Has he got news for you... Paul Merton on his new stand-up show

As Paul Merton brings his frank and funny new show to the West End, he tells Bruce Dessau about the chilling stay at London’s Maudsley psychiatric hospital that inspired it
Funnyman: Comedian Paul Merton
Daniel Hambury
8 October 2012

At well over six foot, Paul Merton cuts a distinctive figure as he walks through The Ivy restaurant. More of a “sit-down” than a stand-up comedian, the quickfire pro is best known for his role as team captain on BBC One’s panel show Have I Got News For You.

But the 55-year-old funnyman has been stretching his legs lately, going back on the road for his first tour in more than a decade. When he brings his new show to the West End’s Vaudeville Theatre next week it will be the first time he has performed his own material — as opposed to improv — in London since 1998.

Out of My Head is not quite the stand-up animal his television fans might be hoping for. It is Merton revisiting events in his life with the aid of sketches and music alongside his wife, Suki Webster, and long-time colleagues Richard Vranch and Lee Simpson. Why not go it alone?

“My main motivation for it was that when I used to do stand-up I’d be one of four people on a bill and it was a nice social thing,” he says. “When I did my last solo tour I was sitting in the dressing room during the interval listening to the bustling crowd on the intercom with a cup of tea on my own, thinking I’ve got to go back and listen to myself talking for another 45 minutes. I realised I’m a team player. Performing with others is not the icing on the cake, it is the cake. If it was two hours on my own I’d probably lose interest.” And, he fears, so would the audience.

The silent-movie obsessive is in a chatty, open mood as he discusses the show’s title. It sounds like a reference to the improvisation that Merton still does most Sundays off Leicester Square as part of the Comedy Store Players, but it is also a specific reference to his extended stay in the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in the late Eighties. He recalls those events with such crystal clarity that they clearly had a surprisingly lasting effect on him.

Merton’s career was rapidly taking off. He had been writing for Julian Clary and was just about to front his own Channel 4 series when an adverse reaction to anti-malaria pills knocked him sideways. He became paranoid in meetings with TV executives and started to think that he was being followed by freemasons.

He has talked about his time in the Camberwell clinic before but never so chillingly. His usual cheerful demeanour frequently drops and even when his humour remains, the tone becomes darker. “The Maudsley thing was a good thing in a way, it acted as an ego brake. I was getting a bit Charlie Big Potatoes — I’d got what I wanted ever since I could remember.”

The stay was intended to be brief. “I got out after 10 days but I was still not right. I was looking at people oddly and thinking they were looking at me oddly, so I went back.”

Things took a horrifying turn. “They asked me to empty my pockets and I rather churlishly refused. They said, ‘If you refuse you have to sign a form saying you’ve refused because we don’t know if you’ve got anything sharp’. I quickly understood it was no good trying to fight them. They had the power to keep me there for a long time.”

He had to play the game or risk grave consequences: “Someone said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get sectioned’.”

But events conspired to make him appear far more ill than he was. “I was in a dormitory with six other beds. The shower block next door leaked, so I stopped showering, and if you wanted to shave you had to sign a piece of paper saying they had given you a razor, so I grew a beard. After five days they called me in and said: ‘You’ve not been looking after yourself’. It was pretty grim. I realised if you refuse to do stuff, things will happen, and not necessarily to your advantage,” — he then lightens the mood — “as the Japanese emperor said at the end of World War 2”.

One event in particular still haunts him. “There was a guy who, if you looked into his eyes, would always look away. One day it was a patient’s birthday and everyone was singing Happy Birthday when this guy took the opportunity to walk out of the ward, through the main entrance and back to the tower block where he lived. He walked to the top and threw himself off.” Merton had told a nurse he was going out to meet a friend the next day, but the nurse had forgotten this. “So I get back having been drinking Guinness and playing pool and it’s panic stations, nobody knew where I was.”

Seeing mental illness up close was startling: “If you are in a normal hospital with a broken leg, with other people with broken legs, you don’t break your other leg, but in a psychiatric hospital somebody comes in with a belief that there are people hiding in the chimney and within 24 hours everyone else thinks it’s true.”

A medication oversight did not help. “They were giving me the weekly pill every day because they weren’t reading the label properly.” Eventually, when his anti-malaria course ended — the drug has now been withdrawn — he started improving. After six weeks he left and has had no recurrence since.

In fact he seems one of the most well-balanced acts in a business full of needy neurotics. He puts this down to performing with others and avoiding television comedy.

“I think if you work a lot on your own and you are watching others you end up thinking ‘Why are they doing better than me?’ and you can drive yourself nuts.” On Have I Got News For You he has seen the Charlie Big Potatoes syndrome in full effect. “The first time Ann Widdecombe came on she was all bumbling amateurishness. The next time she argued with producers and was telling the writers their jokes weren’t good enough ...”

Have I Got News For You, which returns next month, has been good to Merton. He says he has not seen former host Angus Deayton for over a decade since he resigned after his sex life became news itself. Merton, on the other hand, is bemused to be approaching national treasure status: “The other day I was visiting a safari park and I was browsing through a book in the gift shop: it had a list of favourite wits and I was placed sixth, between Churchill and Noël Coward!”

His personal life has certainly had its ups and downs since the Maudsley, though. His marriage to actress Caroline Quentin ended in divorce and his second wife, Sarah Parkinson, died of cancer in 2003. He married Suki Webster in 2009. What is touring with your wife like? He smiles: “I think when you ask me that you are imagining being on tour with your wife. It’s actually easier. If you get home late you don’t need to talk to her when you get in because your wife has been with you. Obviously the worst option would be to work with your wife if she was useless.”

The couple do not have children, something Merton is maybe starting to regret. “When I was young I decided that I didn’t have time, it’s that thing Cyril Connolly says about the pram in the hall being the enemy of creativity. I love children but I love it when they go away.” He might have had children with Parkinson but now it looks as if the moment has gone. I wonder if he had nieces and nephews that he took to the safari park — I tend to associate safari parks with children, I remark. “That’s funny, I tend to associate them with animals,” he replies without missing a beat.

Out of My Head is at the Vaudeville, WC2, Oct 1-20 (0844 482 9675, nimaxtheatres.com).

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