Puppet Love, TV ventriloquist Paul Zerdin on surviving Las Vegas and finding love

Like most variety stars, Paul Zerdin owes his success to a combination of talent and dedication. The super-slick TV ventriloquist has plenty of both, but admits to one downside. “I can’t switch off,” Paul tells me. “Even on honeymoon I was writing material. At 2am, I think of something and I have to write it down. I can’t leave it alone.” Mercifully, the new Mrs Z didn’t order the London-born voice-thrower to sling his hook, exit the marital bed and kip with his dolls. “Emma just rolls her eyes,” he says. “She understands me. She knows I’m always thinking of ideas. Especially on holiday; I’m more relaxed, so I get inspired.” London-born Paul, 52, married actress and dancer Emma Hunter in September. They live in the Surrey village of Cobham, popular with Chelsea footballers. “Despite that, it’s still quite nice,” he jokes. “It’s good for Heathrow Terminal 5 – it’s just 20 minutes away.” Which is handy given he has a new residency in Las Vegas, playing selected weekends at Jimmy Kimmel’s Comedy Club. Zerdin, who tours the UK with his new Jaw Drop show this September, sounds altogether perkier than when we spoke after his first taste of Sin City turned sour. He hadn’t expected to win America’s Got Talent in 2015. As well as $1million, he also scooped a weekly three-night residency at Planet Hollywood for three years, but then had to perform there while still honouring UK commitments.

“It was a very stressful time. I felt like David Frost, jetting between the US and Britain for my tour, and slotting in meetings in New York and dates in Canada too. I was getting by on sleeping tablets and adrenalin.” It became overwhelming. “I had a breakdown. I was playing Vegas and meeting heroes like David Copperfield, it should’ve been the time of my life but it was the opposite. I could cope with the jet-lag, I’m good when I’m tired. I’d fly in, unpack my case in the wings, have a bourbon and walk on stage. They brought the launch forward by three weeks, so I was a hot sweaty mess on opening night. There were a lot of celebrities in – and pros who are a hard audience to work. I heard an English accent shout ‘I love you Paul!’ I said, ‘I thought I told you to stay in the trunk!’ That got a good laugh but for the rest of the show all I could hear was someone saying ‘Get off, you’re rubbish!’ It was Nigel Havers, one of my best friends, who had flown over specially to heckle me!”

It took Paul two months to learn how to work a Vegas crowd – enthusiastic America’s Got Talent fans rubbed shoulders with drunks, uninvested comps, and unhappy folk who’d gambled away their holiday money. “I tried so hard,” he says. “I was re-writing material constantly and doing press and promotional stuff every night to get the show noticed…” He blames corporate shenanigans for the plugs being pulled after 100 shows. His new residency is on a roll though. The venue at LINQ Promenade is unlike normal Vegas lounges. “It’s like a TV studio turned into a comedy club. It’s quite sexy; I can be nearer the knuckle.” That show runs until August, and then Paul returns for his new family-friendly Jaw Drop UK tour with his supporting cast of sponge characters like freckled schoolboy Sam, incontinent codger Albert, and selfish, crowd-soaking Baby. He is also bringing Roger, his dim-witted US bodyguard, who looks disturbingly like Simon Cowell.

“That’s not deliberate,” Paul protests. “Someone said he looks like Simon Cowell and I said, ‘He’s not that evil!’ He’s a paranoid American who thinks there are hostiles everywhere and that the potholes in English roads were made by aliens. In the UK I can let rip at the current government. I poke fun at everyone a little but in the US I tread carefully because I’m a visitor. I do one gag where I ask, ‘If Trump, Putin and the Devil were locked in a room, who would survive?’ Sam replies, ‘Us!’.”

A coyote puppet he had made for his original Vegas run has been reborn as a cheeky cockney Urban Fox. “He makes it on tour by accident, he smelt my packed lunch and got trapped.” Jaw Drop will also include Zerdin’s human dummy routine, now enhanced with radio-controlled mics.

Paul found UK fame after winning ITV’s The Big Big Talent Show in 1996 – seen by millions more viewers than the number who watch Britain’s Got Talent today. “I get recognised at petrol stations at 2am – they just point and mime a puppet with their hands. And often at airports. One of the cabin crew will ask, ‘Is he in the overhead locker?’ – meaning Sam – ‘Can you make him speak?’ So I do ‘Let me out, let me out’ from the locker.” Zerdin is his real surname, his paternal grandparents escaped to England from Latvia after the Russian revolution. His parents were actors and broadcasters. His late father, Dan, a Radio 3 music producer, also on the World Service, met his mother, Hilary, a Radio 2 presenter, at the BBC’s Bush House. Paul was ten when a family friend made him a puppet theatre. He started to put on his own shows and the hobby quickly turned into an obsession. Ray Allen’s book on ventriloquism and a mirror were all he needed at the start. “I saw Ray Alan live with Lord Charles and he blew me away. I was a bit odd as a child. I liked showing off. I used to dress in my mum’s clothes and pretend to be Margaret Thatcher! We had a serving hatch between the kitchen and the dining room, and I would do puppet shows. I think that came from loving Sesame Street and the Muppets.”

After failing his GCSEs, Paul worked part-time at Davenports’ Magic shop in Central London, and local radio, developing his skill-set. He became a children’s entertainer, making his TV debut in 1990 on BBC1’s children’s sitcom Tricky Business. In 1991 he performed as a ventriloquist on BBC1’s children’s variety show Hangar 17 and started played holiday camps – “a steep learning curve,” he says. His next break was on ITV’s Rise And Shine, where he unveiled Sam for the first time. Winning The Big Big Talent Show propelled him onto mainstream TV shows including Tonight At The London Palladium, The Generation Game and A Royal Gala for The Prince’s Trust. He also recalls filming a less glamorous no-budget pilot for the BBC where he made baby noises from a pram that only continued a bottle of cola and sandwiches, attracting an audience of Shepherd’s Bush tramps and winos.

Paul, who is developing a puppet-centred podcast, has played comedy clubs, the Edinburgh fringe, appeared in 30 pantomimes and has worked the Royal Caribbean cruise line for decades.

Lockdown hit entertainers hard, but it had a silver lining for Zerdin, re-uniting him with Emma. “We did panto together – oh yes we did – in 2004, at Wimbledon with Claire Sweeney and Robin Askwith. There was definitely a spark, but the timing was off. Sixteen years later, during the pandemic, one of us messaged the other and the rest is history.” They had to postpone their Dubai honeymoon until November after his father had a fall. Sadly, he died in December aged 98. “As he got older, Dad misheard things all the time. I’d say, ‘I’m going to Dubai’, but he’d hear ‘goodbye’ and say, ‘Oh, going so soon?’. ‘Directing me’ became ‘hysterectomy’. He laughed as much as we did about it.”

Paul’s 2023 tour, Puppetman, played to more than 50 sold-out venues. “I hope people come and see the new show,” he says. “It’s always different. There are new characters and new jokes. I’m trying out some Jaw Drop material now, so it’ll be tried and tested – fresh from Vegas.”

*Paul Zerdin’s Jaw Drop runs from September 2 to November 8. Details at paulzerdin.com/#tour