British Comedy Guide

Richard Herring crowdfunds new As It Occurs To Me series

Tuesday 5th April 2016, 10:39am

AIOTM. Image shows from L to R: Richard Herring, Emma Kennedy, Dan Tetsell, Christian Reilly, Ben Walker
  • Richard Herring's online series As It Occurs To Me is to return
  • The news follows a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising over £100,000
  • The new series will be filmed and episodes due to be released from September

Richard Herring has raised over £100,000 through crowd-funding platform Kickstarter to make a new series of his hit internet sketch show As It Occurs To Me.

As It Occurs To Me - aka AIOTM - originally ran for three series between 2009 and 2011, distributed as a free audio podcast. Written by and starring Herring, and also featuring Dan Tetsell, Emma Kennedy and Christian Reilly, the show mixed stand-up and sketch show elements.

The AIOTM podcasts, published by British Comedy Guide, proved to be very popular and regularly appeared in the iTunes charts and received multiple award nods, including a Sony Award nomination. The show was also one of the first to trial the concept of recording podcasts in front of a live audience, a model that is now commonplace in British comedy.

Herring took to Kickstarter to raise enough money to make "a professional quality" AIOTM video series. Writing on the Kickstarter campaign page, he said: "We want to make at least six monthly VIDEO episodes of this stand-up and sketch show and we need money to pay the actors, camera crew, editors, puppet makers and cartoonists. We want to make these to TV quality so it's not going to be cheap. But all the episodes (as well as hopefully some extras and stand alone sketches) will appear for free online."

Over 3,500 people have now backed the project, meeting the £100,000 target with two days still to go. A 'stretch goal' has now been announced, whereby each video episode will be extended to 45 minutes in length if a new target of £120,000 is met.

Writing on Twitter last night as the campaign passed its target, Herring said: "Utterly insane. I am starting work on this tomorrow. Your support is a helluva incentive to make something good."

He later added: "Lying in bed trying to sleep when it suddenly properly struck me how ENORMOUS this is. Fucking Hell."

Herring discussed the milestone being reached in much more detail in his daily blog. He wrote: "I knew this was a phenomenal show of support for the work I've been doing over the last eight years and something potentially revolutionary for writers, comedians and podcasters everywhere. Over three and a half thousand of my listeners were prepared to put their money where their ears are and help us to bring them (and everyone else) a comedy show, made independently and completely on my own terms. It means you don't need a huge audience to be able to make something that is hopefully both groundbreaking and that looks good."

He also commented: "Getting the backing and reaching the target might be the highlight of my career thus far."

Although it will primarily now be a video series, it is expected that the original audio podcast will continue in some format too.

Listen to the AIOTM Series 1 to 3 archive

Dates at the Leicester Square Theatre have been booked to film the stage-based segments on Sundays between September 2016 and February 2017. Tickets are now available

Below is the comical sketch that Herring filmed last month to explain the AIOTM Kickstarter campaign:

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