HARRY HILL ON 77 DATE TOUR
It's a lap of honour. I may never do it again- seventy-seven dates, it may kill me. But I'm, so I thought it would be nice to do some, some of my old- see if my old bits, some of my old bits work. So I've got a load of new stuff. And I'm going to stick some of the old bits. Cause I'm, I'm quite fond of some of those old bits, you know. Well, I don't know. It's a funny thing with comedy, because it's not like me singing, Lady in- being Chris de Burgh and singing Lady in Red. Yeah, so you, you know, you, I think as long as you've got enough new stuff. Because the thing with the joke is it has to be a surprise, really. I don't go to Europe. There’s nothing in Europe for me. Yes. I'm going all around, yeah, I'm going around again, you know.
I, I didn't tour for ages. I didn't tour for like ten years and then the whole lockdown thing. And when we c- when someone tells you, you can't tour, then you want to tour, so then I toured and I thought, well, why haven't I toured for so long? You know, it was such good fun. And I thought, well, I'd do it- have another go. I don't like the, I never used to like the traveling, but I think since the kids- when I used to do them, the kids were small and it was always that slight guilt thing, you know, leaving at sort of eleven in the morning, you know, not being there for when they got back, all that sort of thing. And now they're older, that's sort of gone. Just my wife who's sitting at home watching Long Lost Families and Say Yes to the Dress. Night after night.
HARRY ON COOKING
Well, because… I mean, I used to cook for myself, you know, and I mean, my background is very much seventies type food. So meat and two veg, you know, it's just like no sauce, and it'd be like that. When I left home to go to medical school, the one bit of advice that my mum gave me was get to know your local butcher and he'll sort out all the best cuts. So the first day I would troddle up to the butcher, and I say, oh, you know, ‘I'm Harry, and I've just moved into the area.’ And he sorted me out this, this massive pork chop. Cost me a fortune, so I never, I never went back. I felt like he was taking advantage of me.
HARRY ON LIVING IN HONG KONG
You know what? So I was fourteen, and I didn't want to go. I was absolutely dead against it. And we were there for about two years, and we didn't once have a Chinese meal. No. My mum, she maintained the sort of meat and veg thing. She recreated a little bit of Kent in Hong Kong, yeah. In Hong Kong anyway, at that time, it wasn't like what we thought was Chinese food. We probably had Chinese food in Kent, but it would be, you know, sweet and sour pork balls.
HARRY ON TV BURP
Yeah, it was great. I used to love watching it, actually. Weirdly. You know, this sounds like a crazy thing ‘cause me sat there, but I did used to really enjoy watching, really watching it. Yeah. It’s kind of of its time because that was maybe the last time when everyone watched the same thing. Or even if you weren't aware of- if you didn't watch EastEnders, you might watch Corrie. But it would be in the paper, wouldn't it? There'd be some story, oh, you know, the new Slater family story or whatever it was. So you'd be kind of aware of it. I don't think that's the case now. Yeah, it was exciting at first, you know, thinking, oh, great, you know, sit down. But then, yeah, it's, it was a sort of… we kind of made a rod for our own backs ‘cause we were always really hard on ourselves- and I say ourselves, cause there was, it wasn't just me, it was like, there were five of us watching all this stuff and trying to come up with jokes.
We tried lots of different people, actually. So, yeah. We initially I tried comics, but they weren't very good at it. Because they, one, they kept all the best jokes themselves, and two, they'd be out in the evening gigging. So we, I kind of insisted that it's got to be a joke. It's got to be gag, gag, gag, it’s gotta b- and in fact, the, I remember the director said to me, it's going too fast, you know, people aren't going to keep up with it, and I was saying, too bad. They’re going to have to keep up with it. I'm like, foot to the floor. You know. And, but of course that, that requires so much material every week, and so… And then once you've spotted, once you're familiar with every little area of the Queen Vic or the you know, the upstairs bit, you know, yeah. We've, we've spotted all the faces in the curtains or the pattern of the blah, blah, blah. So then you've got to be even more ingenious and that, and that was the difficult thing, trying not to repeat ourselves.
TV BURP NOT GOING DOWN WELL WITH JAMIE OLIVER
People think it's an exaggeration, but I would watch TV from, you know, nine in the morning to ten at night. And I mean, little breaks, but we'd record the show, and then when the series had finished, I’d sort of emerge and, and I mean, I knew it was popular, but I had no idea what the people had been taking the mickey out of. And so it would always be that awful thing when you go along to the- one of those award ceremonies, you know, and you'd see these people and you’d think, oh, I've been really, really rude about you, Phil Mitchell, or whatever it was, you know. Yeah. And the only one was, the only one I heard about was, was Jamie Oliver that time, you know…Well, it was, I mean, it was, probably was a bit too mean, that joke. And we had done jokes- he'd always been really up for it. There was one I think I, I tied his shoelaces under the bench and he fell over, and he loved that. And they, and they got in touch with us saying, oh, ‘If you ever want to film it around at Jamie's,’ you know, blah blah blah.
And then this one was, do you remember Ministry of Food? Jamie's Ministry of Food. Where he was trying to teach the public how to cook. Yeah, so he'd- so the whole thing was, if you, if that person teaches one person how to make spaghetti bolognese, and those two people teach two people and then it goes down. There's like a graphic of a… And you end up with 64,000 people all cooking spaghetti bolognese. Simultaneously. Yeah, national mince shortage. And, and I did this thing, and I don't think it was his best show. ‘If, if you tif one person tells another person not to watch Jamie's Ministry of Food and two of them tell two other people…’ I don't know if it was him or if it was the producer. Yeah, I know. I know. And there was quite a lot of that, you know, we were, we were quite, you know, really, we were quite rude.
HARRY HILL ON HIS NEW PODCAST
So I have spent a long time trying to think of… I mean, most podcasts, seems to me, this one excepted, it's often two comics or three comics who are chatting, and it's just seems very unfocused. So I thought, I don't want to just do another one of those. So I figured maybe there's a gap- and often they're quite rude, aren't they? Not like deliberately rude, but it'd be the odd you know, bad word. So I figured maybe there's, maybe there's something for families to be, to listen to together, so they'll be in the car with the kids and you can listen to it. So I, that's what I'm doing. Are We There Yet? So the idea is it's designed to get you from A to B. And I have a guest, often a comedian. People I know, and we have a subject.
A topic each week, theme of the week. So we had ants one week, one week it was volcanoes. What did we do? Oh, the London Wnderground we did with Chris Packham, last week. So we get an expert on. So I can be sort of gently mocking of the expert or ask dumb questions. And then there's like various sort of silly bits. There's a quiz. And the weird thing is, these experts, I've actually been learning a lot. Yeah, so it's kind of weirdly educational.
Picture: Creative Studio Chris Blacklay
