Lee & Herring Interview (unedited version)

Lee & Herring are disgustingly young. At 28, they’ve written two series of Leonard Nimrod’s Inexplicable World, contributed to R4’s On The Hour (which later become BBC2’s The Day Today), and written and starred in four series of Fist of Fun, the latest of which was recently broadcast by BBC2. And now they’ve topped it all by appearing at the Sands Centre, Carlisle. OTR caught up with them backstage:

Is this a short tour. RH:It’s a run up to an Autumn tour, to give us an idea of what size audience to expect after our last TV series. SL: It’s the first tour we’ve done where people might know who we are.

Hecklers throwing them out.

RH: There were a few bits where people recognised stuff from TV. What we were trying to do was take old stuff and do new stuff with it.

SL: You write them at enormous length, perform them at half that length and then they get cut down to two or three minutes on telly. So it’s nice to put all the bits back in and do extended versions of them.

RH: It’s a learning curve. Because we were a little bit shaky at the start, they were expecting us to be very slick but we started very laid back and relaxed.

Another series between this and autumn tour?

RH: We’re doing other things, we’re doing a couple of shows at Edinburgh

SL: Rich is talking to Nick Owen

RH: Nick Owen of Good Morning with Ann and Nick, we’re going to do a show with him, because he’s out of work now.

SL: And he’s writing a sitcom about his experiences as a cave guide in Cheddar

RH: It’s called Sex Amongst the Stalagmites. We’re busy. So we won’t be doing another Fist of Fun before the autumn tour.

SL: We’re going to see the Sex Pistols reunion at Finsbury Park as well.

RH: Yeah, we’re all going to see it.

Kevin: My house is near to Finsbury Park

RH: We’ve been very busy so there’s not been much time to write new stuff, I don’t know if that’s what people are expecting.

That guy at the beginning was straight in, wasn’t he?

RH: yeah, we’re okay at dealing with heckling, no one ever does it any more, especially at theatres.

Do you try out stuff on your own?

SL: Rich does stuff on his won and we write stuff for him and the ridiculous sound of his three voices but then he does a play in Edinburgh every year. And I do my stand up shows. You tend to find that you write something on your own and the other person always makes it better anyway.

RH: It’s weird we’re finding increasingly we’re starting to write each others stuff, even with the characters we do.

SL: You’ve more of an idea of what the other person’s like, you know them in a way they don’t even know themselves. We’d like to say that the things we write for ourselves are based on us but things we write for Kev in no way reflect his personality.

RH: Just the Rod Hull one.

Obvious question, how did you start off?

SL: We met when we were students but we’d both done things at school and then we met on the stand up circuit and then we started doing radio together.

RH: We wrote Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World for R4 and then I think because R4 were a bit bamboozled by what we were doing, so we did it for R1. We were travelling round the country and somehow Kev managed to wheedle his way in and we can’t get rid of him now.

RH: We’ve told how we met so many times we’ll probably start lying about it.

SL: We met in a brothel in Amsterdam

RH: You can’t say that in a local paper

RH: : No we met at college and we’d done the Comedy Club then started doing the comedy circuit but never did the same place at the same time, because one of us had exams or something, but then we got together because we sort of disliked what everyone else was doing and wanted to try other stuff. And then we met Pete and then Kev, you find you just bump into people. Things like the Rod Hull character come out by accident. We’d done a couple of jokes about him on the radio and we thought we’d do him as a vox pop in this thing and Kev had a sore throat and just shrieked this thing and we all rolled around the floor, so we got him in every week on the radio show and people started ringing in saying “I’m Rod Hull, not him” and it took off from there. The really good things happen by accident, you can’t sit down and say, let’s write a character about a man who thinks he’s Rod Hull but really he isn’t

Kev: I am don’t be stupid.

RH: Two thirds of the way through we relaxed into it. I think we were worried we were a bit under-rehearsed.

Do you ad-lib based o the audience

RH: You need to feel the audience are with you but it’s good fun really, it stops it being boring for us. The nicest points for the audience are when we are making each other laugh. The fact that you’ve let the artifice fall doesn’t seem to matter with our stuff.

Kev: I’ve watched them a lot on tour and quite often in the middle of a routine they’ve done a lot on tour they go off at a tangent and you get a whole routine out of it. And usually really good stuff comes out of what happens on the night.

RH: It’s usually when you’ve relaxed. It’s hard to do it on the first night of the tour.

SL: By the end of the last tour we were completely off the script. We’d use the script as a starting point and then work it around.

RH: When we’re rolling I think you can’t really tell what we’ve scripted and what we haven’t. It’s quite good fun to try a line and watch Stew’s face. Often you do things that make you laugh on the bus while you’re on tour. That’s quite pleasurable for us and I think the audience can tell.

The audience tonight, half of them seemed to know you from TV, the other half not.

SL: The acid test of that was every week on telly we’d start with a really contrived topical joke, the sort of thing you’d find on Weekending, and when he was doing that tonight, as a piss take, a bloke in the audience thought it was real, “I paid ten pounds for this”.

RH: I think sometimes you get a heckler who’s really horribly personal and you meet them afterwards and they say how much they like you. They’ve seen the relationship on TV and think, well Stew always slags him off so he won’t be upset by me slagging him off. That slightly bowls you over a bit.

SL: You were crying inside.

RH: I was.

You seem very confident on stage

RH: We weren’t tonight. I don’t ever really get nervous

SL: I’d get much more nervous about meeting somebody I didn’t know, than having to go up on stage. Tonight was a bit nerve wracking because it was the start of the new tour.

You do a lot of anti-Somerset jokes, despite both coming from there — for example, the tour leaflet says: ‘Warning - electric light will be used to illuminate this show. The management cannot accept responsibility for any Somerset people who are startled by their flashing or who become entraped in their glare.’ Do you ever get any resentment from the West Country?

SL: We went to Glastonbury last year , to the festival, and after this Somerset Hell’s Angel, about twenty stone, drunk from cider, saw us and came up to me and went, ‘You bastard, stop taking the piss out of Somerset,’ he started shaking me around and stuff and then he went, ‘A ha ha had you going there, really frightened you there.’

RH: Nice thing about Somerset, which isn’t true of many minority groups, is that they’ve got a sense of their own funniness and it’s water off a duck’s back. It comes down to what I’m trying to get at in the sitcom, people in the city think that people in the country are stupid but people in the country know that people in the city are stupid because they live in the city. I quite enjoy the stereotyped thing. I’d love to do a gig in Somerset.

RH: We’ve done mainly student venues up to now but we want to do theatres this time round. It’s going to be interesting.

SL: For the autumn we can do more set pieces for theatre.

RH: It’s a bit weird this week, I can’t imagine after seven days we’ll be ultra confident and can just leave the script. In the last tour there was 50% of the material which hopefully people didn’t realise wasn’t the script because we’d left it behind.

Are you consciously trying to appeal to a young audience?

SL: Not consciously no, we just do what we think is funny.

RH: It takes longer for older people to see new stuff as good. If the people who like us now grow up with us and carry on liking us it’s going to be interesting

SL: I think Reeves and Mortimer have got lots more references to popular culture than we have, to neighbours and things. But they’re like stupid sentences that go round in circles.

RH: A lot of 28 year olds like the references they understand which I’m sure goes over the head of the teenage audience. We try not to do too many pop references. And on tv, the second series was deliberately geared not to look like a youth programme. Our producer at the BBC felt it was alienating older people by looking like a youth programme. I don’t think it was and I’d hope the contents were enjoyable for anyone.

In the last series you had all those bits flashing up on video.

SL: We didn’t do so many of them this time. One the BBC thought it looked too young and flashy, secondly we couldn’t afford it because the budget was cut and thirdly the first tv series we made the shows with like a ten day gap before transmission but last series we made them it was a day, so we didn’t have time to do a lot of that sort of stuff. Also in the first series, no one had done that before, but by the time we came to do the second lots of people had done it, adverts and so on. In the last series we had time to watch the edit and think we’ll make a comment on that but in this series we were editing the first half as the second went out.

RH: So we didn’t have time to do much of it. Lots of people wrote in and said we can't see the stuff, our videos aren’t good enough, so part of the enjoyment was that it was annoying people and they weren’t really worth reading anyway.

RH: And you wreck your video pause button. On the last listing we put is your video machine broken as a result of videoing these captions, well why not take it to the Lee and Herring Video Repair Shop in Balham High Street where Rich and Stew may be working for the rest of their lives. It’s nice that people spot it.

SL: In one sketch, the BBC made us bleep out a word, which really annoyed me because in a less well-written drama they’d have allowed someone to say it. So we put up a caption saying that the F word has been censored here, if you would like a picture of Stew saying it, please write in. We got 208 requests.

RH: And it was up so quick you’d need an excellent video to catch it. If you can give people an extra level, there is a certain amount of clever comedy in it but we don’t push it like John Sessions.

SL: There’s loads of arcane bits of poetry in Simon Quinlank but it’s there for people who find it.

RH: It’s nice to give levels. We always sign autographs and we always write back to the fans.

SL: The thing about touring is it’s probably better financially for us to stay in a room in London and write articles for magazines and things but you’d never develop any new stuff

RH: And it’s fun

SL: When we went off for two months last year we got into the swing of it and had fun

SL: I don’t think we’ll do that in a week

RH: That’s why we’re going off to have fun in a minute. Not that we’re not having fun now. Touring’s weird, when you do it and look back at it you think that was fun but when you’re doing it and having to eat pizza every night and chips every meal.

SL: You get so sick of those service station meals. It’s so hard in this country to get fast food. We went to the states in the autumn and drove for a month and it was so easy to get good food.

RH: I think Stew and me are writers ultimately and we’re happy to perform but I don’t see that as a career decision

SL: We’ll both get to a point where we can’t do the things we’ve written and it’ll be better to get someone else to do it

RH: We can always write things we can do and it’s fun writing. It’d be interesting to write films. It’s like a job to fall back on. We can always do interviews and stuff.

SL: I nearly interviewed Spike Milligan. I went to his house but his wife came out and said he’s gone mad today, he can’t do an interview, so I was shown through the house, out of the back door and had to go home again.

RH: Just say they’re horrible blokes.

22 May 1996