Soon after I moved in, I fell into a coma. My friend called an ambulance, which took three hours to arrive, and on the way to hospital I kept slipping in and out of consciousness. At A&E, they said I’d have to wait, but my friend started shouting at them, and thank god he did because I’d got a pulmonary embolism.
And still the fun wasn’t over because I then contracted hepatitis A. Later, the doctor said: “To be honest, you probably caught it off the food in here.”
Whenever you go to Edinburgh as a performer, there’s always a chance that you’ll “die” on stage, as they say; I’d never imagined I might literally die there. Still, those intimations of mortality didn’t put me off – we’re a tough breed, comedians – and I go back every year.
Since 2004, I’ve been taking a show called The Impro Chums to the Fringe. There are five of us – Richard Vranch, Lee Simpson, Mike McShane, my wife, Suki Webster, and me. I love the camaraderie of working in a team like that, and going on every night for two or three weeks to do improvised comedy is great for me because it keeps me match fit for things like Have I Got News for You on television, and Just a Minute on Radio 4.
And, as a performer on the Fringe, it’s wise to keep yourself in reasonable shape. My advice would be always to ensure you’re less drunk than your audience – and to get enough sleep.
We’ve been recording episodes of Just a Minute at the festival every year since the early Nineties. Once we were due to do a show at 11am, and I made the mistake of taking the sleeper train from London the previous evening. The compartment was too small and I got no sleep at all, with the result that, when we began the recording, the voice in my head that usually says “shut up now” wasn’t there.
I started doing a lot of strange stuff, and at one point I attempted an impression of my fellow panellist Clement Freud, who was sitting next to me, even though I was fully aware that he didn’t appreciate that sort of thing. Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter and I just ploughed on, doing a bizarre impression of Clement singing Robbie Williams’s Let Me Entertain You. I’m not sure he ever quite forgave me, but the audience loved it.
My advice to Fringe “virgins” would be: don’t be overwhelmed by the sheer number of shows and don’t try to see everything. Be adventurous, take risks, pick up on word of mouth.
Even if a show isn’t great, it might well be memorable. I can still recall a midnight sketch show I saw in 1980. It was terrible. In one scene, there was a girl standing there, telling the spotlight operator: “Can I have a bit more yellow light? A bit more red light? A bit more blue light?” This went on for about a minute until finally she said: “I always wanted to be in the limelight.” And the bloke sitting next to me, who had been a perfectly ordinary, polite member of the audience until then, blew the most enormous raspberry, which just started everybody around us laughing.
From then on, this wonderful camaraderie spread through the audience as we sat there watching these spectacularly bad performers dying on stage. It’s stuck with me ever since.
The Edinburgh Fringe is the best comedy festival in the world: I can’t imagine not going up there every August. It’s great for audiences, and, if you’re a talented rising comedian, it could well be the making of you. If it doesn’t kill you, of course.
- The Edinburgh Festival Fringe runs from Aug 3-27 (edfringe.com). Paul Merton’s Impro Chums, Pleasance Grand (0131 556 6550), Aug 16-25
- Paul Merton was talking to Marc Lee
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