Harry Hill has revealed that the stress and exhaustion from presenting his hit show Harry Hill's TV Burp led to a period of intense paranoia, including a belief that someone was trying to assassinate him. The comedian, now 61, told The Times that he 'did not respond well' to the demands of the ITV series, which ran for 11 years.
Hill recalled an incident in 2012 when, exhausted from the show's gruelling production schedule, he became paranoid about tabloid attention after being photographed with his children. When he discovered a hole in his car windscreen, he was convinced it was an assassination attempt. He also admitted he was 'very hard to live with' during filming and worried his constant stress would affect his marriage to artist Magda Archer.
The comedian, who won multiple Bafta and British Comedy Awards for TV Burp, previously told the Beyond the Title podcast that the show would have been cancelled after its first series if it aired today. 'It took us two or three series to get TV Burp right,' he said. 'No one was keeping an eye on us, so somehow we managed to get away with that. We could easily have been cancelled after the first series and we would be now.'
Hill criticised modern TV commissioning, accusing the BBC and ITV of failing to develop 'new or risky' content. 'If you look at Saturday night schedules now, it's celebrity quiz show, celebrity quiz show, celebrity quiz show,' he said. 'Comedy is never right the first time. History is littered with it. You identify a spark in it and think, 'We will get it right.''
