Most young boys dream of becoming astronauts or of playing for Manchester United. Harry Hill was the only one in his class who wanted to be a pathologist.

His role model, he insists, was the morbid, mortuary-dwelling TV doctor, Quincy. His childhood in Kent and Hong Kong was wished away waiting for the day when he'd be old enough to follow his hero's calling and enrol in medical school.

Today, Harry Hill is known as the daft comedian with the big, black glasses and even bigger white collar. There are, on the face of it, few clues that he was ever once a doctor. But looking back, it's not hard to spot the comedian trying to get out.

"Even when I was a locum at Worthing Hospital, there were always a few laughs to be had - even if they were of the gallows variety," he says.

"There was this one old woman who had had a stroke at the top of a staircase. She tumbled down the stairs and fell on her Alsatian dog who passed away instantly.

"It was hard explaining that to her with a straight face."

Later, Hill spent time on the heart ward at Brighton General Hospital.

"I had a big, black Maxi and drove it into the hospital exit, hit my supervisor's car and did about £1,500 worth of damage."

Hill qualified as a doctor in 1988, aged 24. But by then he had realised that life in the pathology lab was not as glamorous as Quincy had made it seem.

His heart now lay in comedy, and on the London stand-up circuit at the turn of the decade he was the funniest doctor doing five-minute spots on Open Mike nights.

His breakthrough (after a false start as one half of a double-act called The Hall Brothers) came in a Soho club, when he stumbled into an act that has become his trademark: a running gag punctuated by catchphrases and snatches of pop songs.

"I realised what I was on to," he says. "I came home so excited I couldn't sleep. It was fantastic."

A Perrier best newcomer award at the Edinburgh Fringe soon followed, and later, his own series on Channel Four.

Currently, he's on a tour of one-night stands which will bring him to Bradford's St George's Hall next Wednesday.

"Mostly, the show's about badgers," he says, puzzlingly.

"They came from a little ad lib I did one night. I got bored with the show and said to the audience, 'Unfortunately there will be no badger parade tonight'. It got a big laugh so I ended up putting some toy badgers on a bit of string and pulling them across the stage."

He claims now to be developing a family sitcom about badgers - but as with his act, the line between fact and ridiculous fantasy is hard to find.

"A lot of my humour comes from my childhood," he says. "When you're a kid you have felt tip pens - so I wrote a felt tip pen routine."

His plans for the future are not much more developed than those of his adolescence. "I suppose I hope to be retired in ten years," he muses. "I don't know, really.

"I still enjoy what I do and I keep doing it. "What else could I do? I'm useless at anything else."

David Behrens

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