The Everyman who's Everywhere

Dean Bedford charts the steady rise of Paul Merton.

The Times of London, the traditional voice of Britain’s establishment. A piece bemoaning the lack of success of Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith. The advice from a political commentator. Duncan Smith should throw away his Shakespearian phrases and Latin words and learn to talk like Paul Merton.

The newspaper was serious. It even ran a poll asking people whether Duncan Smith should try to copy Merton.

There was a time when Merton was an “alternative comedian” but these days even the establishment looks to Merton to be entertained. He’s conquered television, radio and live comedy, and yet has done it without really changing his act or himself.

Arguably Merton has done best of any of those that started Whose Line is it Anyway back in 1988. His long-running news satire show Have I Got News For you seems to gain in popularity every year and Merton is very much the star. He also now hosts his own offbeat chat show Room 101, and is the key to the BBC’s long-running radio panel game, Just A Minute. He continues to perform improv with the Comedy Store Players, and in between these gigs, works away at a variety of other radio projects.

Most profiles still date Merton’s success back to Whose Line is it Anyway. Merton is still remembered for his performances on the show, although he has now not been on the show for nine years, and even in the years he did appear (1988 to 1993) he appeared infrequently.

Merton’s style on Whose Line is hard to put to put into words. He couldn’t sing or even rhyme words very much. He didn’t do voices or impressions. He didn’t do double entendres. He didn’t do the physical comedy that Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie have cornered the market on. What he did was gibe at the others and take what others said into the surreal. In doing so he produced comedy that stands the test of time. I tend to enjoy the little gibes at others. Asked to do a scene with Josie Lawrence in a weight watcher’s convention he asks her “no luck then?” To Clive Anderson: “are you bald or is your neck blowing bubble gum?” A classic example of the surreal was his response to being asked to portray two beetles making love. He comes out, crouches slightly, looks out straight ahead and in perfect Liverpudlian says “I’ve always loved you Ringo”.

It’s that sort of surreal twist on the words of others that is the basis of Merton’s success on Just A Minute which seems to occupy a special place in his heart. Merton wrote to the BBC after the death of the show’s long-standing star Kenneth Williams in 1988 asking to be on the show. At the time the average age of the show’s cast was around 60. The BBC didn’t have too much faith in the virtually unknown young comedian. For his first recording, he was only asked to do one of the two shows being recorded, with someone else standing by to take over for the second recording.

But he did succeed and after a few years became a regular, his speciality being taking the words of others and taking them in a bizarre direction, while also spinning a web of fantasy. On Just A Minute, Merton has described his life of 19 years on the planet Venus with Winston Churchill, explained how he picked up a safe cracker by wearing his favourite skirt and denounced fellow regular Derek Nimmo for serving cat’s urine as wine. His attacks on chairman Nicholas Parsons are a regular feature of the show, but he has also described friendlier times, claiming at one time that Parsons was his sugar daddy.

Arguably, Merton has done much to keep Just A Minute going, bringing in younger comedians to join, and eventually replace the older stars. His style is, consciously or not, aped by other players like Tony Hawks, Linda Smith and Ross Noble. Merton has talked about still doing the show, like Parsons, Clement Freud and the late Peter Jones, in his 70s.

Merton’s success on Have I Got News For you is odd in some ways. Merton is not a comedian who bases his act on current affairs or jokes about politics. Even on the show he tends to leave the political jokes to his other regulars, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, and comedian Angus Deayton. Instead he gibes at the others, and plays with words. Like a kitten playing with a ball of wool, he pounces on any loose sentence construction and pads it around the room until he gets bored with it.
Noticeably he steps in to fill any gap in the humour and often the weaker of the guests is paired with him. As in Just A Minute he seems to enjoy winning the game, although this may reflect the fact he can seldom bear to be out of the action for long, not for vanity but simply for boredom one suspects.

Have I Got News For You has been an important part of Merton’srise but he is also aware that the show needs him too. He stepped down for one season, and in 2000 demanded and got a doubling of his salary when the show moved to a better time slot and channel. He has a canny awareness of his worth on the market, and is now reported to be getting around $US30,000 a week for Have I Got For You. With 20 editions of the show a year, he could live on that and clearly it allows him to do the work he finds interesting the rest of the time.

That may or may not include his chat show Room 101, which he has presented for the past three years. The concept of the show is simple: celebrity guests discuss the things that annoy them most in life and what they would like banished to Room 101. Merton looks a bit uncomfortable in this. He is, even in improv, not the sort of person who sets things up for others, and there is a slightly “rabbit-in-the-headlights” look to him when he is trying to prod his guests into providing the humour or pretending to laugh at their lines (interestingly in Have I Got News For You and Just A Minute he seldom laughs at the work of the others). The best shows tend to be those where
the guest is as quick, or nearly, as Merton and he doesn’t have to help them. And the best moments are pre-prepared involving Merton himself, doing his own brief routines on the subjects suggested by his guests. It will be interesting to see if the show returns next year.

If it doesn’t Merton will no doubt find other things to work on. He acts as something of a student of comedy and tries things, some of which work and some don’t. He has written for radio and television, and recreated the classic Hancock’s Half Hour series. He has talked about doing a movie. Perhaps Merton doesn’t want to be just known for appearances on game show, or more likely he is still trying to discover new things about his art.

Certainly he remains unaffected by his success. Waiting outside London’s Comedy Store, a tall man in an old denim suit with a bushy greying beard and dark glasses approached. He looked a bit like someone who was homeless. Only when a girl squealed with delight as he walked through the front door, did I realise it was Paul Merton.

It’s hard to imagine the Conservative leader similarly attired but the Times has a point when it suggests he look to Merton. More than any other comic, Merton’s style crosses boundaries. It seems safe to predict continued success for this least pretentious and most talented of performers.

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