Richard Herring

Richard Herring: On the offensive

Richard Herring grew a Hitler-style moustache for his last stand-up show. When it comes to comedy, everything is fair game, he tells Simon Hardeman.

Richard Herring: Young, gifted and ... 40?

Comedian Richard Herring is unmarried, addicted to Nintendo and devoid of practical skills. When his parents were the same age, they seemed so much more, well, grown up.

Comedy Podcasts: A smile costs nothing

An article about comedy podcasts which includes interviews with Andrew Collins, Richard Herring, Robert Llewellyn and Andy Zaltzman.

Here's a tinsel-brandishing variety show for the rationally minded. Recorded at the Hammersmith Apollo in London before Christmas - or should that be Yule? - it features a motley collection of performers. Atheist-in-chief Richard Dawkins leads the cast which includes physicist Brian Cox, Ben 'Bad Science' Goldacre, writer Simon Singh, musician Robyn Hitchcock and comics Richard Herring, Mark Steel, Shappi Khorsandi, Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden.

Currently, the Wednesday night TV schedule is the most boring in the UK, unless you watch Spooks. I've never been so grateful to see pop music panel show Never Mind The Buzzocks (BBC2, 10pm) as I was yesterday evening, with Frankie Boyle as the week's guest host. Is it just me, or has the guest-host format worked wonders for Buzzcocks? I was expecting Have I Got News For You-style tedium (where they insist on making everything look amateur and distracting by keeping in outtakes of the host fluffing their lines, etc), but Buzzcocks has avoided all that redundant inanity.

It helps that Buzzcocks can afford to be uncontrolled and slightly meandering under the guiding hand of guests (with various levels of presenting skill), because that's always been part of its makeup, whereas HIGNFY was a razor-sharp satirical quiz in Angus Deayton's day, but has since devolved into a light entertainment panel show. Anyway, I thought Frankie Boyle did a surprisingly good job of keeping Buzzcocks focused (or was it good editing?) and he came across as more human than the acerbic quip-machine from Mock The Week. And guest Richard Herring's "career bounce" just goes to show that celebs in danger of being forgotten about should try co-hosting a ribald podcast instead of munch insects in the Australian jungle.

Warming Up

Today I fulfilled one of my professional ambitions. In fact I think I can now die happy. I was on Radio 4's "Just A Minute".

The universal themes of sex, death and, er, middle-class parents who tut disapprovingly, run through the adolecent diaries of Richard Herring. He is the first brave soul to take part in this new series in which, for the schadenfeude of a delighted studio audience, comedians read from the diaries they kept as teens. I'm presuming a degree of self-censorship, but still Herring revels in mocking his teenage self's more embarrasing, pompous and even sociopathic tendencies. Teen angst has rarely been this funny.

Stewart's wonderfully witty weekly barrage against the stupidities of modern life has left us asking one question - why has it taken 10 years for a TV channel to recognise his formidable talent? And, while we're at it, why isn't his former double-act partner, Richard Herring, on the telly screen, either? Regardless, political correctness - or what people assume to be political correctness - is on Stewart's radar tonight. Incoming!

A welcome return to the small screen for Richard Herring's taller, (marginally) slimmer and deadpan former partner. Mixing standup comedy about a particular subject - in this case, the phenomenon of 'toilet books' - interspersed with relevant sketches, this showed Lee at his witty, caustic best. We'll definitely be tuning in again.

Stewart Lee, stand-up comic par excellence and TV partner of Richard Herring, returns to prime-time television with this six-part series of sketches and routines, each week taking a new theme. His first is the "toilet book", by which he means the kind of publication one might keep in a bathroom, rather than a Bathstore catalogue. "For some reason," says Lee, "someone, somewhere, thought history, fiction, poetry and the like weren't enough any more, and so they invented celebrity hardbacks, tragic lives and Dan Brown." That gives Lee an excuse to examine works by Asher D and Paddy McGinty, and to wonder what would happen if Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown got a job where he had to break bad news - melodramatic doesn't exactly cover it. Indeed, Lee's strength often comes from a peculiar sense of tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless righteous anger about his subjects: "What does it say about our culture that the word 'toilet' can be appended to the word 'book'?" he asks. "Toilet seat, yes. Toilet paper, yes. Toilet duck - you can even have toilet duck. But toilet book - surely not?" It's hard not to agree. Simon Munnery is among Lee's impressive line-up of co-stars, while comedian Peter Serafinowicz provides the voice-over.