Harry Hill hopes he never has to become a doctor again.
The 55-year-old British funnyman considered returning to the medical profession at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, when he was asked to join the staff at London’s Nightingale Hospital to help fight the pandemic, but he has admitted it was a "scary" prospect reviving his former career.
He told What’s On TV: "That was quite a funny thing.
"Although it wasn’t funny at he time, it was really scary! When this whole lockdown thing happened I got an email saying ‘We’re calling back all retired doctors, you’re back on the register, do you want to come back?’
When the pandemic started they were worried about getting overwhelmed and they thought they were going to need everyone – ‘We’re even going to need Harry Hill!’ – but it never happened and fingers crossed it never does! Because if you were on a ventilator and you wake up with me leaning over you, you’d think things had got really bad!"
The ‘Harry Hill’s World of TV’ host made up an excuse to decline the offer after realising how long he had been out of the job.
He said recently: "I’d submitted the form and then I thought, ‘Oh Christ. What the hell could I actually do?’
"I’ve got cold sweat dripping down my back, and I said, ‘Well, to be honest, I’m in south London so it would be quite difficult for me to get to’. I did say to her, ‘It was 30 years ago. I was only a junior doctor and my specialisation was general medicine.’"
Harry – whose real name is Matthew Hall – trained in neurosurgery before landing a job at Doncaster Royal Infirmary.
But he decided to quit the medical profession when he was 25, as he "didn’t feel in control of what was happening".
Harry then turned his hand to comedy and achieved his breakthrough in 1992, when he won the Perrier Award for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The television star’s best-known show ‘Harry Hill’s TV Burp’ ran for 11 series from 2001 until he quit the programme in 2012.
In 2017, he presented ‘Alien Fun Capsule’, saying at the time: "It’s great to be back on ITV with an all new format that finally tackles the problem of an imminent and prolonged war with space aliens, by proving to them that us humans are really a lot of fun to hang out with!"