Paul Sinha - star of The Chase - reveals he had two heart attacks at last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival but kept performing, fearing financial loss. Photo / Supplied.
At the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Chase’s Sinnerman was taken seriously ill. Yet with huge financial losses looming, he had no choice but to carry on.
Last August, unbeknown to all but a close circle of friends and family, Paul Sinha suffered two heart attacks at the Edinburgh Fringe. Yet the comedian and star of quiz show The Chase only cancelled two of his Edinburgh shows.
“I should have taken a massive break but I continued to gig,” the 54-year-old tells me. He is looking relatively fit and well-rested, taking this year’s Fringe off to watch the Olympics. He wants to be “upfront, forthright and honest” in sharing his experiences “in my own words without the tabloids sensationalising it”.
“The reason I want to share my story is that I truly think performers need to think more about taking better and more holistic self-care of themselves.”
Forced to undergo a heart bypass operation in December, Sinha endured what he “can only describe as the most visceral, intense and unpleasant eight days of my life” at St George’s Hospital in London where, coincidentally, he’d qualified as a doctor almost 28 years earlier.
So why did he continue? Fearing a loss of approximately £20,000 ($42,660) in ticket sales at the 450-seater New Town Theatre, he tells me that “financial ruin” felt like a very real possibility. Sinha was also acting against medical advice. His life is already significantly constrained, having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease four years ago.
His first heart attack featured, bizarrely, a celebrity. He had the evening off after his opening night and was walking up the steep hill to the Pleasance venue, when “I got this crushing, constricting chest pain, which from my medical experience seemed incredibly cardiac in origin. I’d got to the Pleasance, when I had a classic Fringe experience” he says. “Someone recognised me from The Chase and demanded I meet his friend, Levi Roots.” Shaking the Reggae Reggae Sauce creator’s hand “out of sheer politeness, I realised that the pain wasn’t getting any better”.
At Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary however, the pain subsided. And because there were no significant changes registered by his electrocardiogram test, he was treated conservatively and sent home. He continued to perform for a week and a half “while actively avoiding hills” – no mean undertaking in the Scottish capital. His show, Pauly Bengali, was attracting at least four-stars across the board, but it was also taking a huge mental and physical toll. As well as hula hooping to play down the debilitating impact of his Parkinson’s at his show’s conclusion, Sinha was singing and playing piano on stage for the first time.
With exquisite irony, he was hit with more severe pain while on his way to see Ed Byrne’s hit show Tragedy Plus Time. On this occasion, he was seen by a consultant cardiologist who recognised a “definitive cardiac event” and that he’d probably had a small heart attack the first time, so he was kept in hospital for three nights.
Sinha’s Bengali family has a history of cardiac conditions. When his father had a heart attack at 50, the comic put off telling him he was gay for years for fear the news would kill him. Sinha had also been a committed drinker since medical school, where he felt it helped him to fit in socially. He estimates that he was “drunk 25 nights out of 28″ at the 2001 Fringe.
He feared his ailing health meant 2023 could be his last Fringe. But it emboldened him to deliver a “lash-out” show, in which he settled scores with fellow comics and was “quite overt in my disdain for certain people in the comedy industry”, most notably stand-up-turned GB news presenter Mark Dolan, whom he recalled drunkenly abusing at an awards ceremony.
Performing on the day he was discharged from hospital, the show was interrupted by “an angry Glaswegian, loudly exiting as he drunkenly disagreed with my politics”. It was unfortunate that it “coincided with my bestselling show of the Fringe”, Sinha laments.
Today, Sinha moderates his drinking, but his indiscretion still causes him problems. In his memoir, One Sinha Lifetime, he recounted how, during the pilot episode recording of Sky’s panel show A League of Their Own, James Corden and John Bishop joked about his attraction to fellow panellist and former England cricketer Stuart Broad, prompting an uncomfortable Sinha to freeze. He hasn’t appeared on the show since, but Bishop has since reached out to Sinha’s management to make sure that there are no hard feelings.
One of four Edinburgh Comedy Award nominees from the St George’s production line of jaded medics-turned-comics, alongside Harry Hill, Mike Wozniak and Sam Hutt, aka country and western singer Hank Wangford, he accepted an honorary degree in science from his alma mater last month — a pleasing coda to the medical vocation that was always his family’s dream more than his.
But while Sinha affects jealousy at not being asked to appear on stage at Glastonbury with Coldplay like fellow celebrity Parkinson’s sufferer Michael J Fox, he’s genuinely pleased that clips of his physically and mentally malcoordinated performance on the show Taskmaster in 2019 are used by medical schools to train for spotting signs of the disease.
Meanwhile, The Chase remains popular, still hitting a “sweet spot” of questions about Aristotle and Rembrandt while never taking itself “too seriously”. Benefiting from host Bradley Walsh’s “chemistry with the contestants and the Chasers”, the rigours of quizzing have been helpful for monitoring his Parkinson’s progress, “constantly turning over the topsoil of my mind”.
Sinha’s parents have accepted what he euphemistically calls “his lifestyle issues”, in no small part because of their affection for his husband Oliver, whom he married in 2019, the same year in which he received his Parkinson’s diagnosis and became British Quizzing Champion.
Looking to the future, he is about to finish recording a third series of Paul Sinha’s Perfect Pub Quiz, to air on the UK’s Radio 4 this autumn. He is resisting anxiety about having potentially performed at his last Fringe by crafting heart-attack routines for next year’s event.
From a clinical point of view, “everything is going in the right direction.
“I don’t feel that I’ve completely recovered, nonetheless I have a very full diary indeed” he says. “The decision regarding Edinburgh relies on so many factors of which cardiac health is just one. Whatever happens, I will only return with a show that I’m proud of.
“Being self-employed, there’s always a fear that you might stop getting booked, that people worry ‘is he fit enough?’
“So I’m trying to be pickier about the gigs I do and a little bit pickier about my overall lifestyle. I’ve been very much guilty of being horrifically unhealthy with what I’ve put myself through for the festival.”
He empathises with Glaswegian stand-up Susie McCabe, who has continued to perform in Edinburgh this month, despite undergoing an emergency heart procedure on the eve of the festival.
“When Susie said ‘the show will go on’ that’s kind of how I’d felt,” he reflects. “It wasn’t courage; it was pragmatism. I’d written a show but I’m not someone that tours a lot. I’m someone that writes a show for Edinburgh each year and is learning the hard way that life doesn’t give a s*** about your creative ambitions or finances.”
Paul Sinha: One Sinha Lifetime is out now, published by Ebury Press
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