Harry Hill: ‘I’ll leave them punch-drunk with a very silly show’

Although this much-respected and highly-acclaimed master of his art may seem ubiquitous, it’s actually been a while since comedian Harry Hill – one of the UK’s best-loved and most inventive entertainers – performed live on stage night after night.

In fact, when Harry’s current tour rolls into Cambridge next month, it will have been 10 years since his last sell-out jaunt, Sausage Time. Pedigree Fun is the name of the big-collared star’s new touring show and when the Cambridge Independent caught up with Harry, he had just finished the first leg the previous night in Brighton.

“It’s been going great,” he says. “I finished it last night in a sense – the main body of the tour, which was 50-odd dates. I remember thinking when I was putting the dates together and starting it – those early warm-ups – ‘Gosh, this is going to kill me’ but actually it’s flown by and it’s been really good fun. I always have a slightly ambivalent relationship with touring, because in the past I‘ve always resented the travelling.

“I’ve always sort of suffered the travelling, rather than embraced it, and this tour, I think maybe because we were all locked up for so long, I’ve just really enjoyed that part of it too – up and down the motorway and stopping off at the service stations... It’s made me think I ought to do it more often.”

Pedigree Fun boasts new jokes in an all-singing, all-dancing, one-man spectacular. Audiences will meet Harry’s new baby elephant Sarah (a part of the show that includes a lot of audience participation) and Ian, The Information Worm. And yes, the co-host of Channel 4’s Junior Bake Off – who describes himself as a “massive fan” of fellow comedian Stewart Lee – will also be joined by Stouffer the Cat, his famous sidekick.

The pandemic obviously put paid to any intention the three-time BAFTA Award winner may have had to go back out on the road a couple of years ago, but there were other factors that prevented a potential return to the stage. Harry, 58, says part of it was the amount of television work he was doing, but there was more to it than that.

“About six years ago, I nearly went on tour,” he reveals. “Back then I had a whole load of dates booked in, but I had a change of heart and thought, ‘I can’t face it’. It’s just worked out well really... and then obviously with the lockdowns where they said ‘no, you can’t do it now’, it made me want to do it more.

“The other aspect of it, I think – and I’ve talked to other comedians about this – is that the audience seem a lot more up for it now as well. I don’t know if that’s true but it feels like they’re desperate for a bit of an escape. Maybe it’s just the times we’re in as well – a lot of bad news around, isn’t there?

“And I deliberately made this tour very, very silly. I put a lot of physical, slapstick stuff in, which I think is quite unusual in a sense because not many people do that now. You get it in pantomimes and you get it in circuses but stand-ups don’t really do it any more. So that’s been an area of interest to me for a while.”

With eight British Comedy Awards and a Perrier Best Newcomer Award to his name, the comedian, presenter and author often gets cited by other comics as an influence for managing to keep the energy level up – even if their subject matter may be completely different.

“Well, it’s horses for courses,” says Harry, who holds a medical degree from the University of London and is still registered as a medical practitioner. “The truth is whatever kind of comedian you are, you don’t really have any choice about what type of comedian you are.

“I always used to envy people like Alan Davies, who would do 10 minutes on one subject, and it would be discursive and the audience would love him as much as anyone, whereas I’d have to do 10 different subjects in a minute; I could never really develop shaggy dog stories and longer bits, and I think you can kick against that. You can fight it and try to be like other comedians but fundamentally you have to follow your heart.

“My thing was always that I was insecure about any silence – I just wanted them laughing and as one laugh’s dying down, I want to punch them again until they’re punch-drunk. I’m always going for that moment where they’re just reeling and then they’re out of control.

“That’s what I’ve always gone for. The first 20 minutes of my show at the moment does that, but then you just need to have a little something there, a little kind of pacer thing. Often that’s a musical thing or a prop, or just something to say, ‘OK, you can have a break now’. Then you start to pick up again and knock them around for another 10 minutes. That’s my thinking anyway.”

He adds: “What I’m aiming for is that people come stumbling out at the end of the night feeling sort of confused about what just happened. I want them to wake up the next morning thinking it was a dream. It’s not an overtly political show or anything like that, so it’s a good way to forget, to be taken away from real life – and let’s face it, we all need that every now and then.”

Harry, who was born in Woking, grew up in Kent and lived as a teenager in Hong Kong, made his comedy debut at the Edinburgh Fringe 30 years ago and went on to create the hit ITV series Harry Hill’s TV Burp, which ran for 10 years. More recently, he has made three series of ITV’s Harry Hill’s Alien Fun Capsule, two series of Harry Hill’s Tea-Time and Harry Hill’s World of TV, and of course he is the voice of You’ve Been Framed.

As an author, Harry has written several best-selling joke books, the popular children’s book series Matt Millz and last year released an autobiography Fight!: Thirty Years Not Quite at the Top, which was named by The Times as one of its books of 2021. In 2013, he released The Harry Hill Movie and has also had his artwork displayed at the Royal Academy.

[Read more: Stand-up comedian Mark Simmons: ‘I failed until I stopped failing as much’, Comedian Gary Delaney: ‘Laugh a minute? That means 80 per cent of my jokes have failed’]

Having enjoyed himself on this tour so far, Harry believes he won’t leave it quite so long next time. “I think I’m going to tour again in two years,” he says. “Well, I should have told the promoter, but I think that will happen...

“And the other thing I was thinking about, because a lot of people come up to me afterwards and say ‘I saw you 25 years ago and you did this routine and you did that routine’, is I might do a bit where I do some of my ‘greatest hits’. That might be fun; I’d have to try it out first and see if those things are still funny...

“I’ve got a lot of stuff under my belt over the years, and I had a lot of stuff I had to cut out of this tour because it was too long. The show now is about 50 minutes in the first half, 50 minutes in the second half, and at one point it was two and a half hours, so I have had to cut out a lot of stuff – mainly because it wasn’t funny enough, but there were a few bits that I do miss.

“But anyway, who knows? We’ll concentrate on this tour before we start thinking about the next one. I think it’s probably safer to do that.”

Catch Harry Hill’s Pedigree Fun at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Saturday, January 14, 2023. Tickets, priced at £33, are available at cornex.co.uk. For more on Harry, go to harryhilltour.com.