Harry Hill agreed to tour to escape wife's obsession with reality TV show

04 June 2024 , 20:00

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Forget touring! Harry Hill's honesty could leave him in the doghouse

EVERY parent knows the guilt that comes with being Mum or Dad. Missing a school play because of work, not being there every single night to make their dinner or tuck them in.

Celebrities are no exception, as comedian and TV presenter Harry Hill admits. But, seeing as he is about to embark on a huge and lengthy tour, thankfully that guilt has been assuaged somewhat these days.

For now the 59-year-old You've Been Framed! and TV Burp star is actually quite looking forward to trekking round the country, playing to packed venues night after night.

Not just because he wants to see his fans, but because his children are older and have all but flown the nest. So now most evenings it's just him and his beloved wife.

And unfortunately Magda, who he married in 1996, normally has just one thing on her mind for when they're alone together..... watching her favourite reality TV programmes: Long Lost Family and Say Yes to the Dress.

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Harry Hill agreed to tour to escape wife's obsession with reality TV show

Nick Ross and Davina McCall on ITV's emotional reunion show Long Lost Family

Harry says of the tour: “It’s a lap of honour. I may never do it again – 77 dates, it may kill me!

“[But] I thought, ‘Well, I’d do it, have another go’."

It will be his first tour of its scale in a decade.

“I never used to like the travelling," he admits. when I used to do [tours], the kids were small and it was always that slight guilt thing, leaving at 11 in the morning, not being there for when they got back, all that sort of thing.

“But now they’re older, that’s sort of gone.

"It’s just my wife sitting at home, watching Long Lost Families and Say Yes to the Dress. Night after night....”

It safe to say Harry isn't particularly enamoured by either the wedding gown reality series or indeed Long Lost Family, Davina McCall's weepy ITV reunion show.

The wedding gown shopping show Say Yes To The Dress UK (Say Yes To The Dress Lancashire)

So much so, that he's sent himself to Coventry....and another 76 venues around the UK.

Not that Harry is abandoning his family of course. It seems artist wife Magda and grown-up kids Kitty Clover, Winifred Millicent and Frederica Aster are not exactly going to be breaking down doors to see his new show when he departs early next year.

“They have no interest,” he says. “That’s the great thing about a family. They don’t have any interest in your work. I wouldn’t want one of those families that say, ‘Where is it tonight, Dad? What time are we leaving?’. Because it adds to the pressure if they’re there. And it’s another overhead."

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Harry Hill with wife Magda Archer (Ben Cawthra/REX/Shutterstock)

Even the likes of a major festival will be unlikely to peak their interest apparently.

“Well, if I did Glastonbury they would come," But they wouldn’t be watching me," he says. "They’d be in the other field. You can be sure of that!”

It’s not like the family are going to be missing his cooking either.

“When they sometimes say, ‘It’d be nice if you cook occasionally’, I point to [when] I made spaghetti bolognese, and they accused it of being too meat-heavy," he adds. "That damaged my confidence in the kitchen.”

Harry decided the time was right for his 'New Bits & Greatest Hits live tour', as he felt it was a fitting way to celebrate 30 years in the business and his forthcoming 60th birthday in October. It will run from February to September next year but tickets go on sale next Monday, May 10.

Of course, much of Harry's 30-year career he credits to his ITV show Harry Hill's TV Burp, which ran from 2001 to 2012 - and led to him also fronting You've Been Framed! from 2002 to 2022.

“It was great. I used to love watching it, actually,” he says, during of TV Burp during his interview on this week's new Dish from Waitrose podcast with Nick Grimshaw and chef Angela Hartnett.

Not that everyone was always happy to be the butt of Harry’s jokes, as he usually discovered much later when he finally emerged from his TV Burp bubble.

Harry Hill in his element on ITV's TV Burp

“The longest we ever did was 23 weeks. So I’d be locked in, you know, watching – literally, I mean, people think it’s an exaggeration, but I would watch TV from nine in the morning to 10 at night," he says.

"We’d record the show, and then when the series had finished, I’d sort of emerge and... I mean, I knew it was popular, but I had no idea what the people had been taking the mickey out of.

“And so it would always be that awful thing when you go along to one of those award ceremonies and you’d see these people and you’d think, ‘Oh, I’ve been really rude about you, Phil Mitchell’, or whatever it was.”

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Of the jokes that apparently did not go down well, one particular thing sticks in his mind – when he quipped that viewers should switch off Jamie Oliver’s new show.

“Jamie’s Ministry of Food,” he recalls, when asked to name the digs he somewhat regrets. “Where he was trying to teach the public how to cook.

“So the whole thing was, if you, if that person teaches one person how to make spaghetti bolognese, and those two people teach two people and then it goes down. And you end up with 64,000 people all cooking spaghetti bolognese. Simultaneously. Yeah, national mince shortage.

“And I did this thing... ‘if one person tells another person not to watch Jamie’s Ministry of Food and two of them tell two other people...’

“Really, we were quite rude.”

Harry Hill served up a real burn for Jamie Oliver on ITV TV Burp (REX/Shutterstock)

Though some were thrilled to be on the show.

“Some people took it like a badge of honour, they were pleased to be mentioned,” he says. “Like some shows started putting in stuff that they thought we would use.

“Like EastEnders a couple of times mentioned me. I remember Barbara Windsor, Peggy, she goes, ‘That’s like something Harry Hill would say’. So we deliberately didn’t use it.”