Harry Hill has said he was once so exhausted from making TV Burp that he became convinced someone was trying to assassinate him.
The comedian hosted the award-winning ITV show from 2001 to 2012, and it featured him mocking and satirising clips from other television shows from the last seven days in his own surrealist voice.
As he has revealed in a new interview with The Times, however, the effort of creating the show took a serious toll on his physical and mental health, to the point that he started to become paranoid.
Speaking about the new level of fame that the show brought, Hill said: “The whole red carpet celebrity thing has never been me, and, well, I did not respond well to stress.”
He recalled one incident in 2012 in which he was out with his children and noticed a hole in his car windscreen, which caused him to become convinced that somebody was trying to assassinate him.
He said he was “constantly stressed and anxious” during that period, something he worried was impacting his wife, the artist Magda Archer, as, in his own words, he was “very hard to live with”.
“Around that time, Magda did a painting called My Life Is Crap, which I worried was because of me,” he added. “But she is the one that grounds me.”
Hill is currently hosting The Harry Hill Show on YouTube, which has featured anarchic interviews with the likes of comedians Stewart Lee, Nish Kumar and Phil Wang.
Another recent guest was CMAT, and Hill also joined her on stage at Alexandra Palace last night (March 13), dressed up as a dartboard during her rendition of ‘Have Fun’, while darts were thrown at him.
During their interview on his show, Hill said he was “such a big fan” of CMAT’s latest album ‘Euro-Country’, having discovered her via her acclaimed Glastonbury 2025 performance.
Hill is well-known as a big fan of indie. He supported Yard Act at their 2023 residency at Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club, the same year he surprised Black Midi fans by joining the art-rock band on stage in London to deliver a Cardi B verse.
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