Only When I Laugh: My Autobiography charts the comedian Paul Merton’s career from inauspcious beginnings, including spells on the dole and a six-week stay in Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital.
As a boy, Merton collected Super 8 silent films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and projected them on to a bedsheet draped on his bedroom wall. His late teens and early 20s involved dismal visits to Tooting Employment Office and he was on the dole for a lengthy period.
In his new book, Merton recalls how he lived on a diet of porridge and fish-paste sandwiches in his small Streatham single bedsit. On one occasion, he sat on a park bench in Hyde Park for a week from 5.45am each morning, hoping to glimpse Michael Crawford. Crawford was a major star in the West End at the time and a journalist had reported that he regularly jogged through Hyde Park.
Merton also admits to climbing on to the Morden Hall Road roundabout and lighting a campfire in the shrubbery. Once when he was drunk after too much cider, he leaped on to the line at South Wimbledon tube station and walked into the tunnel, barely avoiding the live wire.
His annus horriblis was 1990 when he had a nervous breakdown at the height of his fame on Whose Line is it Anyway? This resulted in a six-week stay at the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital. The breakdown, Merton insists, was caused by a reaction to anti-malarial tablets taken before a trip to Kenya.
