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It was my second appearance on the bizarre and strangely hypnotic Sunday morning TV show Sunday Brunch today. I was still ill and under the weather and I don’t know if I was quite in the right mood, but I don’t think I really shone on it. There was a great atmosphere amongst the guests, an unlikely gathering of Olly Murs, Kathryn Jenkins, Jason Manford and myself. It’s not exactly my natural habitat but sometimes I can make something like this work by being sardonic or incredulous, but my brain wasn’t really firing. Jason was much more at home and did a great job, mocking the show for previewing a piece about making shoes by showing the guest involved hammering nails, as if we couldn’t have imagined what that was going to be without the illustration. Why did they then not have the marmalade expert eating a big spoon off marmalade? How would anyone understand what was happening?
Jason had been up until 4am after travelling back from a gig on the Isle of Wight and being delayed by a motorway closure, but he managed to turn it on for the cameras much better than I did. He also rescued quite a moribund item about drinking chocolate that Kathryn Jenkins and me were doing by gatecrashing it and swilling down all the half drunk glasses of (unpleasantly cold) hot chocolate. It was easy to see why his DVD will be near the top of the Christmas charts and sell tens of thousands of copies whilst mine will have a somewhat more niche audience. Some comedy fans are snobbish about the more mainstream acts, but they shouldn’t be. There are very few successful comics who aren’t really good at what they do and it’s extremely hard to create populist material. Jason is a really fabulous comedian and on today’s show I was less amusing than Olly Murs and feeling a bit like I had won a competition to be on the show. Maybe my whole career is a bit like that. I can’t imagine my appearance sold many tickets for the gigs (that we scarcely mentioned). I know it didn’t sell any DVDs because we only sell those from one place and I can see the sales and there was nothing resembling a spike.
I actually had a lot of fun on the show. I felt like I was still asleep and watching Tim Lovejoy and Simon Rimmer dressed up in aprons and making shoes was truly surreal, as was seeing Olly Murs incredulous face when he got to drink some disgusting marmalade cider. How can I compete with that? What joke would be funnier than this? My comments mainly seemed to misfire or be mistimed or be slightly inappropriate. My latest joke about becoming a dad, “typical isn’t it, the first time I have sex I get someone pregnant†was maybe too racy for this show and the hosts just pretended I hadn’t said anything and my story about training next to Prince Harry, which usually gets some laughs was too complicated for the tiny amount of time I had to tell it and was derailed when I realised I probably couldn’t talk about killing him. But saying I could have slapped him was still too much. Another day I might have coped better and made a virtue out of this being an inappropriate arena for my stuff, but today I couldn’t find the right groove.
Still I got to eat a tequila cake and to claim that I was going to sell Kathryn Jenkins’ half eaten one on ebay and got screen grabbed alongside Manford with a terrific thousand yard stare (I was actually enjoying myself but it was hard to keep up the energy for 3 hours, especially when we didn’t realise we were on camera).
My favourite moment came right at the end, after the show, when Olly Murrs said “it was nice to meet you†to Kathryn Jenkins. “You’ve met me loads of times,†Kathryn replied. Olly seemed a bit flustered as if he was trying to recall when this would have been, pretending he remembered something. Kathryn revealed that they had been on a night out together with some friends. She wasn’t too annoyed, but it was funny to see. I said to Jason, “Blimey if you’d think that one of these two was going to forget meeting the other one, it would be the other way round.†I would certainly remember it if I’d spent a night hanging around with Kathryn Jenkins. In fact I would talk about it every day to everyone I saw. I am never going to forget just holding up a small bit of cake that had some of her saliva on it.
I was more at home this evening compering the Leicester Square Theatre New Act of the Year Competition. So at home in fact that I said that I thought the theatre should be renamed “Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre†and maybe it will be when I am dead. There were 14 new acts vying for the title this year and the standard was unbelievably high - certainly the best new act competition line up that I have ever seen. I felt both excited and terrified about this. I love the fact that a new generation of comedians is emerging, but am aware that that pushes me further out into the margins and I’m close enough to the edge of the margins already. But mainly I like to laugh and was glad that so many of these (mainly) youngsters achieved that. The winner Joshua Ross packed a lot of laughs into his five minutes and is definitely one to watch out for, but this was true of all of the acts. As much as it’s scary for older comedians to have so many hungry and talented newcomers, it’s actually more scary for them. I don’t know how you manage to breakthrough in such a competitive environment. There are great comics who don’t get the credit they deserve in every generation (though they usually at least find their niche), but the competition nowadays will mean that surely some great comics don’t get their lucky break.
I don’t think I’d stand a chance.
An extra treat on the secret free channel for badge subscribers this week. An audio of my recent q and a session at Falmouth University. To get access to this and other exclusive extras please donate a pound (or more) a month here.
