Paul Merton’s is the most boastful autobiography in years

Has there ever been a nun or a priest who wasn’t a bent sadist? Because here we go again. At school Paul Merton was terrorised by a nun who, in her black outfit with a white band, ‘looked like an angry pint of Guinness’. She walloped the future comedian if ever she detected an imaginative strain in his English compositions. ‘You can’t write about things that aren’t true,’ asserted this believer in the actuality of virgin births and rising from the dead. For stating that Beethoven invented rice pudding and Mozart baked the first crème brûlée, Merton was told he’d ‘poisoned the minds of your classmates with your ridiculous stories’.

Of course, Merton has been poisoning and entertaining us ever since. His formal education further blighted by the Jesuits — who believed that pain could be equated with learning, and that the only way to teach algebra was with the strap — Merton left his secondary school in Wimbledon and joined the civil service in Tooting. That seemed to last five minutes, because without what appears to be any trouble or effort at all, he’s earning £30 a go for stand-up gigs in pubs and clubs across London, often fitting in five performances a night.

Not for Merton the slog of workingmen’s clubs or holiday camps. Nor did he go to university, which is where Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and others of his generation got together. Merton, born in 1957 in Parsons Green, and growing up in a small flat with a grumpy grandfather who had a club foot, visited the Comedy Store in Soho, where the great Alexei Sayle was the compère, and after his first shot at performing before an audience, ‘everything I had ever dreamt about had just happened to me’.