Harry Hill: What Bruce Forsyth taught me…

Harry Hill learned from the best.

“Years ago I met up with Bruce Forsyth and we were chatting,” Hill recalls. “One of the pieces of advice he gave me was [slipping into a perfect Brucie impression], ‘Don’t go on other people’s shows – do your own shows’.”

This explains why Hill has never been seen making up the numbers on Have I Got News for You/Mock the Week/QI/Would I Lie to You?/8 Out of 10 Cats or any other panel show. “I’m not really comparing myself [to Brucie] but unless you’re desperate for fame and fortune… I’m not desperately in need of money at the moment. When you see me on one of these panel shows you’ll know that I’ve gambled it all on a horse.”

So instead of appearing on a panel show, Hill is launching his own – Harry Hill’s Alien Fun Capsule. “It’s my attempt at a panel show,” Hill corrects.

When you see me on one of these panel shows you’ll know that I’ve gambled all my money on a horse

“My view is they’re often not about the game, more the funny things that happen. So I came up with this rather thin format idea: I’ve been asked by the world’s governments to collect all the funniest stuff so if aliens invade I’ll be able to show them this stuff and say, look, we’re really good fun to hang out with, don’t kill us. It’s a weird hybrid of TV Burp and a panel show. I used to take the piss out of the shows, now what I’m doing is taking the piss out of the people in the shows, in front of the people in the shows.”

The guests on the programme are, Hill explains, “a mix of what you might call celebrities, the odd soap star, actor or presenter, also some of my favourite comedians. I figured it would make it easy for me to have other funny people on.”

In fact Hill’s original idea was to name the programme ‘Is This Funny?’. “Everyone said to me – you can’t call a show Is This Funny? because the critics will just say, NO! But I quite like leading with my chin.”

But if we were to take the premise seriously – and stranger things have happened in the world of politics – does Alien Fun Capsule make a good case for saving the human race? “If you wanted to be serious about it, one very positive thing about human beings is a sense of humour; sense of fun.”

Is that what defines us and sets us apart from the animals?

“That’s probably a bit deep for me,” he says.

“You forget, I’m a very superficial person. But I think in dark times it’s good to have a laugh. We like to define ourselves in Britain – perhaps wrongly, I don’t know – as being able to laugh through adversity. The only slight drawback is there isn’t actually a capsule.

I press a button but really it doesn’t go anywhere.”

Besides the fictional capsule, Hill goes on to explain that panel shows are not all they seem.

“These panel shows take hours to record because it’s like a fishing expedition,” he says. “There are long bits where nobody says anything funny then they get the bit that they want. The first few did take about two-and-a-half hours. You need to let the guests talk but then I realised we were editing out what other people were saying and sticking to the script. From then on I started driving it a bit more. We give everyone a chance but we’re not going to hang around all night.”

Harry Hill’s Alien Fun Capsule airs Thursdays, 8.30pm, ITV