Harry Hill tells BBC’s Desert Island Discs his stepfather’s death made him switch careers

Comedian Harry Hill has said his stepfather’s death at a young age was what inspired him to quit his job in medicine and pursue a career in entertainment.

The 60-year-old, best known for shows such as Harry Hill’s TV Burp and You’ve Been Framed, studied at St George’s Medical School and worked as a doctor before pivoting to comedy in the early 1990s.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs: “It had been a long time coming, and then my stepfather died of cancer.

“And I thought, here’s a man who’s worked all his life. And they [my stepfather and mother] had always talked about what they were going to do in retirement. And how old was he? Maybe 54. And I thought, I don’t want that to be me.”

“The other part of it,” Hill laughed, “is I think if I’d said to him, ‘I’m giving up to be a comedian’, he would have been quite disapproving.

“So it probably kind of set me free a little bit from that. But really, I was kind of at the end of my tether with [medicine].”

Hill qualified as a doctor in 1988, and began his medical career working in orthopaedics. But, he explained, he was not passionate about the job and felt he did not have the right temperament.

“I think it’s difficult even if your heart’s in it,” he told presenter Lauren Laverne. “In the first six months, I had to break the news to this bloke whose wife had died in this operation, unexpectedly, and they had young children, and I was completely out of my depth.

“I told him, he started crying, and then I started crying, and I thought, this isn’t good. I mean, I certainly wasn’t a very emotional [person]. Actually what it makes you do is bottle up your emotions.”

Asked how long he continued bottling his emotions for, Hill replied: “Until I had kids, I think. There’s something about having kids that uncorks you.

“I wasn’t a bad doctor,” he reflected. “If I’d stuck at it, I probably would have ended up as a GP.”

After having doubts about his suitability, Hill had a discussion with his consultant about his career, before telling his mother he was going to have a year off to try comedy.

When leaving his job, Hill said: “I remember getting in the car, and this sounds impossible, driving out of the hospital car park, I turned on the radio, and the tune that came on was Eric Burdon and the Animals, with We Gotta Get Out of This Place.

“I remember driving away, weight lifted, and I thought, wow, this is really exciting, and it was, and terrifying in equal measure.”

Hill explained his stepfather, Tony, had met his mother in an amateur dramatics group, and often wrote pantomimes and starred in them as the dame.

“He inherited four kids when he married my mum,” Hill explained. “And I didn’t think it at the time, but that’s quite a guy to take that on.”

At the time, Hill said, it was unusual among his friends that his parents had divorced. “People didn’t do it,” he recalled. “Everyone’s parents are divorced now, but back then, people just stuck it out.”

Hill has presented a variety of TV programmes since leaving medicine, including Harry Hill’s Tea Time, Harry Hill’s Alien Fun Capsule, Harry Hill’s World of TV and a revival of Stars in Their Eyes.

Since 2019, he has hosted the Great British Bake Off children’s spin-off, Junior Bake Off, on Channel 4.

But his best known programme was Harry Hill’s TV Burp, a satirical review of the previous week’s television. It ran on ITV for 11 series, airing its final episode in 2012.

Hill has previously indicated he would not revive TV Burp because of the intensive workload, a position he reiterated to Laverne.

“I made a lot of TV shows, and most of them have been a lot less successful than TV Burp, but I don’t look back at those years particularly fondly because of that stress,” he said.

“I would start the week with no show, knowing that on Saturday morning I’d have to sit down and write a show. We’d work one week in advance, off preview tapes, so I’d sit down with a blank page on a Saturday, and at the end of that day I’d have to email it to the producer.”

While the episode was being pulled together, Hill said he and his team “would watch TV all day long, there were no shortcuts, you did actually have to watch the full two-and-a-half hours of Emmerdale”.

“The best day was the recording day,” he said, “but if you ask my wife, every time I came back from a recording, I’d go upstairs, she’d be in bed, and I’d say ‘I’ve got to get out of this’. It was bad.

“But then I’d watch it on the Saturday and think it was great, I did really enjoy watching it.”

Hill also co-wrote 2021’s Tony! (A Tony Blair Rock Opera), and the X Factor musical I Can’t Sing, which closed in 2014 after six weeks at the London Palladium.

Reflecting on its failure, Hill said: “It became clear to me, that people who like the X Factor don’t really go to musicals, and people who go to musicals don’t really like the X Factor. It was just a really bad idea.”

But he added: “You can’t be heartbroken, you’d be a complete baby if you got upset about a professional failure.”

Desert Island Discs is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 10:00 BST on Sunday, and is then available on BBC Sounds.

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