On Saturday, in our first extract from Harry Hill’s uproarious new memoir, the funnyman told how his comedy career has been beset with disaster — from meeting the Queen while drunk to his doomed attempt to launch a new musical. His life as a doctor was more difficult, according to our final part. . .
Let’s get one thing straight: I was never a neurosurgeon. Some joker put it on Wikipedia and, because I rather like the idea, I’ve never bothered to change it. Not that I couldn’t operate on your brain if you wanted me to. If you need a brain operation, I’m happy to have a go. I just can’t guarantee the results.
True, it is true that my doctorate was earned. Fundamentally, though, I wasn’t cut out for life as a medic — one of logic and reasoning. I’m a dreamer at heart. I live in my head and I’m always looking for new excitements, but it took me a while to work that out, and in the meantime, I’m afraid my patients didn’t always get a smooth ride.
Why did I choose to become a doctor? My friends and I had enjoyed trying to make explosions after I was given a chemistry set for my birthday, and that early apparent interest in science somehow morphed into the idea of me becoming a doctor — which Mum, in particular, was thrilled about.
Although I admit it, my feelings were conflicted. Inside, I knew I wanted to be a comedy writer or possibly a comedian, but I couldn’t work out how on earth you became one.
True, it is true that my doctorate was earned. Fundamentally, though, I wasn’t cut out for life as a medic — one of logic and reasoning
I’d seen interviews with comics such as Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Tommy Cooper, and it seemed that the way they’d all got into it was through entertaining the troops in World War II. To be a star, I was the 16-year old praying for World War III.
Monty Python and I met at Cambridge University. However, none of my teachers suggested that I was intelligent enough to do so.
For my A-levels, I studied the sciences — but as the exams approached, I was struggling in physics and chemistry. My physics teacher had shaken his head and told my parents that there was ‘absolutely no chance’ of me getting a good enough grade to do medicine, and suggested I should consider chiropody instead.
I’m an awkward b*****d and don’t like to take no for an answer. I was also quite certain that I didn’t want to spend my days fiddling with other people’s feet. As soon as that teacher told me I couldn’t make it as a doctor, I decided to make sure I would be one. It could be said that I was a victim of my own indignation.
Once I’d passed my exams, though, and enrolled at St George’s Hospital Medical School in Tooting, I was keen to get involved with the drama society. Within a few months I was writing sketches, including one where a shark had somehow got into the operating theatre because it had ‘smelt blood’.
What made me want to be a doctor? My friends and I had enjoyed trying to make explosions after I was given a chemistry set for my birthday, and that early apparent interest in science somehow morphed into the idea of me becoming a doctor — which Mum, in particular, was thrilled about
Medical school was really fascinating in the third year. That’s when we finally got to meet the patients. Doctors were considered gods back then. Before the internet, when people couldn’t Google what was wrong with them, there’d be a notable frisson when a doctor in a white coat walked into a room. It was the oracle!
I was shocked to discover that most people took what I had said as a whole. One visitor once asked me whether it was okay to smoke in the corridor.
‘How many do you smoke a day?’ I demanded.
‘Er, about 20?’ he said.
‘Hmm, well, you need to cut down,’ I snapped. ‘I need you to promise me you’ll have quit completely by the end of the year.’ ‘Yes, Doctor!’ he said, almost jumping to attention.
They were wrong to think I was as perfect as I thought. My first few days in general hospital had been spent diagnosing a heart attack for a normal patient. I was also told off for daydreaming during an operation to repair an aortic aneurysm. It didn’t help that the heart surgeon was trying to deal with a burst vein at the time.
One patient, a Lebanese man, came to me for the repair of bilateral hernias — lumps in the groin. I provided him with a form for him to complete. I handed him a form to sign. He took his reading glasses out and began to examine it.
‘I’m sure it’s all fine, Doctor,’ he said, looking up. ‘But just one thing. What is a bilateral orchidectomy?’
‘Removal of the testicles,’ I said. ‘Castration, if you like . . .’
‘Hmm, so why am I having that, too?’
‘Eh?’ I said, snatching the consent form back off him. Yes, he wasn’t just interested in hernias but was also ready to dance the night away. He was very fortunate to have spotted it.
They were wrong to think I was as perfect as they believed. After only a couple of days in general hospital, I discovered that a woman had suffered a cardiac arrest.
Then there was the inadvisability of having a cardiac arrest — never a good idea, obviously, but especially on my shift.
A senior medical house officer [SHO] on call (which is what I was) is automatically on the cardiac arrest response unit or in hospital slang, the ‘crash team’ — day and night. You fall asleep at 2am when the alarm from the crash team shrieks. You automatically start pulling your shoes on before you’ve even opened your eyes, and then you run.
You run like your life depends on it, even though, in fact, someone else’s does. As soon as a person’s heart stops beating, their chances of survival fall off exponentially with the amount of time that passes. It is not just minutes, but seconds that make a difference.
When St George’s was built, it was the largest teaching hospital in Europe, with a mile of corridors between the furthest points. There was one team of crash specialists available for all the hospital’s new wings when it opened.
If your arrest bleep went off while you were in the old wing and you were needed in the new wing, you really had to leg it if you didn’t want your patient to peg it.
One time I was in call and went to the canteen. I’d just loaded up my plate with Sausage Lyonnaise, one of their specialities, when my cardiac arrest bleep went off. The bleep was obvious. . . Then I looked at them. It was. . I then looked at the cashier.
‘Poor you!’ she said. I looked up, sighed and grabbed a sausage. Then, I turned around and ran. I don’t know whether you’ve ever tried eating a sausage and running at the same time — well, it turns out you can’t.
And it doesn’t look good turning up to a cardiac arrest holding a warm sausage either.
If you are called to a cardiac arrest during the day and you aren’t clutching a sausage, it can look terribly glamorous. As I walked down the corridor with my stethoscope in hand, old ladies would be enchanted. Passers-by would shout encouragement: ‘Go on, Doc! Sort him out!’
As the SHO, I’d usually be the first on the scene. The responsibility doesn’t get any greater than for a cardiac arrest — what you do in those few minutes makes the difference between life, death and occasionally something in between. The process of cardiac resuscitation can be described as a sequence of steps. You may call it a flowchart. You try the first step, and if that doesn’t work, you go to the second one and so on.
The first one, when I was doing it anyway, was the ‘precordial thump’ — a punch to the chest. The punch works only when the heart is stopped beating. At any other time, it’s just assault. Next, it’s CPR or chest compressions. You’ve really got to lean on that chest, otherwise it doesn’t compress the heart enough for it to be effective.
My registrar at the time used to reckon that if you didn’t break a couple of the patient’s ribs, you weren’t doing it right.
Here comes the fun part. It’s time to break out the Kerdunker! You’ve all seen defibrillators on the telly — they look like a couple of electric irons connected to a tape deck. You shout: ‘Clear!’ Kerdunk!
I knew I wanted to be a comedy writer or possibly a comedian, but I couldn’t work out how on earth you became one
If I’m honest, I could count on the fingers of one foot the number of times the Kerdunker brought someone back. But now and then, much to my surprise, it did work — and it was a fantastic feeling, because it’s like magic! One minute your patient (and it’s nearly always a man and usually a smoker) is lying blue and gurgling with his eyes rolled up into the top of his head. Then — Kerdunk! — he’s sitting up asking for his cup of tea, completely oblivious to the peril he was in just moments before.
Most of the time they’d never even thank me. It was really only ever the nurses who got the thank-yous — and more importantly, the gifts: the boxes of Milk Tray and occasional bottles of sherry.
So whenever I successfully resuscitated someone, I would lean over them and as their eyes focused on my face I’d say: ‘My name is Doctor Matthew Hall — and I’ve just saved your life!’
The experiment worked. My first attempt resulted in a huge box of crystallized fruits. It was a success!
The main lesson I took home from my brief stint as a doctor was a simple one that everyone comes to realise eventually — but not usually until they are faced with death. 23 years old, I realized that life was short.
After I qualified, I moved on to Ashford Hospital, in Surrey, which took patients from Heathrow’s Terminal 3 — and, yes, our love of gallows humour meant there were a lot of ‘terminal’ jokes.
The main lesson I took home from my brief stint as a doctor was a simple one that everyone comes to realise eventually — but not usually until they are faced with death. When I was just 23 years old, I realized that my life is very short.
One day, a man was brought in — mid-60s, probable heart attack. We tried to bring him back, but he wasn’t having it. We were unsure of his identity so we looked in his wallet.
Sure enough I found his driving licence and name — but I also found a receipt for Knickerbox, the lingerie outlet. His wife was found by someone and the two of us broke the bad news.
It turned out that they’d just come back from a holiday to celebrate his retirement. He’d clearly popped in to Knickerbox in the hope of livening things up. This was what made the experience so difficult for me.
‘He’d been planning it for so long,’ sobbed his wife. ‘We were so looking forward to his retirement, to spend some proper time together.’ A light-bulb moment. Life’s short. And I didn’t want to spend it being a doctor.
‘Probably what you need to do is get a GP practice in a village with a really strong amateur dramatics group,’ my mother said, vainly trying to look for a compromise.
There was nothing to be done. Matthew Hall, Dr. Matthew had already left. I tried writing jokes while sitting at my desk.
It was a good memory of me gigging with Sean Lock. He was going well, until out of the blue some bum up the back shouts: ‘You’re not funny!’ Sean stops and pauses just for a beat, just long enough to establish who’s boss, to let the guy know he’s not hurt by it in any way. ‘Not funny?’ he said. ‘So all these people laughing . . . that’s a coincidence, is it?’ Beautiful
Harry Hill’s first gig was on September 23, 1990, at the Aztec Comedy Club, a Mexican restaurant in South Norwood.
That’s not strictly true. Harry Hall was my name back then. Michael Caine has a good line about why he changed his name: ‘There was already a famous actor called Maurice Micklewhite.’ In my case, there was a cement business called Matthew Hall. A ticket is not required to view a cement company.
I changed it because I thought Harry Hall was more showbiz, and I liked the way it contained ‘Ha-Ha’, too. I also didn’t want any of my friends or family turning up to my gigs — and I certainly didn’t want to see any of my old patients in the front row.
But when I tried to join the actor’s union Equity, I was told there was already a female actor called Hari Hall. Therefore, I asked her permission for the use of my name. I was turned down by her. I ummed and ahhed for a couple of weeks over alternatives — Harry Hole, Harry Hell and even Harry Carnegie were all front runners (Carnegie Hall, geddit?I.
Once I had settled on my stage name I wrote down my favorite gags on pieces of A4 paper and joined them to create a scroll that contained my five minute act. It was nearly as tall as I am.
You’ll be pleased to hear that I still have that scroll of paper. It appears that I started my set with ‘I’m not a lonely person but I’m the only person I know . . . (pause) I’m the only person I know.’
It made me anxious to think of the hecklers. People, journalists, and civils all love the idea that hecklers exist. ‘What’s the best heckle you’ve ever had? I bet you’ve got some great heckle put-down lines.’
The fact is, if the rest of the room is with you, it doesn’t matter what you say — you’ll get the laugh and the heckler will shut up. And if you’re dying the room hates you . . . it doesn’t matter what you say either, you’re toast.
What’s the worst heckle I’ve ever had? That’s probably being chased down the road next to the Hackney Empire by a bloke wielding a broken bottle, threatening to kill me. This bloke questioned me while I struggled on the stage. I came back at him with a four-letter word, and to my surprise, it worked — there was a bit of muttering, but he shut up.
He charged towards me as I was going to my car waving a empty beer bottle. The end of the beer bottle was flung on the pavement by him. I was shocked and walked towards him waving my empty beer bottle at him. I sprint for my car as soon as I saw him and ran off. ‘I was right about you!’ I shouted out of the window: ‘You are a ****!’
Actually, I made that last bit up — it’s what I should have said, but honestly I was too scared to say anything. I’d never been threatened with physical violence. It just didn’t happen in my part of Kent.
The collar and glasses were the first thing that made me stand out on stage. I always thought it was important to have a ‘look’. I have never been a jeans-and-t-shirt kind of girl.
I’d picked the glasses because I thought they made me look like Buddy Holly — I can see now that really they made me look like a 1950s accountant. I bought a pair of brothel creepers in Carnaby Street —– just the sort of thing I’d never have been allowed to get away with on the wards. These early months of freedom were the most rebellious years in my teenage life.
Hill’s TV Burp hit was on ITV for a while in the Noughties. It aired on Saturdays just before The X Factor.
A sparkly waistcoat from a charity shop joined my ensemble for a while —– until the stand-up comic Ian MacPherson took me to one side after a gig at the Red Rose. He congratulated me on my act —– which was a real thrill as I was such a fan of his —– and added with a wry smile: ‘But I can see you dropping the waistcoat . . . ’
I have never worn it again.
To make the collar look bigger, I raised it. When people started commenting on the big collar, I had a couple made with genuinely huge collars — they were expensive and not the sort of thing I’d ever bought before, but I saw it as an investment in the act.
I was rewarded. More laughs. It was great to laugh.
Since that Cub Scout panto, I have always done so. It’s only recently that I’ve worked out what it was I so enjoyed about the experience.
Because I made them laugh, people laughed. I felt empowered.
I’m a megalomaniac really. Bet you’re glad I’m not a doctor.
- Extracted from Fight! by Harry Hill, to be published by Hodder on November 11 at £20. © 2021 Harry Hill. To order a copy for £18 go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £20. Valid until November 11th