His style is characterized by describing highly unlikely scenarios sustaining the straight — possibly mournful shopping — face. He quickly grabs hang in to of any risk to exp& on the subject and stretch its credibleness to snapping point. This works attractively inside improv & exceptionally swell whenever he is pit against supplementary strait-puritanical guests inside panel shows; it hwhen, even so, been less successful whilst Merton utilizes this form of high-fantasy in the written form, as by owning his sketch shows.

Born Paul Martin in the Parsons Green area of London to an English father and the mother of Irish Catholic extraction, he gained his earliest agent credits under it title. In joining Equity he found that a title Paul Martin was already taken, and then he renamed himself fallowing Merton, the district of London in which he grew higher. Merton's father was the train driver on the London Underground and his mother was a nurse. Whenever his mother returned to function, Paul & his immature sister were scanned when by their granddaddy world health organization swallow the babies in their council flat. He typically claims that he was inspired to last into comedy at the immature age watching clowns at the circus, remembering "I had no idea that adults could behave like that." He failed his eleven-plus, and famously received an unclassified grade for metallic work in CSE prior to moving on to Wimbledon College even as it became comprehensive.

When allowing Catholic school, Merton worked at a Tooting Employment Professional for x years. Though he experienced harboured good ambitions of becoming a performing comedian since his school times, it was non until April 1982, at the Comedy Store in Soho that his dream was realised. He recalls that, in simply his 2nd or even third nighttime, he uncovered a dour role that was to inform his funny approach ever since.

One of these early routines at the Comedy Store included the report of a officer world health organization got been given a hallucination drug. This routine was super popular & went inside to exist as involved in his television series. Merton recalls "I walked all the way home to my bed-sit in Streatham. I was on a cloud. And that one night got me through every single bad gig after that — and there were a lot of them. I was so lucky to get that encouragement early on. It kept me going over the next eighteen months of just dying the whole time."

Within 1986, while performing in the Edinburgh Fringe, he was mugged while helping the friend put higher posters. He was kicked upstairs & experienced to attend hospital. A year down the road, Merton returned to Edinburgh. His 1-one-person indicate was getting an expert reviews. Notwithstanding, when swimming football using fellow comedians, he broke his leg, and when within hospital, he suffered the pulmonary embolism and contracted hepatitis A. He misplaced the £3,000 he got pay front for a theatre & would own been within worse condition experienced the Comedy Store non held a gain for him.

His breakthrough as a television performing artist come following of the jury-rigged comedy indicate Whose Line Is It Anyway? from either 1988 onwards, which moved to TV from BBC Radio 4. Have I Got News For You started in 1990, & ii series of his have sketch indicate Paul Merton: A Series followed before long fallowing. Between 1993 and 1995 he was amongst the regular cast members on the Radio Four improvisational comedy series The Masterson Inheritance. Since 1999 he has been a persons of Room 101, a talk show where guests come offered a risk to discuss their favored hatred & consign the babies to the oblivion of Room 101.

Shortly prior to becoming the personal title in HIGNFY, Merton got suffered the mental breakdown and booked himself into Maudsley psychiatric hospital for six weeks, astir which he has since talked honestly. He experienced begun to hallucinate conversations using friends.

He has been the member of the London improv group The Comedy Store Players since 1985, and however regularly performs by owning the two.

Fallowing 7 nominations for the BAFTA award for Best Entertainment Performance, Merton eventually won a award within April 2003, ironically defeating fellow HIGNFY star Angus Deayton who had good recently been fired from either a indicate.

Merton married a actress Caroline Quentin in 1990, but it divorced. Merton's 2nd married woman, Sarah Parkinson, died on September 23, 2003, of breast cancer.

Around 2003, he was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy. In ''The Comedian's Comedian,'' a 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians, he was voted the 20th funniest comedian in the universe. He wwhen linked by owning ingesting above as carrier in Countdown, but decided does'nt to pursue this.

Merton's spoof autobiography My Struggle (apparently named when Mein Kampf) was published in 1995 in the UK (Boxtree, ISBN 075220775).