Career
Merton often claims that he was inspired to go into comedy at an early age watching clowns at a circus, remembering, "I had no idea that adults could behave like that." He gained his earliest professional credits under his birth name, including an appearance as a yokel in Time, an episode of The Young Ones in 1984. On joining Equity he found that the name Paul Martin was already taken, so he renamed himself after Merton, the district of London where he grew up.
Read more about this topic: Paul Merton
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)