Thursday, 23rd October 1997.

This evening I tape my second appearance on "Have I Got News For You ?". While feeling considerable admiration for Angus Deayton and Ian Hislop, it was to the comedian of this famous triumvirate that I was drawn. All I knew about Paul Merton were a few bare facts that had appeared in the press: that he was born in Parson's Green, south-west London, in 1957, that his dad was a train driver on the Underground and his mum was a nurse. They shared a council flat with Grandfather who, when mother went back to work, looked after Paul and his younger sister.

I'd also read that when Paul was eight, Merton's dad was transferred to Morden where the boy attended Roman Catholic Primary School, failed his eleven-plus and moved on to Wimbledon College just as it became comprehensive.

He began his working life at Tooting Employment Office. Undeterred, sometimes inspired by such surroundings, he pursued his ambition to make people laugh and eventually became a stand-up comic at London's Comedy Store. From there he graduated to BBC Radio's long running comedy panel shows "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" and "Just A Minute", scored consistently on Channel 4's "Whose Line Is It Anyway ?" and made a success of both his own broken comedy show on Channel 4 from 1992, "Paul Merton, The Series", and BBC 2's topical panel programme, the one on which we were employed this evening. After the taping I found him easy to talk to in the studio's bar. I reminded him that he'd once said that watching clowns at a circus when he was three years old decided him on his career, and quoted his remark, "I had no idea that adults could behave like that."

He told me that he can't remember a time when he didn't want to make people laugh. When he was three or four years old, the games that he played on his own always involved performing to an imaginary audience.

Although he can't remember it himself, his mother tells me that when he was about two she saw him in front of the television with a knitting needle, conducting the Joe Loss Orchestra.

From quite early in life he practiced writing his own autograph, "something I thought everybody did until a few weeks ago".

He had a great thirst for anything funny. Someone gave him an early reel-to-reel tape recorder and, when BBC TV re-ran Tony Hancock shows, the small Merton would hold a microphone against the speaker to collect the comedy for himself.

Although he had a childhood addiction to "The Goon Show" and "Round The Horne" on radio he has fond memories of watching Arthur Haynes on TV, a performer whose belligerent stance might well have affected him, it's Hancock who's persistently suggested as a major influence. Time Out's description of Merton could have been written about Hancock, observing "his deadpan demeanour, accentuated by a hangdog, slouching posture and prematurely pot-bellied physique", adding that Merton "makes Ken Livingstone sound animated."

Merton pooh-poohed the Hancock comparison but admitted being able to understand the reasons for it, acknowledging the similarity of his lugubrious, even morose style.

"But he's just one of many people really. And I have no intention of going to Australia."

In real life, Merton show no trace of the glum, unsmiling comic persona. "And I think probably Hancock really was like that in real life. That's one of the differences."

Like so many comic performers, Merton has always been a shy person and was unwilling to push himself forward in school despite his natural gifts. "My academic career peaked when I was about eight years old thanks to a very good teacher called Mrs Gately who encouraged my interest in English."

Before long his precocious work was so exceptional that he was giving reading lessons to other children. Then came the summer holidays and a change of teacher, a nun with a strict view of what the children should or shouldn't write.

When the lad submitted his essay on "What I Did in my Summer Holidays", it was well outside the limits she set. The piece began normally enough but not for long:

"Me and my family went to littlehampton. It was very nice. A spaceship landed. I got on the spaceship and went to the moon. It was very cold." And so on into further flights of fancy.

The nun castigated the young author in front of the entire class because, she said. "This didn't happen ! You can't write something which is untrue !"

Rashly, she read the essay to the class. This had an inspiring effect on the other children who all began to write in the same vein, abandoning their tales of buckets and spades on the sands in favour of wild fables involving dinosaurs and flying carpets.

Two or three weeks later, the nun again had Merton standing before the other pupils, blaming him for this "new trend" that had been established. There's a sense of residual outrage in his voice even today when he speaks of it.

"It just seemed to me so wrong-headed but, when you're eight years old and there's a nun telling you that everything you feel is right for you is totally wrong, then that is a bit disturbing."

However, young Merton did end up his education with a bit more the his CSE ungraded in metalwork.

"Ungraded !" he bewails.

There were a couple of A Levels to his credit when, about to leave Wimbledon College, full of baffled admiration and hopeless dreams of comic fame, Merton could see no path before him that could possibly lead to showbiz. How could he go to his careers officer and say, "I want to be a comedian" in the hope of hearing the reply, "OK, we'll fix you up with an apprenticeship in the Harry Worth / Petula Clark Show at Paignton" ? It just doesn't work like that. So he never told anybody what he wanted to do. He feared the reaction would be the wrong kind of laughter.

As for confiding in friends, that relief was denied to him too. For some absurd schoolboy reason, he was sent to Coventry by the half-dozen lads he'd previously looked upon as mates.

For almost his final year at school he felt cut off and, in searching for any kind of kinship, formed a new bond with a boy called John Irwin who shared his love of comedy. Today they script much of Merton's material together, all in a carefully considered longhand with little rewriting, but in 1979, when together they bought a ramshackle maisonette in West Norwood, south London, the chance to realise whatever eager plans they made lay over a decade in the future.

Merton worked at the Tooting Employment Office for ten years. He remember it as good fun, but then he was never involved in the disagreeable task of interrogating the unemployed with questions like "Why haven't you worked for three years ?" He says he'd have been useless at acting the hard man.

Part of his happier duties there involved the New Towns Scheme which had been introduced after World War II. Basically the idea was that people who lived in bad housing in London could go to Basildon or Bracknell or any one of the new developments. If they could land a job there, a house came with it. Helping people to a better kind of life pleased Merton and part of the fun was a newsletter called the Milton Keynes Bulletin he received regularly and found hilarious.

"This was around the time of the famous concrete cows. A herd of concrete cows in a field ! With a concrete milkmaid on a concrete stool ! And these cows were made out of bits of builders' rubble so they had square jaws and bent necks, they looked like they'd been in a car accident. And the spokesman said that that was all very well but if you were passing overhead in a plane, it looked like a real herd. It's not easy to write funnier stuff that that."

Life at the Employment Office neared the end of it's natural term. Merton was beginning to realise that if he didn't leave soon, he'd be there for ever. He waited until 29 February so he would never forget the date, but a couple of years were to pass before he actually got up the nerve to do what he had always yearned to do: to try out his ability as a comedian in front of a paying audience.

"The big fear was, well, supposing I can't do it, suppose I'm not very good at it."

But if he didn't make the leap, then he would never know, so one night in April 1982, he found himself above a strip club in Soho at half past one in the morning, walking on to a stage in front of a bunch of drunk people.

This was the Comedy Store, London's answer to the legendary comics' graveyard of earlier years, the Glasgow Empire. "Although in Glasgow you'd get a certain amount of credence if you were FROM Glasgow. In London, it didn't matter if you'd lived in Stepney Green all your life, they were going to get you if they could smell blood."

Merton had almost incredibly immediate luck in his choice of material. While his general attitude towards the audience was dictated, as you'd expect, by his desire to have them like him, quite understandably he still lacked what most comedians strive to find over a period of years: a style - a consistent, recognisable tone and technique.

Then, on only his second or third night, he found the dour role that was to inform his comic approach ever since. Adopting an unamused air came smoothly to him because he had never been a fan of anyone set upon being the life and soul of the party.

"I had this thing about comedians who laughed at their own jokes. If the loudest laughs are coming from the comic, then something's gone wrong somewhere."

With this distaste for the falsely chuckling funnyman, he was ready to be drawn towards finding the vaguely truculent but almost expressionless manner that suits him best. The key to his future style emerged from his portrayal of a police constable.

"One of the first things I did at the Comedy Store was this sketch about a policeman taking an hallucinogenic drug. And he starts off in a very policeman-like manner: I was patrolling along the road on October the 27th... you know, about twenty seconds of that, then he reveals he's been given this hallucinogenic drug disguised as a Smartie. And he carries on describing his hallucination in the same deadpan way - "while sitting aboard this inter-galactic spacecraft" - and that worked very well because it was the morose policeman in court, being very much a sort of stereotypical copper really, but describing these fantastic things like meeting Marilyn Monroe on top of a bus shelter. It was the contrast that worked, the weird delusion reported in the down-to-earth, no-nonsense delivery of an unimaginative policeman."

Few comedians have been as fortunate in discovering a lifetime technique contained in a single sketch. And so soon.

"I didn't have an act, I really didn't know what I was doing, but this one night that I did the policeman it was like a dream come true."

"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."

He read Time Out, learned of comedy rooms that had recently opened and rang them for work. His open sesame was, "I've done the Comedy Store." That was regarded as the baptism of fire.

Some gigs were hostile; others, like the vegetarian curry joint Earth Exchange in Archway, north London, were easygoing and tolerant. In such ambiance's as the latter he could explore and expand his range.

If the God of comedy blessed him form the start, other less kindly forces were in charge of his subsequent luck. In 1986, while performing on the Fringe in Edinburgh, he was mugged in the Lothian Road. He'd volunteered to help put up posters for a friend's show.

"There we were at midnight, sticking posters on a wall, and these three guys came around a corner, luckily wearing soft shoes. They were just looking for trouble and I suppose I must've said the wrong thing at the wrong time or whatever and one of these blokes came vaulting over a barricade at me and kicked me in the head. It was dreadful', I had to go to hospital, really badly shaken."

Then a year later, 1987 found him in Edinburgh and hospital again. He'd opened in his first one-man show in Scotland, receiving some of the best reviews he'd ever had. GO AND SEE THIS MAN ! commanded one headline. Greatly cheered, the next day he went out to play football with a bunch of comedians.

"It's a sort of tradition up there and about as interesting as watching a bunch of footballers telling jokes. And I was running along and I think I fell over my own trouser leg or something because all of a sudden my feet were where my head had been. There was a very loud crack of a bone breaking and that was the end of that show."

Merton lost the £3,000 he'd paid up front for the theatre and would have been in worse trouble had the Comedy Store not held a benefit for him.

He'd been in hospital for several days with a badly broken leg leg when he got a severe pain in his side. It turned out to be a pulmonary embolism, the kind of life threatening blood clot that sometimes forms after a breakage and which can go to the brain, heart or lungs. Luckily, it went to the lungs but, on top of all this, he contracted hepatitis A, "from the hospital food I reckon", and, at the age of just thirty and on the brink of a major success, his burgeoning career was stymied.

Although deeply depressed, Merton's nature inclines towards finding the positive elements in every setback. Being in hospital gave him time to think and to make an attempt at plotting his future career. It's evidence of his extraordinary determination, tenacity and increasing self-confidence that, ill and defeated by circumstances, he lay in bed considering how to achieve one paramount goal: his own television show.

The next development for a comedian who works hard at his scripts and respects what he's written was the loosening -up process demanded by improvisation. He'd started experimenting with extemporaneous comedy in 1985. Mike Myers (a Canadian actor who would go on to star in Waynes World and Austin Powers) was doing a double act with Neil Mullarkey and, together with American Kit Hollenbach, they were keen to have Merton join them in creating a small company of players inventing unwritten, impromptu entertainment.

At first Merton thought this concept was unworkable witchcraft but, after attending Kit's classes and letting himself adjust to the very different requirements of comic spontaneity, he steadily came to grips with the craft of talking off the top of his head. "It's like a conversation except that's it's got to be funny."

Most comedians, reliant upon set routines and scripted rehearsals, would agree that conjuring comedy out of the air according to the suggestions of the audience takes a lot of nerve. Is that what it needs, sheer guts ?

"No, it takes more than sheer guts or General Schwarzkopf would be doing it. You need all your confidence, that's at the core of it all. And if the first thing you say isn't funny, then you day the second thing. If that isn't funny, then you let the other person on stage do a bit of talking and you'll come in with something. The thing is never to think, right, I've got to be funny now - here it comes, here's my chance to be funny - oh ! I didn't say something funny ! That's no good, that's too tense. You just relax into it and it will happen."

The kingpin of his current reputation is the show we've just been doing, TV's hugely enjoyable version of Radio 4's perennial "The News Quiz".

But just how ad-lib is "Have I Got News For You" ? How much is it over-recorded ? How heavily is it edited ? We know it's taped the night before it goes out but how much preparation precedes the taping and how much doctoring follows ?

"Well, as you can see for yourself, the stuff that Angus does, he doesn't like people to know it's on autocue. He works with the producer from Monday onwards, writing all those links and doing all the kind of heavy work on it, finding questions and bits of film and all that sort of stuff. And myself and Ian go in on a Thursday afternoon, early evening, like we did tonight, about half past five, we're there till about half eight and that's it for us really.

"I mean, you've got your mind on it all week to a certain extent, eyes open for the sort of headlines that they're likely to pick on, you know, as much as you can afford to do without going potty. And you kind of get an instinct for it after a while. I remember a couple of years ago there was a story, MAN SLEEPS WITH PET PIG. About how he shared the bed with this pig and his wife said, "It's either me or the pig." And she left and he carried on with the pig and, when you see a story like that, you just know that'll come up."

And post-production adjustments ?

"Every week it's pretty much like this evening. We only record about forty five minutes' worth for a half hour show so, if there's not a good show in there somewhere, we shouldn't be allowed on really, should we ? Also, with the nature of this thing, because a lot of it is ad-lib stuff, there's a finite period on it. If you haven't got anything in forty five minutes, you're not going to get it in an hour and a half because your energy goes down. After all, you're not just reciting lines. You're trying to find fresh stuff."

He tends to make it all sound easy, almost as if he's funny by accident, but this is due less to pretension than to his desire to avoid it. Asked to admit that it's much harder work than he is suggesting, Merton's honesty comes through.

"Well, no, it isn't all that easy. But the way I can deal with that is based on the fact the I've been performing for so many years now, improvising since about '85, and I'm in the habit of saying things off the cuff as they occur to me and not being thrown if something doesn't work."

Merton invariably gets the non-comic guest, the politician or the commentator, on his two-man team. Keeping someone in play who's so inexperienced in the cut-and-thrust of spontaneous comedy can't be easy either.

He says that these visitors generally fall into two camps - either they hardly say anything at all and they're just frozen by the whole thing, in which case, "you just grab at anything they do say and try to turn it into a joke and at least take it on somewhere that will help the show along", or he gets the kind who talk none stop and none of it is any good. "So whenever you watch it and you see the fourth member of the panel just smiling at everyone else's jokes and saying nothing themselves, it's either because they didn't say anything at all or they spoke for hours and it was all useless stuff. All yours was very good again so most of it will stay in, same as last time you did the show."

Merton's indomitably sardonic humour conceals a private sentimentality. When he proposed marriage to Caroline Quentin, he chose to do it in the most romantic place in London he could think of - in Picadilly Circus beneath the statue of the Greek love-god, Eros. He got down on one knee with all the homeless people and police and Japanese tourists and drunks watching him and popped the question. In spite of this, Caroline accepted after a suitably long and painful pause. After all, she is an actress. Did they make each other laugh ?

"Oh, yes, but that's essential in any kind of relationship really, isn't it ? But then again, I don't want to paint a picture where, as soon as we got home, we locked the door and laughed uproariously until next morning when we went out again."

The marriage eventually ran out of laughs and ended. Neither career has suffered.

In spite of his success, or perhaps because of it, Paul Merton eschews self-satisfaction. He recalls hosting a musical event just after appearing on Terry Wogan's BBC1 chat show, Idly talking to the drummer of a small pop group called Voice of the Beehive, he was feeling very full of himself and seized upon some innocuous question to turn it around so as to introduce the subject of his appearance on Wogan the night before. The musician listened civilly to Merton's account of the great event, then sympathised with the stress of it all: "I had to do some telly for a group I was in." Asked rather loftily about the name of the group, the drummer answered, "Madness".

Merton is still rueful about his unjustified vanity. He says, "My ego had got temporarily out of control. I was speaking to this guy from Madness who must have done a thousand television shows all over Europe !"

He never intends to let himself think he's better or greater than he really is. I believe it's this commitment to being level-headed that lies behind his great comic gifts and lends them honestly. Truth in comedy with added surreal imagination.

His career continues apace with no fear that the bubble will burst because he doesn't see it as a bubble, a manufactured thing.

He argues that "Have I Got News For You ?" is a success not just because he's on it but because of it's combination of assets, although I thought it flagged badly during his absence.

Expanding his activities to writing a book and touring the country with his stage act, these are just parts of the job he always wanted to do. He hopes and believes he'll improve and is relieved that his parents are pleased with his TV appearances as it means they no longer leave newspapers lying around, open at Situations Vacant with rings drawn around suitable oppotunities.

They must have concluded, along with the rest of the British public, that their son has job security.