Paul Merton

Ian Hislop once called Merton a dangerous alien from planet Stroppy. He is given to soaringly surreal flights of fancy and dive-bombing belligerence. As an actor, he is solid wood, however you slice him.

There were plenty of reverse-balding-syndrome sufferers on view last night in Paul Merton's Life of Comedy (BBC1), a fascinating six-part trawl through the LE archives. As a member of the first generation to be raised from birth with television, Merton confessed at the outset that "TV comedy seems as real to me as my own life", and the series blurs that distinction further, blending vintage footage with spurious autobiography. Adding funny links to funny clips is a dangerous game to play (usually, you prefer one and wish the other wasn't there at all) but he brings off the double act superbly - so effortlessly, in fact, that a huge effort must have gone into preparing the apparently unstructured format.

Paul Merton - The Series is extraordinary from the opening moments. Eleanor Rigby-like strings pound away melancholically in a minor key, with a sombreness rarely encountered in TV comedy. [...] But these monologues are far more than a string of disconnected jokes. Each one possesses a strange distorted logic of its own, a subtle twist that transforms a simple idea into something utterly baffling, the verbal equivalent of a Mobius strip.