Richard Herring 2024

[Twilkes]

Mark Lamarr tempered the laddishness a bit, and Simon Amstell was Simon Amstell.

Been reading Warming Up for about a decade now, plus during the odyssey that was Consecutive Number Plate Spotting - it's sometimes a bit family heavy these days and I do sometimes wonder about the level of disclosure, but it's always genuine and sometimes has some decent ideas in it.

Subscribed to Substack because he needs the money more than me; well, his kids do, when they take up their first show to the Fringe, Herring Snr will be redundant.

[Red82]

Buzzcocks was pretty entertaining for its time.  Although some would argue Lamarr was overly mean to guests at times.  Sean Hughes was on it whom I've always found likeable and later Bailey, Fielding and Amstell.

[Mobbd]

Herring's been podcasting for 17 years as of yesterday and he posted some nice reflections of Collings & Herrin, where it all began. It's especially nice to see Tina Wiseman get a mention.

When I started putting out weekly shows with the journalist Andrew Collings, many comedians asked me why I was doing it. Why was I giving out so much material for free?

But I was struggling to get my stuff on TV and radio and if I managed it then I'd usually have to wait months for broadcast and get censored by nervous channel chiefs. So the autonomy and the immediacy of the medium was all I needed. Also there weren't many people podcasting - We Need Answers, Peacock and Gamble and Ricky Gervais were the major comedy podcasters that were going before me (that I remember anyway), so it was a fairly open market place. Albeit a market place where everything was given away for free.

I think Collings and me vaguely thought that if we did OK we might get asked back to do a 6 Music show (and that did come to pass after a couple of years) and I vaguely thought it might encourage people to come and see my stand up shows (and again, my live audience doubled within a year, but that was starting from very modest sales). Ultimately though we were doing it to try stuff out, to be as rude as we wanted and have fun. Earning money from it was not on our radar at all. And aside from the occasional pound pressed into my hand by a stranger we didn't directly make any money from it until we had the idea of doing the shows in front of an audience. Which we only did a handful of times - plus an Edinburgh run or two, which given the nature of the Fringe were not for profit.

It was a funny show and without us expecting anything of it led to lots of opportunities - I got on some TV panel shows as a result (finally appearing on Have I Got News For You?) and the podcast sparked ideas for stand up shows, most notably Hitler Moustache and Secret Dancing, but the shows were an achievement in themselves, filthy and rude at a time when TV had got overcautious with a loyal band of listeners, who joined in, made friends with each other, remained virgins nonetheless and were genuinely affected by the loss of one of our number. RIP Tina, we won't forget you.

I am so glad we took the plunge because this was a very creatively fecund period for me, but no one else was really interested in employing me and it led to As It Occurs To Me and then, in the final collapse of the double act, RHLSTP.