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The profile · researched 1 November 2026
Paul Sinha's thirtieth year on stage, and the hour he refuses to make sad
A former GP turned stand-up, quizzer and Radio 4 regular, Paul Sinha is touring 2 Sinha Lifetime through 2026 and into spring 2027 — a show built from two heart attacks, a Parkinson's diagnosis and three decades of gags, and deliberately not from pathos.
Luton, Dulwich, and the doctor who kept booking open spots
Supriya Kumar Sinha was born on 28 May 1970 in Luton, into a Bengali Hindu family in which medicine was the family trade: his father and paternal grandfather were doctors and his mother a nurse. He was educated at Dulwich College and then St George's Hospital Medical School, where the extracurricular habits that mattered later were already forming — he performed in the annual student revues and co-edited the medical school newsletter.
He qualified as a GP in the 1990s and began doing stand-up while working as a junior doctor in London and in King's Lynn, a double life that lasted years rather than months. The early material leaned on his sexuality and his ethnicity, and on puns — a lot of puns, delivered with the air of a man who found the construction of a joke as satisfying as the laugh.
The Edinburgh Fringe debut came in 2004. Two years later Saint or Sinha? earned an if.comeddie nomination, the award then regarded as the Fringe's main comedy prize, which moved him from the pile of promising club acts to someone the industry watched. The medical career was eventually set aside; by his own account in his memoir, the disappointment of medicine was as much a part of the story as the pull of comedy.
The hours, the books and the radio
Sinha's body of work is a run of Edinburgh hours rather than a run of specials. He has taken shows to the Fringe across 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2022, 2023 and 2025 — a pattern of long gaps and sudden bursts that tracks his television commitments and, latterly, his health.
Radio has been the more consistent home. Paul Sinha's History Revision began on BBC Radio 4 in 2014, and its second series, broadcast in May 2016, won the Rose d'Or for Radio Comedy that year. Paul Sinha's Quiz Culture had run in 2011. Paul Sinha's Perfect Pub Quiz, the format in which he takes a listener's favourite quiz question, explains why it is a bit rubbish, and then offers a better one with the story behind the answer, ran on Radio 4 from 2022 to 2026 across five series and 32 episodes; the first two were collected as an audiobook by Penguin. He is also a regular on The News Quiz and Just a Minute.
The memoir arrived on 20 June 2024. One Sinha Lifetime, published by Penguin, covers the academically precocious childhood, the souring of the medical career, the late-blossoming romantic life, the quizzing obsession and the 2019 Parkinson's diagnosis. It was well received by his peers — Miles Jupp called it eloquent, pithy and painfully honest, and noted that its subject does not shy away from his flaws — and it supplies the spine of the current stage show, including its title.
The Sinnerman
Sinha joined ITV's The Chase in 2011 as the show's fourth chaser, billed as The Sinnerman and The Smiling Assassin, and remains one of six as of 2026. The quizzing is not a television conceit: he was ranked seventh in the country in 2017, and he won Fighting Talk's Champion of Champions twice.
The split between the two jobs is part of the comedy's appeal. Reviewers of the current tour keep noting the gap between the tidy afternoon-television persona and what the live act actually contains — one Fringe critic in August 2025 took particular pleasure in watching a mainstream audience, drawn in by the quiz show, laugh warmly at material the daytime schedule would never carry.
He has been consistently blunt about the terms on which he stays. Speaking to BBC Radio Merseyside in July 2026, he said that if he came to think he was a liability he would leave, and that if he was no longer worth his position on the show he would call it time for a dignified exit.
Two heart attacks, and a diagnosis he put in the act
Sinha was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2017 and then had a sudden-onset frozen right shoulder. Parkinson's disease was identified in May 2019, when he was 49; he decided almost immediately to be public about it. That December, on the 14th, he married Oliver Levy.
The 2023 Fringe was worse than the diagnosis. He had two heart attacks during the festival, in its first and third weeks. The first struck in a bar while he was shaking hands with Levi Roots; years of medical training told him what the crushing chest pain was, and rather than call an ambulance he took a cab to the nearest hospital because he did not want to cause a scene. It was not correctly diagnosed and he was sent home. After the second, he was told he had had two small heart attacks. He carried on performing the run — he told Good Morning Britain in June 2025 that he did so because of the money at stake at the festival, and that, looking back, it was not the right thing to do.
The 2025 show makes material of all of it without asking for sympathy. He has said the condition gave him a connection, particularly with audience members in their fifties, sixties and seventies managing health problems of their own, and that his job is to put that in perspective and make it funny. On the same Radio Merseyside appearance he acknowledged the diagnosis was not a good one and that the future may look bleak, then added that he was having a lot of fun with it.
Where he stands now
2 Sinha Lifetime is his thirtieth-anniversary show, written for the 2025 Fringe and played at The Stand 3 in Edinburgh through to 24 August 2025. It was the first full Fringe run since the cardiac year, and the reviews were the strongest of his career: five stars from On The Mic on 11 August 2025, which called it upbeat, quick-witted, wide-ranging and gag-heavy, with every joke landing; five stars from Broadway Baby; four and a half from One4Review, which found it bitingly funny and delightfully written, erudite and occasionally cutting, and complained only that the hour was nowhere near long enough. The Scotsman's verdict, carried on his listings, was "triumphant".
The show has been on the road through 2026 — a Glasgow date at The Stand on 10 October, Chelmsford Theatre in September, a Brighton club night on 28 October — and the touring diary continues: York's The Crescent on 3 November 2026 and Chorley Theatre on 4 November 2026, then Plymouth University's Main Hall on 6 February 2027, The Dukes in Lancaster on 13 February, Corn Hall in Diss on 20 February and the Marine Theatre in Lyme Regis on 12 March. Tickets on the regional dates sit between £18 and £23.50. Alongside the theatre run he is still working the clubs, with multi-night stands booked at Hot Water Comedy Club in Liverpool in December 2026 and at the Comedy Store in London from 17 to 19 December.
Radio 4's Perfect Pub Quiz reached its fifth series in 2026, the memoir is in paperback and audio, and The Chase continues. For a performer who spent the 2010s best known as a face on a quiz show, the standing has quietly inverted: the stand-up is now the thing the critics rate highest.
The show, now
2 Sinha Lifetime was built as a one-hour Fringe show and ran at that length at The Stand 3 in Edinburgh through August 2025; the touring version is longer, billed at around 100 minutes for the Glasgow Stand date on 10 October 2026, and a Brighton club booking on 28 October 2026 was listed as 19:30 to 21:15. Staging is minimal — a microphone and a keyboard. He opens with a satirical song and returns to the keyboard for further short numbers through the set, which the Mail on Sunday summarised as banging one-liners and pithy ditties. The material is structured loosely around thirty years in stand-up: celebrity autobiographies and crime-writing memoirs, his own earlier Edinburgh shows, his family, the diabetes, the Parkinson's and the two 2023 heart attacks, drinking and gambling, television work and the indignities of hosting awards ceremonies, with a fair amount of unscripted work off the audience. The declared promise is jokes and, despite everything, no pathos, and reviewers have taken him at his word: On The Mic gave it five stars in August 2025 for being gag-heavy and self-deprecating with every joke landing, Broadway Baby five for being clever, honest and very funny, and One4Review four and a half, noting the room laughed throughout and that an hour was not enough. No support act is listed on the theatre or club dates — he plays the whole bill himself. Dates are 18-plus at club venues.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · chortle.co.uk · chortle.co.uk · onthemic.co.uk · one4review.co.uk · rte.ie · aol.co.uk · thestand.co.uk