Harry Hill takes new series featuring top UK comedians straight to YouTube

The Harry Hill Show will be available on the comedian’s YouTube channel this month

UK comedian and TV presenter Harry Hill (Harry Hill’s TV Burp) is going direct to YouTube with a digital-first weekly series having recently criticised UK television for being too risk-averse.

The Harry Hill Show launches on January 19 and will be available on the Harry Hill YouTube channel and as a visualised podcast on Spotify, with new episodes streaming every Monday.

The former stand-up comedian rose to fame with madcap Channel 4 series Harry Hill, which ran from 1997 to 2003. He then moved to commercial broadcaster ITV as part of a lucrative deal that saw him create Harry Hill’s TV Burp, which aired for 11 seasons between 2001 and 2012, winning a number of awards.

Since then, Hill has made Harry Hill’s Tea-Time (Sky), Harry Hill’s Alien Fun Capsule (ITV), Harry Hill’s Clubnite (Channel 4) and Harry Hill’s World of TV (BBC Two), and has also narrated 15 seasons of You’ve Been Framed! for ITV and co-presented Junior Bake Off on Channel 4.

His latest project is a successor to his podcast Are We There Yet?, launched in 2024 and produced by Keep It Light Media. It promises a mix of surreal comedy, celebrity guests, daft games, a mascot called Licky and an AI bot named Terror.

Among those set to feature are Stewart Lee, Ed Gamble, James Acaster, Laura Smyth, Phil Wang, Alex Brooker and Nish Kumar.

Teasing his new project on YouTube, Hill said: “I’ve got a new show and this time it’s visualised – a vodscarf! If you like prolonged low-level disruption, then join us. There’ll be men, women, laughter and some sadness.”

It comes after Hill recently criticised the UK’s commercial broadcasters for risk-aversion, lack of imagination and unwillingness to foster new comedy shows.

Speaking to the Beyond the Title podcast, Hill said: “If you look at Saturday night schedules now, it’s celebrity quizshow, celebrity quizshow, celebrity quizshow. There’s some really funny ones, but you think, ‘Really?’

“It’s commercial TV, they’ve got to make money or they feel like they have to, so they don’t develop anything new or risky. Comedy is never right the first time. History is littered with it. You identify a spark in it and think, ‘We will get it right.’

“It took us two or three series to get TV Burp right. No one was keeping an eye on us, so somehow we managed to get away with that. We could easily have been cancelled after the first series, and we would be now.”