He’s just making it up as he goes along
Last updated 11:40, Thursday, 29 May 2008
In Channel 4’s long-running show Whose Line is it Anyway? performers were required to come up with sketches, speeches and jokes based on suggestions shouted out by the audience.
It was a show that made Paul Merton a household name in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Merton’s new live tour, Paul Merton’s Impro Chums, which comes to the Sands Centre, Carlisle, on Saturday night, follows a similar format.
Audience members will be given slips of paper at the start of the show and Paul and the other four performers will base their improvisations around the themes the audience raise, with the minimum of preparation.
There are also dangers in being at the mercy of the audience’s suggestions – and topics sometimes come up that are strictly no-go areas.
“The things that people write down in the dark under the cloak of anonymity can sometimes be quite scary,” Paul admits.
“We might look at something and think: ‘We just can’t do that.’ If you ever see someone pick up a card and say: ‘I can’t do that one’, it’s almost always on the grounds of taste.
“The suggestions might be homophobic, say, or there was the one where within a month of the London Underground attacks we had a card that said: ‘Travel on the Underground with a rucksack stuffed with explosives.’ Now that’s just not going to work, and if we tried it we’d end up being booed for someone else’s suggestion.”
Merton is best known these days as a team captain on Have I Got News for You, appearing, with fellow team captain Ian Hislop, even more often than the new mayor of London.
Paul, whose real name is Paul Martin, took his stage surname from the area of London where he grew up. He left school without any qualifications and worked in the employment office in Tooting for seven years before, inspired by Alexei Sayle’s act at London’s Raymond Revue Bar, he tried to make it as a stand-up, and first perfected his straight-faced, slightly bewildered expression.
It is Paul’s face that fills the posters advertising Impro Chums but the title reminds us that we are also spending an evening in the company of his comedy friends, namely comedians Suki Webster, Richard Vranch, Lee Simpson and Mike McShane, who is replacing improv stalwart Jim Sweeney, now too unwell with the multiple sclerosis to carry on touring.
Paul compares the appeal of improvisational comedy to the years of doing stand-up in the early to mid 80s,” Paul says. “Bits of it were fun, the bits on stage, but when I’m sitting in some dressing room backstage at half time, and hearing the buzz of hopefully excited people while I’m here on my own, I think: ‘Why am I here on my own?’
“Compared to that there are five people on this tour, and we travel around on a coach with each show being different every night. That’s a key thing. If you get an idea that you think is a funny idea, you don’t have to pitch it, you just do it and find out there and then if it’s funny.
“This freedom just to come up with stuff and not have to take it to anybody or get a show of hands can be liberating.”
The popularity of Have I Got News for You (now about to enter it 35th series) has almost overshadowed the other TV and radio work Paul has done.
In an interview with Melvyn Bragg he pointed out: “Many people had no idea I’d been a stand-up comedian. They thought I was born to sit behind a desk and make quips about the week’s news.”
Within the last three decades he has written for Sticky Moments with Julian Clary, had his own show Paul Merton: The Series, is a frequent contestant on Radio Four’s Just a Minute, and has presented Room 101 on BBC2.
He turned down an offer to take over from Desmond Lynam as chairman of Countdown, saying: “The people who watch and play the game take it very seriously. Even if you could think of gags in the course of three weeks for six months of programming, you couldn’t think of enough, and the people who watch it don’t want gags – they just want the quiz.”
A follow-up to Paul Merton in China, this time in India, is to appear later this year, and he promises it will be entertaining.
“From the crew’s point of view, we got better material than the China series,” he says. “But it was an intensive thing, and I reached a level of exhaustion where I was getting chest infections and a bad stomach. Since I’ve been back, I’ve mainly just been lying around.”
Once the Impro Chums tour finishes at the end of June, he’ll be getting ready to direct and appear in a documentary for BBC4 about the films of Alfred Hitchcock. He is showing no signs of slowing up, and Paul is a firm believer in the adage that you’re as young as you feel.
“Maybe I’ve changed physically, but I don’t feel any different,” he says.“ I feel 30.
“There were people I went to school with who when they were 16 were really 40, while there were people I worked with in the Tooting employment office like this 60-year-old guy who had the spirit of a 20-year-old.
“There’s a Dave Allen line that says growing old is better than the alternative. I’m still pleased to be working and doing it.”
Paul Merton’s Impro Chums starts at 8pm. Tickets cost £18.50, from www.thesandscentre.co.uk, by calling 01228 625222 or the 24-hour ticket line on 08448 472276.
