patient was having a heart attack, yet Hill remembers running across the car park hoping they'd die before he got there. "And that's not right, is it?" he says now. "I mean, yes, I was exhausted and a dead patient meant doing 15 minutes' paperwork instead of an hour and a half if they survived. But even so, it made me question whether my heart was in it. I've always felt bad about that."

Born Matthew Hall, he grew up with three sisters and a brother in Staplehurst, Kent. His mother, Jan, and father, Keith, divorced when he was six and Jan met Hill's future stepdad, Tony, through the local am-dram society. Hill recalls a happy childhood watching Bruce Forsyth and Monty Python on TV, or making stink bombs in the garden shed to sell for 7p each at school. When Hill was 14, Tony's job in finance took him to Hong Kong and the whole family spent two years there.

Within weeks of the Ashford car park incident he'd left medicine; two years later, in 1992, he won the Perrier award for best newcomer at the Edinburgh festival. One broadsheet review hailed him as the "future of comedy". Radio and TV soon beckoned.

It sounds as if the last few years have been tough for Hill. Another friend, the comedian Sean Lock, died of lung cancer in 2021, aged 58, and in 2024 his longtime musical collaborator Steve Brown — who wrote music for Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge and Spitting Image — died of pulmonary fibrosis at 69. Hill's eyes fill with tears just talking about them. "I've had a couple of close friends die too, and so I've been wondering: am I just unlucky that so many people I love have died?"


Hill has been married to the artist Magda Archer since 1996. Harry Styles and Dua Lipa wore her designs when she collaborated with the fashion house Marc Jacobs in 2020. Her work might be described as dysfunctional kitsch: one screen print shows a lilac kitten on a pink background with the words "Text me yeah?" "The day I met Magda I thought she was so gorgeous, sarcastic and clever, but it took me ten years to persuade her I might be a worthwhile partner," Hill says proudly. They met at a party in 1986 through his friend Rob, a student at London's Chelsea School of Art. Hill, still a "square medical student", found Archer attractive "but a little bit haughty". A decade later he was a rising TV star making good money and he bought one of her paintings. Archer offered to deliver it to his London flat and they were married within a year.

In 2018 Archer fell seriously ill. Hill can barely get the words out, recalling it. "That was such a scary time," he says, welling up. It began with a cough and shortness of breath, though initially they dismissed these symptoms. "As a doctor I can be a bit blasé and Magda can be a bit of a hypochondriac," he says, "but she was short of breath even in her sleep, so finally I made her see a specialist." The specialist immediately admitted Archer to hospital. A scan showed worryingly depleted lung function. "It took quite a while on steroids to bring her back. Afterwards the doctor said to me, 'When I first looked at her scan I thought, she's f***ed. And when I looked, I agreed. I couldn't bear to tell the children until she'd turned a corner because, frankly, without her I was f***ed too."

Hill credits Archer with saving him from himself. "Every comedian needs a relationship with someone honest and real who provides perspective," he says. "Doing TV Burp I was very hard to live with — constantly stressed and anxious — and around that time Magda did a painting called My Life Is Crap, which I worried was because of me. But she is the one who grounds me."

Archer sounds formidable. Early in their relationship, a grumpy and monosyllabic Hill told her he wasn't a morning person. "She said, 'Well, become one then!' " he says, chuckling — and he did. He tells me about a wealthy Korean businessman who came to their house recently to buy one of Archer's prints. He then produced a fat roll of £50 notes and asked her to paint his children. "She said, 'No, I don't do that,' " Hill says. "So I took her aside and said, 'Wait a minute, I did Stars in Their Eyes for the cash because you told me to. Paint the man's kids!' But she just said no. Magda won't do anything she doesn't want to do."

Maybe there's a bit of that in Hill too. He reportedly turned down millions to renew his deal with ITV after TV Burp, instead pursuing some risky career options. "Are we going to talk about my flops?" he says, laughing. "We'll be here all day."

In 2012 he produced a sports-based version of TV Burp for ITV — You Cannot Be Serious! — that lasted six episodes; the following year his film The Harry Hill Movie bombed. I Can't Sing! — a musical he wrote with Steve Brown sending up The X Factor, with Simon Cowell's blessing — opened at the London Palladium in March 2014 and closed six weeks later. The 2015 series of Stars in Their Eyes he hosted lasted just six episodes (and when he appeared as Morrissey on a 1999 celeb special he lost to Kirsty Young's Peggy Lee).


Then there was Tony!, his 2022 rock opera about the life of Tony Blair, performed at the Park Theatre and Leicester Square Theatre in London before touring. "Someone came down from the Tony Blair Bank — or is it his institute? — to see if he'd have any issues with it," Hill says. "I'm not sure they stayed to the end.  "I'm pretty resilient," he continues. "Why not take risks? Everything flops in the end. And I get bored very easily so, even if massive success eludes me, I enjoy the journey."

Hill came fifth in a Channel 4 poll in 2007 of the 100 greatest stand-ups, but he's since been overtaken by more traditional stadium-filling comedians such as Peter Kay, Ricky Gervais and Michael McIntyre. Gervais was reportedly paid $40 million for his two most recent Netflix specials. Does Hill ever think he should be up there too? "These are tough times for the whimsy merchants," he says. "Look, I loved The Office but with a Ricky Gervais Netflix special there's an element of, 'Oooh, is Ricky going to say the unsayable?' Well, I've never wanted to shock by swearing or doing politics head-on. That's just not me. I'm waiting for the whimsy pendulum to swing back in my favour."

He's changed his mind about McIntyre. "I didn't rate him at first but he's gained confidence and now I think he's great," he says. However, Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer's BBC hit, Gone Fishing, does not get the seal of approval. "You've got two of the best British comedians out there and they're... fishing?" he says, squirming.

It must be said Hill's mischievous style works wonders with the child bakers on Channel 4's Junior Bake Off, which he has presented since 2019 — "the last gasp of my proper TV career" as he describes it on The Harry Hill Show. "I wasn't sure about doing it at first," he says. "Bit low-rent. But you can have a lot of fun getting kids to pronounce words like 'quenelle'."

Hill has three daughters: Kitty, 28, Winifred, 27, and Frederica, 21. They work respectively in ceramics, visual arts and textiles. "Like their mum, they're adapted to the ego of the needy comic dad," he says. "They still say Stewart Lee is their favourite comic and ask me to get tickets for his shows. But one of them appeared as Stouffer on my last tour, which I think is a thumbs-up for me." (Stouffer is a cat that started life as a blue, rubber glove puppet and is now another human-size mascot on the podcast.)

Hill sometimes consults his daughters on new material. For example, he has this joke about the protective air pockets that come inside Amazon parcels. He says we can save ourselves the expense of a holiday to, say, China by popping one and sniffing the air inside instead. "I used to pop one, sniff and say, 'Ahh, chicken chow mein!' but one daughter said that was unacceptable. So now I say, 'Ahh, Tiananmen Square!' and then, 'Ah, Wuhan wet market!' and finally, 'Bats!' "

Has that gone down any better? "Depends," he says. "Sometimes I do that gag in a trendy club and you can see the young people not necessarily reacting to the material but thinking, 'I wonder if I should be offended... ' "

Hill's performance style has changed over the years. I first saw him on stage in a south London pub in 1994. Back then he was a manically blinking, shoulder-shrugging, lip-licking bald man peppering the audience with one-liners, song fragments, catchphrases. Throw in the charity shop suits and shirts with giant collars, the pens in his top pocket and the weirdly suggestive "Mmm? Mmm?" that bound his spiel together and you had an Eric Morecambe for the rave generation. "I was and still am very interested in the joke as a form," he says. "I mean, why do we always have to have a set-up then a punchline? Why not two set-ups, a bit of song and dance then both punchlines later? If air traffic controllers can multitask, why can't my audiences?"

Hill's new YouTube show is reassuringly bonkers. He uses a ventriloquist dummy without actually ventriloquising. He offers each guest a box of chocolates that contains only a conker. Then on comes an expert in the field to answer questions on "castles" or "sweets".  "Value for money, I call it," Hill says. "And a reflection of how quickly I get bored."

In response to a previous interview Hill gave to this paper in 2024, one reader posted a comment, claiming to be an old school friend from his days in Hong Kong. The reader suggested that Hill was "very disruptive" in class and possibly had ADHD. "No, that's not true," he says. " I was very unhappy and quiet, wanting to get home. Just look at my grades from that time. I was working hard — that's not really someone who is the class clown."

Not everyone finds Hill funny, he knows that. At the 2008 Bafta awards he was handed his gong by the actors Keeley Hawes and Nicholas Hoult. Afterwards he overheard Hawes telling Hoult she'd never found anything Hill said remotely funny. "And Keeley wasn't the worst!" Hill says. "I once did an ITV special called An Audience With...  — supposedly a studio full of my showbiz pals cheering me on. I remember Chris Tarrant sitting there scowling like he'd been dragged to a public beheading."

When not in London, Hill and his wife are in their Kent coast house that "TV Burp paid for". In the morning he walks his dogs — two jackapoos called Snowy and Wilson — then sits with a notepad for an hour, writing jokes.  "You know why it doesn't matter if I'm not a household name any more?" he asks. "Because to be honest I didn't like it. And, secondly, I've escaped a life I didn't want to lead to do something I love. Not everyone gets to do that."

Or as Stewart Lee accurately puts it in his episode of Hill's new show: "Do you think your life's been about amusing yourself really, and sometimes that Venn diagram has overlapped with public taste?"

TV Burp Gold 3 added above