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Harry Hill wants TV Burp to return - but with one major change
Harry Hill wants TV Burp to return - but with one major change

Wales Online

time02-07-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Wales Online

Harry Hill wants TV Burp to return - but with one major change

Harry Hill wants TV Burp to return - but with one major change The 60-year-old comedian fronted the ITV comedy clip series - which saw Harry make jokes relating to the previous week's hottest TV shows, with episodes also featuring sketches and parodied scenes - from 2001 until it ended in 2012 (Image: BBC ) Harry Hill wants TV Burp to come back – but with a new presenter. The 60-year-old comedian fronted the ITV comedy clip series - which saw Harry make jokes relating to the previous week's hottest TV shows, with episodes also featuring sketches and parodied scenes - from 2001 until it ended in 2012. ‌ And whilst Harry thinks he would not succeed in re-creating the award-winning show, the star is open for someone to replace him in reviving the programme. ‌ In an interview with the new issue of Radio Times magazine, he said: "I don't have any plans [to bring back Harry Hill's TV Burp]. "These things are best left undone. We did all the jokes. Trying to re-create that, I'd be on a hiding to nothing, but I'd love someone else to do it. "There's a space for that sort of show and I'm surprised no one's filled it." Article continues below The Knitted Character was a recurring character in many series of Harry Hill's TV Burp until it was replaced with Mr. Fluffy in series 11. And Harry said the Knitted Character does not want the "weekly stress" of the show either if it came back. Speaking about the Knitted Character - who appears in Harry's new live show New Bits and Greatest Hits - he said: "He's in my live show. He comes on at the end as part of the badger parade, riding on the back of a heron. ‌ "Blink and you'll miss him because he's only tiny, but he's still working. "Knitted Character is older and wiser now. He doesn't necessarily want the stress of a weekly show, either." The comic - who married artist Magda Archer in 1996 - binged-watched property shows, such as Homes Under the Hammer and EastEnders, for Harry Hill's TV Burp, and now he gets annoyed by them if he tries to tune in. ‌ He quipped: "I used to watch them all for TV Burp, so they're a bit triggering, which is unfortunate because they're the only shows my wife watches." Harry - whose real name is Matthew Hall - said the sketch comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus is what inspired him as a child to become a comedian. He explained: "Brucey [Forsyth], Eric [Morecambe] and Ernie [Wise] and The Two Ronnies [Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett] were big in our house, but what really got me was Monty Python's Flying Circus. Article continues below "The problem was, my dad decided what was on, and at 9pm, he wanted to watch the news on BBC One. "I wanted to watch Not the Nine O'Clock News on BBC Two. We'd sneak it on, turn the sound down and hope he wouldn't realise what the time was."

Harry Hill: New Bits and Greatest Hits review – a truly silly comedy craftsman
Harry Hill: New Bits and Greatest Hits review – a truly silly comedy craftsman

The Guardian

time02-03-2025

  • Entertainment
  • The Guardian

Harry Hill: New Bits and Greatest Hits review – a truly silly comedy craftsman

Some people's art evolves over time. If you're waiting for Harry Hill's to do so – curious, perhaps, to see what late-period Hill has in store – might I suggest you don't hold your breath? The big-collared one is 60 now, and New Bits and Greatest Hits moves the dial not a jot on the formula that has, since the 1990s, made him one of our silliest and most joyful entertainers. Perhaps you could identify a maturer sensibility in what passes for the theme of tonight's nonsense, which anchors itself in a story about the death of Hill's nan. But we're some considerable distance from 'trauma comedy', as Hill uses the set-up mainly to justify loopy jokes about 'bags for life' and his difficulty spelling nan's name in flowers alongside the coffin. The other running gag derives from a play on the phrase 'hearing dog', and culminates in one of those moments – in which Hill specialises – when you double-take at the daftness of what you're watching on a stage. 'This isn't a dream, you know,' he reminds us at one point – shortly after he's been balancing on an ironing board, blasting his own fleshy face with a leaf-blower, while a puppet bird flaps around him from the end of a fishing line. Not everything here is that arresting. But it comes at you so pell-mell, in surprising shapes and sizes and always with devilry and delight on Hill's part, that you'll seldom stop chuckling for long. I will cherish his anecdote about an armed raid at an artisan butcher. So too a double-act with his ventriloquist's dummy son, Gary, involving a performance of Sitting on the Dock of the Bay featuring a referee's whistle inserted in the back of poor Gary's head. Other returning features of Hill shows gone by include Stouffer the cat, Wagbo – and there are inflatable sausages too. A Wheel of Jokes shares Harry's finest absurdist one-liners from yesteryear. As their brilliance reminds you, beneath all this offhand, forever-young delinquency works a true comedy craftsman, chiselling away at funny to make it funnier still. Tonight, the yield is substantial. At the Haymarket, Basingstoke, tonight; New Theatre Royal Lincoln on Wednesday; then touring.

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