Bob Mortimer, the shy solicitor who found his solo voice after a heart bypass

Bob Mortimer

Photo: Marcus Liversedge / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 23, 1959 Middlesbrough, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Comedian, television presenter, writer and actor
Known for	Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, How to Build a Girl
Awards	British Academy Television · Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize

He spent his first working life arguing cockroach cases in south London and his second standing beside Vic Reeves. Neither looks like training for the job British television now gives Bob Mortimer, which is to sit very still, tell a story nobody could make up, and let a studio decide whether he made it up. On Would I Lie to You? his anecdotes are so strange that the true ones sound invented. On Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing he talks about dying with a rod in his hand and Paul Whitehouse beside him on the bank. A man who says he was crippled by shyness until he turned thirty has become, late and almost by accident, a solo act that television keeps building shows around.

The shyness had a source in Middlesbrough, where Mortimer grew up with three brothers in the Linthorpe area. His father died in a car crash when he was seven, and at around the same age Bob burnt down the family home with a firework. He had trials with Middlesbrough, the club he still supports, until early-onset arthritis ended them; the rheumatoid arthritis has stayed with him ever since, kept in check with steroids.

For the Middlesbrough boy born on 23 May 1959, King’s Manor School led to law at the universities of Sussex and Leicester, a master’s in welfare law and a punk band called Dog Dirt. In London he became a solicitor for Southwark Council and then for a private practice in Peckham, where his Public Health Act cases over infested council flats led the South London Press to call him “The Cockroach King”. He has told the story of being mugged by one of his own clients, who recognised him, stopped and apologised; Mortimer carried on representing him.

In 1986 he went to the Goldsmiths Tavern in New Cross to see a comedian called Vic Reeves try to tap dance in a Bryan Ferry mask with planks strapped to his feet. Mortimer went up to him afterwards; within a week they were writing the next show together. Vic Reeves Big Night Out outgrew the pub, moved to the Albany Empire in Deptford in 1988 and gave Mortimer a stage for Graham Lister, Judge Nutmeg and the Man With the Stick. When Channel 4 turned it into a series in 1990, he took a ten-week break from the law to record it. He never went back.

The double act that followed set the terms for a decade of British surrealism. The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer arrived in 1993, and Shooting Stars, the BBC Two panel show that ignored its own rules or invented new ones mid-round, ran in several stretches until 2011. Mortimer acted too: he played the living detective Jeff Randall opposite Reeves’s ghost and Emilia Fox in Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) in 2000, co-wrote and starred in Catterick and later joined Reeves and Matt Berry in House of Fools. For fifteen years, from 1996, his was also the voice of the animated bulldog in the Churchill Insurance adverts.

The late affection for Mortimer smooths over a career that was rarely cosy. Big Night Out was built to bewilder, a parody of variety television that played to a cult audience in south London before the medium caught up with it, and some of his projects did not survive contact with a broadcaster at all: in 2005 BBC Three shelved Popetown, the animated satire in which he voiced Father Nicholas, for fear of offending Catholic viewers. Mortimer himself has said that Would I Lie to You?, where he has been a recurring guest since 2012, brought him more recognition than anything he made before. The remark is generous and a little unsettling: the country met the gentle raconteur first and the anarchist second.

The turn came through his heart. In October 2015 he needed an emergency triple bypass, and the first leg of the 25th-anniversary Reeves and Mortimer tour was cancelled. On the day he was admitted to hospital he married Lisa Matthews, his partner of 22 years; they have two sons. Whitehouse, who had his own heart scare, heard from Lisa that Bob had stopped going out and invited him fishing. The trips got him out of the house, and in 2018 they became a BBC Two series built on two old friends, a river and the subject neither could avoid. By then Mortimer had also won the fifth series of Taskmaster, in 2017, and started the football podcast Athletico Mince with Andy Dawson.

Writing his memoir, And Away…, published in 2021, pushed him towards fiction. The Satsuma Complex, in which he set out to emulate the style of Haruki Murakami, followed in 2022 and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction in 2023. The Hotel Avocado came out in 2024 and The Long Shoe in 2025: three bestsellers from a man who started writing fiction in his sixties.

The prize that matters most to his television career came for keeping a straight face. In the first series of LOL: Last One Laughing UK on Prime Video in 2025, he won the final face-off by breaking Richard Ayoade with a deadpan speed-dating sketch, and on 10 May 2026 he collected the Bafta for best entertainment performance, alone, while the show took the entertainment award. He returned as defending champion for the second series this spring, which David Mitchell won. Netflix has since commissioned Hot Or Cold, six episodes in which he and Ayoade lead teams through rooms that glow red or blue as they get closer to a challenge nobody has explained. “Spending time with Richard Ayoade is one of my all-time favourite things to do,” Mortimer said when it was announced. No broadcast date has been set. He also voices a scarecrow-like apothecary in Murals, a video game due on PC in 2027.

The ninth series of Gone Fishing begins on BBC Two on Sunday 25 October 2026, with the pair on the River Ribble in Lancashire and the Patterdale terrier Ted, who died in April, on his last trip with them. On 19 November Gallery UK publishes Michael, his fourth novel, about a man who dies and is sent back to the year after his father’s death: a new house, a new school, no friends and a mother with a new boyfriend. It is the closest Mortimer’s fiction has come to the boy in Linthorpe, and the timing gives it an obvious reading. More than three decades after he walked out of a solicitor’s office, he is still finding out what he can do on his own.

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Tags: actors, comedians, Bob Mortimer, LOL: Last One Laughing UK, Shooting Stars, Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

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