Paul Foot is taking his show, Dissolve, on tour [Jonathan Birch]

COMEDIAN Paul Foot has had a decades-long career in the business of making people laugh, touring theatres and clubs across the country and regularly appearing on prime time television shows.

But he has this week for the first time opened up about the depression he has lived with since childhood – and the “miraculous event” that has recently freed him from his life-long affliction.

He is preparing to tour the country with a powerful and funny new show, Dissolve, that he spoke about in a candid interview with the New Journal in mental health awareness week.

Mr Foot said: “I’m being fairly open now to you, whereas throughout my life I would be very careful talking about these sorts of things.

“If I’d been on the phone to you two years ago, I would have been guarded, just saying ‘oh everything is fine’. I’ve never really talked about any of this before.

“But in this show I get very, very open. It’s very personal, very vulnerable. ‘Very brave’, people said to me after the first preview on Monday. I don’t feel like that. It was something that needed to be said.”

Mr Foot, instantly recognisable at the start of his career for his quirky hairstyles and surreal routines, has written a host of stand-up shows and toured with them over the past 20 years.

He was considered an influence on Russell Brand to the extent that some fans believed Brand had almost pinched parts of his act and delivery. Fans of panel shows will may also remember his turns on shows like 8 Out Of 10 Cats and Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

Beyond the laughs, however, Mr Foot was troubled. “I’ve had this for 30 or 40 years – something happened to me, let’s call it childhood trauma,” he said this week. “But it is not like it has been all doom and gloom all day long. People with depression are not just in bed crying every day. There are lots of good days. But then you have crises, lows and difficulties.”

He added: “I would always do my shows. But there were other things in my life that I could not do. Meetings with friends, and things like that. It was all so random. Relatively minor things, like someone being rude to me in a shop, would plunge me into terrible depression.”

On March 20, 2022, however, Mr Foot said something happened that changed his life. A little frustratingly, he said: “I can’t tell you what it was because it would ruin the show, but it was an incredible, miraculous event.

“Within three seconds, everything that I had been coping with just dissolved away. The anger and all the things I hadn’t forgiven, it was all in complete totality healed and solved.”

Paul Foot [Jonathan Birch]

He said he had been taking anti-depressants for years and had therapy that had given him lots of coping strategies.

But he added: “Three seconds after this incident I was transformed into a whole different exis­tence. Now I am complete­ly calm. I am in a good mood. I can’t believe it.”

Mr Foot stressed the miracle was not a religious experience, adding: “I’m quite clear that I am not religious. Jesus, that’s not my answer. “But there is a bit in the show about what Jesus could have achieved if he had been a plumber.”

He added: “It would be obviously disingenuous to say there was a direct thing in my show that if everyone came they could be cured from depression.

“But there is a big message of hope in there. I wanted to show that there is a possibility for improvement. These things you are feeling, are not necessarily forever.

“The show does all the things I’ve done before – making people laugh, several times per minute. But while previously people would come up to me and say that was a funny show and I really laughed, they are now coming up to me saying how depression had affected them in the way I describe.

And I think I describe the years of depression and mental problems and crises in a powerful and funny way.”

Mr Foot grew up in Bucks in High Wycombe and still lives there today. He said he liked the area as “no one really knows where that is”, adding: “When I go on tour I feel that I am at home. When I am at my actual home, I sort of feel like I am not actually there. “I sleep in my bed only a third of the year. Sometimes I look around and think whose is this house? It’s my house!”

He described a life on the road with three days driving to venues around the country and half the week back at home sorting out life-admin.

But he is preparing for a months-long tour of his Dissolve show to theatres around the country with his new show, including a spell at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Leicester Square Theatre on November 24 and the Arts Depot Finchley on September 28.

“I now think that one of the reasons I became a surreal comedian was that there was all this depression and trauma in my life,” he said. “I never wanted to talk about myself, even remotely. So a lot of what I did was abstract and peculiar. People who have depression can come across as selfish when they behave in a certain way, petulant even.

“But in reality you are so focused on getting through the day, you haven’t got any time to worry about yourself too much.

“I think I would focus on other people but now, ironically, I am talking about myself.”

I’d get a little jolt when his name popped up

I’VE always had a bit of a fascination with the comedian Paul Foot, simply because he shared the same name as my Dad, writes Tom Foot.

I had never spoken to him, or seen his act, before yesterday (Wednesday) – but I feel like he has been a kind of mysterious presence in some corner of my brain for many years now. I’ve lost it now, but I used to have a funny photo of my father Paul – a well-known journalist who died in 2004 – standing in front a West End theatre sign where the then up-and-coming comic was playing.

I still get a little jolt when I see the comic’s name on TV, pop up on social media, or appear in an email from a theatre publicist headed “Do you want to interview Paul Foot?”

So, yes I did.

He told me that the shoe has always been firmly on the other foot, remembering a time when he hired his first agent and started getting a lot of calls. “They were always after your dad,” he said.

He also told me he had an uncle called Michael Foot, who used to send in letters to newspapers on political matters sparking chaos on the various newsdesks with editors thinking it was my great uncle.