Warming Up

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Very sad to have lost the great Jimmy Cricket. I met him a couple of times and know his daughter and son-in-law very well and he was the loveliest of men.

I saw him perform in Bristol in 2019 and was impressed not only by his act but with his continued love of the job. He had played huge venues in his career, but it didn't matter to him that this was a modest room with some empty seats. He just performed the shit out of show. I think that's the mark of a true comedian. It doesn't matter who you are performing to, all that matters is you're performing.

Others get tired of it or cynical or resentful or worried about where their career is going (guilty on all counts) but not Jimmy.

Or listen here.

The curse of RHLSTP is picking off some victims this year. My plan is to outlive every one of my guests. Only when they are all in the ground can I find my final rest. So every one that dies brings me one step closer. I am interviewing a lot of young people at the Fringe though, so it looks like I've got a while to go yet.

There seems to be both a curse of RHLSTP and a curse of being called Richard Herring. This is not good news.

I can't quite believe that I am going to Edinburgh tomorrow, but more upsetting was the realisation that it's 39 years since the first one. I dug out this old leaflet to put up on social media, detailing our fairly desperate attempt to get people in to see our show.

We were doing a lunchtime sketch show for one week only in the same venue as the Oxford Revue St Mary's Hall (don't look for it, it's offices now) but it was a large room and we were getting maybe six people in per show.

I remember that we really struggled to come up with a name for the show. We were called the Seven Raymonds as a light parody of the Two Ronnies (it's more important that you find performers with the same name than they have any talent). Also there were only six of us. And none of us were really called Raymond. The laughs never stopped.

In hindsight we didn't really need another name for the show, but we spent hours workshopping it before landing on "The Potassium Permanganate Experience" which again, would have been impenetrable to anyone looking through the Fringe programme. I found Potassium Permanganate a funny combination of words and had used it as the punchline to a Catchphrase sketch that we never even performed (we had a rule that we wouldn't do TV parodies or celebrity impressions so I don't know why I even wrote that, but the joke was the image was a toad in a hole and no one could get it. The laughs never stopped. Even when we didn't perform the sketch.)

KMnO4 is the chemical symbol for PP and I think we thought that sounded like a comedy show - like That Was The Week That Was became TW3 - but obviously it just obfuscated who we were and what we did even more than the already insane name of the troupe and the show.

We were up in Edinburgh for a month before the Fringe to rehearse (imagine being able to afford to do that now) and at some point came up with the idea of trying to get our show banned so that people would buy tickets. Or at least make people think we were trying to get banned. Or maybe make people think that we were pretending to get banned when it was quite clear we weren't. Whatever, we just wanted something to make us stand out on the Royal Mile.

So we printed up leaflets asking people NOT to see our show (the most successful advertising campaign ever - who knows how many people we put off?!) and then went out with Mike Cosgrave in a cage, supposedly on hunger strike, but regularly sneaking a bite of a sandwich, and gave out these leaflets.

Ah happy days.

On our last day we found a way to get more people in, which instead of giving out leaflets, we looked for couples and gave them one free ticket, in the hope that they would buy another one. It worked better than the leaflets and we had 20+ in for our last show.

We had some funny sketches and some future TV stars in the cast. And it was a better show than either of the Oxford Revues that Lee and Herring were involved with.

I was 20. I've lived nearly two more lifetimes (up to that point) since then. How is it possible that I am this old? That this was so long ago? It makes no sense. My memories of that year are sharper than almost any of the Fringes that followed (and not just because of what Stew did to me with that ventriloquist dummy).

Anyway DO NOT GO TO SEE RHLSTP at Stand 3. 

Oh you aren't going to.