Movers and Shakers: Paul Sinha

Our latest Parky Profile

A humiliating defeat on University Challenge turned out to be the turning point in the life of our guest on this week’s episode of Movers and Shakers. After being one of a team of comedians thrashed in a celebrity edition of the programme by the Ministry of Justice - or “a bunch of fucking judges” as Jeremy Paxman puts it - Paul Sinha tells us he sat in a Manchester hotel bar and decided he wanted to be a top quizzer:
”That night, I went to my hotel room and applied to go on Mastermind.”

A few years on in 2011 he was invited to become one of the master quizzers on ITV’s The Chase, and that put him on the path to celebrity. Dubbed “The Sinnerman” by the show’s presenter Bradley Walsh, every aspect of his life became of interest to the tabloids - and that included his Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2019. He has great insights on how Parkinson’s is seen in the media, but first we learn about his background.

He comes from a family of medics, and growing up in South London as part of a Bengali community, it was assumed that he would become a doctor: “In the 80s when I was a teenager, it was actually quite rare for people I knew to not follow their parents into a degree in medicine.”

He duly went through medical school and became a GP - “I was an alright doctor but was never passionate about it” - but became the latest in a long line of doctors to go into comedy, although he says it happened almost by accident:

“It was not my idea that I'd ever be a comedian. I just wanted an anecdote at a dinner party. I wanted to be more interesting than the person next to me by saying, ‘I've done stand-up comedy.’ It never even occurred to me I'd still be doing it 25, nearly 30, years later.”

By 2019 everything seemed to be going well in both his comedy and quizzing careers, but a nagging problem with his shoulder had sent him to a neurologist. On a working trip to New Zealand - where The Chase is on three times a day and he is a huge celebrity - Paul finally woke up to what was wrong with him:

“I decided to Google ‘frozen shoulder plus Parkinson's’ for the first time and when I saw how much literature there was on it, and how much of it matched my exact experience to the very last detail, I just turned to my husband - my fiancé at the time - Oliver and I just said ‘Oliver, I've got Parkinson's disease’.”

He had just a brief spell of depression after the diagnosis but seeing as his father had suffered serious heart problem and his mother had recovered from cancer, he wasn’t going to make a fuss.

“We've learned to cope as a family, we've learned to be there for each other. And if I turned into a melodramatic tantrum person on account of my Parkinson's, my mum and dad would give me very short shrift indeed because of everything they've been through.”

To cap it all, he reveals that Parkinson’s isn’t even his biggest medical problem right now. During his show at the Edinburgh Festival last year he had a minor heart attack, and then had to have a heart bypass operation.

When I met Paul Sinha a couple of years ago to write a profile for Radio Times, he struck me as quite an angry man. But he now explains this is not because of the condition itself but the way his experience of it is treated by the media. He had mentioned his brief period of depression in an interview in which almost everything he said was positive only to read a headline saying “Chaser Suffers Breakdown”. At an awards ceremony he was asked whether he would ever do Strictly Come Dancing. and a throwaway remark about now having the perfect get-out card resulted in the headline “Heartbreak as Chaser reveals he has lost the ability to dance.”

But apart from his anger with sloppy journalism Paul seems relatively sanguine about his Parkinson’s, refusing to let it stop him from doing things he loves.

“For me the most important thing about what I do in my life is that I can show people that Parkinson’s is not the end. it's the beginning. It's the beginning of a new stage in your life.”

We end with a special gift for Paul Sinha, a mini-quiz about Parkinson’s with the first question being asked by Jeremy Paxman. Do play along at home and see if you can beat the Sinnerman.