Richard Herring

Pod Deco

Brian Logan

Tuesday August 10, 2004

The Guardian

These days, comedians like a challenge. They're less likely to tell you jokes than to relate their international search for namesakes or how they traversed the English Channel in a bath. Richard Herring set himself The Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace when he moved into a street with a mythical name.

Herring is such a consummate comic, he almost conceals this show's fatal flaw - which is that it's really rather trivial. He presents his tasks as projections of his mid-life crisis. In fact, they're just mild challenges tenuously related to those of Hercules. He runs a marathon. He tries to steal Germaine Greer's bra. He overcomes last-minute terror to parachute from a plane. "I'm English, so I'd rather career to my death than cause a socially awkward situation."

However, he needs more than his allotted hour to recount them. The most intriguing one, which saw him date 50 women on 50 consecutive evenings, could justify a whole show. Here, it gets five minutes. But Herring is never less than amusing - and on the unheroic nature of the original Hercules's achievement, he's very funny indeed.

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