Life and Career
Amstell's first television appearance was in 1993 when he appeared as a contestant on the Channel 4 game show GamesMaster. He also appeared on Good Morning with Anne and Nick performing an impression of Dame Edna Everage. In 1994, he appeared in an episode of Family Catchphrase, describing himself as a budding magician and showing one of his tricks to the show's presenter Andrew O'Connor, himself a magician. Amstell and his family won a television and a video recorder.
Amstell started performing on the comedy circuit when he was in his early teens and later became the youngest finalist to appear in the BBC New Comedy Awards. His first professional television appearance was in 1998 as a presenter on the UK children's channel Nickelodeon. He claims he was sacked for being "sarcastic and mean to children" although the potted biography on his website also, in jest, claims:
"He started his TV career at Nickelodeon where he was fired for making pop stars uncomfortable. He then began presenting the Channel 4 show, Popworld – where he gained a huge following for his groundbreaking work in making pop stars uncomfortable."
His is openly gay) and Jewish which occasionally figure in his work. He is a vegan and teetotal.
Read more about this topic: Simon Amstell
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving ones ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of ones life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into ones real life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“When man has neither the strength to subdue his underworld powerswhich are really the ancient powers of his old, superseded self; nor the wit to placate them with sacrifice and the burnt holocaust; then they come back at him, and destroy him again. Hence every new conquest of life means a harrowing of Hell.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a mans 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)