Some people write for a shot at immortality; their name will be known in thousands of years time; their work still read and "enjoyed" by the people of the future. This isn't why I do it. Comedy is usually a fairly current medium and loses something down the years. And generally, unless you've written some serious plays as well or you're producing some kind of zeitgeist satire (not guilty of either at the moment) then comedy is something essentially throw-away rubbish that is best forgotten.
I am not interested in being recognised in the future in any case - what's the point? I won't be around to enjoy the acclaim - I wouldn't mind being recognised a bit in my own life time (though that seems just as unlikely), possibly because I am too mediocre.
In a sense it's quite a nice position to be in. People consistently give me work and pay me to do it, but nobody makes too much of a fuss about it. I can walk down the street without being mobbed (especially if I am in Banbury). Maybe about once a month someone asks me if I want the Moon on a stick (no, I never did.It was Stewart that wanted that, you idiots) or thinks that I might be Dom Joly or the stupid one from Father Ted. Generally the people who work out who I am really like my stuff and say nice things about me and then go away quite quickly. It's probably for the best. Though it would be nice if more people came to my shows or bought my book, and eventually anonymity will lead to no-one booking you to perform in their theatres or paying you to write about genitalia. It's a tricky balancing act. At the moment I've still got enough plates weakly spinning to carry on. And am mainly happy with that.
It strikes me though, that if you want to go down in posterity as a great writer the most important thing is for your work to survive. How many classic books and plays and poems have failed to reach us in the 21st Century simply because of paper decaying or libraries burning or civilisations falling?
One route to survival is, of course, to write something so brilliant or important that people make lots of copies of it, and that future generations make copies of these copies and then Kenneth Branagh makes a film of it with himself in the lead.
But writing something good or important is difficult (as my squirrel shit story from yesterday demonstrates). Surely in the Pop Idol world we live in there is an easier way to become an immortal writer.
Of course there is.
As an experienced archaeologist I know that the discovery of any kind of written material from the past is treated with the utmost reverence. It can be fragments of mundane letters written by sentries on Hadrian's Wall, banker's wax tablets in Pompeii or ancient drawings on the surface of Uluru (Ayer's Rock to you, Hitler).
Bascially any complete writing from an ancient civilisation would be regarded as a classic, regardless of its actual quality. Especially if it was the only example of literature from that particular era.
So in order to become the most important writer of my generation all I have to do is ensure that my work will last longer than anyone else's.
This isn't going to happen on merit. I accept this. So what I propose to do is to print up a complete copy of Warming Up, laminate it, put it in a polythene bag, freeze dry it or create a vaccuum in it or something (I don't know how it works, but basically make sure it will never perish using some kind of technology) and then bury it in a safe place where it won't be discovered for maybe 100,000 years.
By this point, you can be sure, the civilisation we know and love today will have fallen and been replaced many times over; everything we hold dear and all the writers we venerate will have passed into oblivion; the United Kingdom will be at most a name that is whispered on the wind, perhaps spoken of as we speak of Atlantis today. The human race may be wiped out all together. Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Chaucer and all those other genuinely talented cunts will be forgotten.
Then an alien archaeologist (I'm guessing he will look a bit like a slug, but that's pure conjecture) will find my manuscript in its hiding place. The aliens will struggle for years to translate the strange language it is written in, but finally will succeed and I, Richard Herring, will be acknowledged as the greatest writer that the human race ever produced (though they will still judge the squirrel shit entry as being poor at best).
Immortality isn't about who writes the best, but who has the best hiding place for their freeze-dried, laminated musings.
Wouldn't it be tragic if my preservation techniques didn't quite work and that last sentence was all the remained of human literature?
