Richard Herring

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 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.

Stewart Lee on his Comedy Vehicle

The man behind Fist of Fun (with Richard Herring) and Jerry Springer - The Opera is back on screen in his own 'Comedy Vehicle'. He talks to The Times.

Taking a stand pays off for Stewart Lee

Stewart Lee has had something of a tumultuous relationship with television. Widely regarded as one of this country's riskiest and most insightful stand-up comedians, the last time Lee fronted a TV show of any kind was ten years ago, when he appeared with Richard Herring in BBC2 show This Morning With Richard Not Judy.

Richard Herring on Goodnight Sweetheart

A detailed, fun analysis of the series by comedian Richard Herring. There is no consistency to the series and at times one wonders whether the writers of one episode are even aware of what has happened in previous ones.

Theoretical comedy it may be; but Lee and Herring are no less in the thrall of the scatalogical than many of their less crafty counterparts. Another of their sophisticated satires, on relativism, has it that the businessman in his suit and tie is just as "sick" as the man who masturbates over incinerating cows.