The return of TV comic Paul Merton

Paul Merton holidayed in Ireland as a child. He visits again this week to perform his improv show at Vicar Street, says Richard Fitzpatrick.

PAUL Merton, one half of the BBC’s long-running satirical show, Have I Got News For You, returns to Ireland this week (May 3) to perform improvisational comedy at Vicar Street, with his troupe, Paul Merton’s Impro Chums, and his wife, Suki Webster.

Merton began visiting Ireland on childhood holidays from London’s suburbs. “My cousins live in Cork, just outside Monkstown. We used to come over for holidays, from the late 1960s onwards. I can still remember being ‘knocked out’ by seeing a train going down the middle of a road in Cork City.”

Merton filmed a travel programme about Ireland for Channel 5. It visited Gort’s Brazilian immigrant community, the Burren’s lunar landscape in Co Clare, and road bowling in Cork. Merton was amazed by the amount of money parting hands on the ditch. “Hundreds of people were there. It must be one of the oldest sports, because, basically, you’re talking about a ball and a road. Will he get around the bend in the road with his next throw? Serious money was involved on a small metal ball bouncing down a gritty road,” he says.

Merton was born into a working-class family in London, in 1957. He is enchanted by the early years of film and has made documentaries on Hollywood: Paul Merton Looks at Alfred Hitchcock examined the director’s early, British films. “He was very influenced by the German silent cinema,” says Merton. “If you think of what we know as the highlights of Hitchcock films, they are generally sequences without dialogue — the shower sequence in Psycho, Cary Grant being chased by the aeroplane, hiding among the weeds, in North by Northwest, a guy hanging off a building with his coat sleeve unravelling. Hitchcock believed cinema was about visuals, action, movement, things you can’t do on stage, essentially.

“From his early teens, he would go to every show that opened on the West End, virtually every night. He says himself he got a sense from that of how to manipulate audiences, of how to tell a story. For example, in Psycho, when the killer, Norman Bates, has put the body in the boot of a car; he wants the car to sink into a swamp, but the car stops sinking. We know he’s a weirdo. We know he’s the villain. The car is not moving. It cuts back to him, the killer, wanting the car to disappear. The audience is going, ‘We want the car to disappear’, even though we know he’s the killer. Hitchcock shows us for a few seconds a car that is not moving, nothing else, and the tension is unbearable,” Merton says.

He has absorbed such minimalist tricks into his comedy. Buster Keaton never responds facially to the high jinks that befall him in his silent films, so Merton used this deadpan as a template for his stand-up comedy, citing one of the first successful routines he wrote, in 1981, about a policeman giving evidence about an acid trip. The key is that the copper delivers it matter-of-fact: “Thirty-five minutes later, I was sitting aboard an intergalactic spacecraft bound for the planet Zanussi, when I observed Constable Parish approaching me disguised as a fortnight’s holiday in Benidorm.”

The gag is funny, like the surreal interjections Merton is famous for on Have I Got New For You, because he doesn’t acknowledge it as funny, and because he acts like he can’t fathom why it would be funny.

Merton had an unfortunate reaction to drugs. He has written about this in his autobiography, which will be published in the autumn. In late 1989, he had just finished filming a TV series. He went to Kenya, his first “posh” holiday, and took anti-malaria tablets; a weekly pill and a daily pill. “Virtually every Friday, when I would take this weekly pill, I would have a manic episode. I would get really paranoid. I’d get in the back of a taxi, and if there was a bit of purple in the taxi, I thought I was being abducted by the royal family. Mad stuff, where you can’t control what you’re thinking.

“I went into the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital. The TV thing has been postponed, it was made clear to me, for at least a year, and I’m in the Maudsley, thinking, ‘there is nothing I can do about this. If I get angry, this is the worst place to do that; if I start screaming and banging my head against the wall, it is going to make things a lot worse’.”

While hospitalised, he was appearing on pre-filmed episodes of Channel 4’s Whose Line Is It Anyway? After a few weeks, a doctor realised the anti-malaria tablets were causing his mania. Merton’s relief was immense. “That’s it! That’s why I was like this! It was a really exciting time. It was coming up to the TV series I’d spent a year and a half writing with a friend of mine. It was all happening. This was the big thing I’d been thinking about since I was five years old. Everything you work for is suddenly being taken away. Friends of mine were distraught. I used to be the kind of comedian who was the funniest person at the party, or endeavoured to be. I stopped being like that. I was in the Maudsley for six weeks, two months, in total. In that time, I stopped being the show-off guy. I’m much more likely now to be the quiet person than the one holding court.”

* Paul Merton’s Impro Chums will perform at 7.30pm, Saturday, May 3, Vicar Street, 58-59 Thomas Street, Dublin 8; www.vicarstreet.ie