Harry Hill is a rare delight. An act outside the normal parameters of the stand-up circuit who has become internationally successful.
Harry is big. He’s conquered prime-time television with shows such as The All New Harry Hill show and Harry Hill’s TV Burp.
Over the years, Hill’s shirt collars have gotten bigger and bigger and more pens have been stuffed into his top pocket. But there is more to him than silly costumes. Harry’s trademark is to offer up seemingly unexplained bits of funny nonsense – almost mystifyingly at first – and to then wander down three or four different paths, before returning to the original nugget, with an extension or addition to the gag, jumping right back in time across his set as though he had just uttered the original line.
The audience is drawn into a dozen tangled threads throughout the set. It is almost like one of those puzzles in The Beano, where you have to decipher which among a scribble of strings will lead you to the correct balloons belonging to Dennis The Menace.
Hill looks as though he’s just jumped from a comic strip, too. He likes to baffle his audience, until, finally, they start to catch up with him.
Harry Hill has never played in Ireland until now, partly because of a misunderstanding about the likelihood of English comedians being summarily “blown up” in the old days, but largely because of drums. “I’ve been asking to play an Irish date on tour for ages,” explains Harry. “We were all set to come to Dublin before, but the promoter wouldn’t pay for the drums to be transported so it fell through”. Of course, we are a wealthy country now and the transportation of drums is like a bit of lose change to us. So at last we can afford to bring silly, cheerful, surreal and funny Harry Hill here to play Dublin’s Vicar Street.
Harry is on an extension of his Hooves tour, the first leg of which took place earlier this year.
He’s very enthusiastic, generally, about getting back to the live shows after a few months away from it. Although touring is not all fun, games and badger parades. “The travelling is awful. It’s so boring,” he says. Hill claims that straightforward stand-up gets boring after a while as well, so in Hooves, you get Harry doing his straight(ish) shtick for the first half of the show. Then, in the second half, the fun and games begin with full use being made of the Harry Hill travelling menagerie.
He brings a band, too, with keyboards and those awkward drums. Then there’s Harry Senior, supposedly Harry Hill’s dad, but in fact 72-year-old character actor Ronnie Giles. (Harry: “I started doing my own Dad myself. But then Keith Harris wrote to me and recommended Ronnie”. )
Another part of the team is stand-up, actor and controversially fired creator of the Tinky Winky role in Teletubbies, Dave Thompson. “He does what he calls the heavy character roles in the show”. These include playing a horse, a badger and a ball boy. I wonder out loud why more comics don’t work with a ball boy. It would stop those balls going all over the place."
Happily, Harry corrects my misunderstanding of the role “It’s for the inter-species swing-ball competition in the second half”. Silly me. Of course it is!
The horses and badgers are very obviously comedy characters. Nobody seriously thinks Dave Thompson is a horse in real life. But how real is Harry Hill? Very real, apparently.
“I can’t really do anything else. It’s not like I have another character up my sleeve,” he says.
Harry won a British Comedy Award in 1997, for his Channel 4 TV show, a Silver Rose at the Montreux TV Festival for The All New Harry Hill Show on ITV1 and a Rose D’Or award for Best Comedy Actor in Harry Hill’s TV Burp in 2004. Add to that his Perrier Newcomers win in 1992 in Edinburgh (he was nominated for the main award in 1994 as well) and you can see he has plenty of reasons to keep doing what plainly just works better and better for him as he goes along.
Just room for a local interest footnote. Harry’s been a big theatre act for a long time now. It’s what he enjoys most. He admits he can only fill the theatres with an audience for the live work he loves doing by doing the somewhat less enjoyable high profile TV shows.
Unlike many stand ups, Hill probably had less of a transition to make from pub comedy clubs to theatre, with his punked-up music hall act credentials a natural for the theatre.
While we’re discussing this, Ardal O’Hanlon comes up in conversation, as an example of someone who was catapulted by a hugely successful TV role into the theatre tour league and then had to deal with essentially a non-comedy audience coming to see Dougal from Father Ted rather than Ardal the stand up.
“Ardal’s success was very sudden though. It took me longer to build up to big theatre audiences,” Hill points out. This also flushes a little confession out of Harry, who remembers, years ago after a gig, going for a drink in London with Ardal who had just been offered and was considering the role of Dougal.
“I told him not to take it!,” Harry admits. “I said if he took the role, then people would remember him as Dougal and not see him as a stand-up at all”.
I relayed this forgotten episode back to Ardal later and his rueful response was: “He was right”.