7773/20714
The RHLSTP tour crawls to its denouement. I can't beleive I've done 36 dates and 72 interviews since September. But now there are only four interviews to go.
Tonight in Bedford was the last show with any tickets left - we ended up selling a slightly disappointing 265 of the 727 available tickets. But this Spring the sales have been so strong that I can't complain and 265 people is a lot for a place like Bedford. The tour has been a success! Not least because the podcasts I have recorded have all been good or better. And no one has got drunk and ruined it. Though not everyone has been sober.
The worst selling gigs were
Northampton with 138 sales (32.1% of tickets sold)
London in October with just 143 people turning up to see one of the best interviews I've done - you London idiots (35.2% of tickets sold)
Tunbridge Wells with 193 sold (a terrible 20.3% success rate)
(one of the Norwich nights sold 190 but the other one 219, raising the average to just above TW and the % was 63 and 73)
So depending which metric you use Northampton and Tunbridge Wells were the biggest blips.
But the best selling gigs are
Hull 1279 (may not entirely be down to me)
Dublin 840
Birmingham 748
and there were 16 shows that sold out (or as near as dammit)
Overall ticket sales just over 70% - Over 14150 ticket sales. I am obviously very pleased indeed.
I have done better than I think my stand up tour will do, which probably shows that people view me more as a podcaster than a stand up now (though obviously some of the guests will have boosted sales a bit), but there's still time to enter the competition to see which will be the best and worst sales of the Ball Back tour -
http://richardherring.com/rhlstp
It's not about the sales though. It's about the friends we made along the way and I'd rather be paid in laughter than money. Which is lucky for me.
Tonight's show in the now non-flooded Corn Exchange was a fun one, with Al Murray recounting his school days in this city and the mysterious Olaf Falafel cracking brilliant one liners and talking about his books and Fringe shows. I was amused to hear in my research that Stuart Goldsmith seemed to have taken Olaf at his word when he had said that Olaf Falafel was just a stage name and his real name was Derek Chickpeas. Let's be generous and assume he was joining in with the joke. I quite liked the fact that I had little to no idea what this man's real name was (and there's not much clue online - though Olaf did get a comp for his dad so if I bothered to look it up I could probably find his surname). BUT I don't want to know.
Amazingly the tour has continued to be fun for me and tonight at least the drive home was very short. The days of the two guest shows might be numbered (though obviously I've only ever had one guest a week) as I might have to start making concessions for nearly being a pensioner - What? But I have just about managed to keep going despite not sleeping brilliantly (Ernie woke me up loads last night and I'd gone to bed late after letting the adrenaline of gigging die down).
Thanks to the 14000 of you who have come (a few of you have been to more than one so it might be fewer actual people). It's modest compared to many comedians tours, but it's an incredible average of 372 people a night and even with all the expense of bringing along someone to record it and all the other costs, that's enough to keep my kids in shoes. I have tried to pay for stuff in laughter, but even if you record it, the shops won't take it.
