Collings and Herrin podcast 135 took place this evening on the massive stage of the Bloomsbury theatre in front of 200 or so excited and occasionally mentally unbalanced fans. It's incredible to think that this ridiculous enterprise has got to this stage in less than three years. Although there were a few Collings and Herrin virgins there, including Simon, the Youth Worker who was not only foolish enough to sit on the front row, but to tell the podcast Richard Herring that he was a Youth Worker, but mainly it was a room of strange and unusual people united in their affection for two bumbling middle-aged men who can't do cryptic crosswords and one of whom wonders whether motorways should be shut at night if they are unlit. The laughs and gags were pretty constant and as always I was surprised and impressed with our ability to entertain an audience for over an hour with no script and little idea of what we're going to talk about. The lucky golden ticket holders also were lucky to see 20 minutes of my stand up and unlucky enough to see 20 minutes of Andrew Collings' stand up (I commented after he'd left the stage that people were impressed by him in the same way as you'd be impressed by a tiny child singing a song. They might not be very good but you would applaud them for even trying). There was also an exclusive Q&A section at the end, where our strange fans posed some strange questions, like whether my tiny hands made fisting easier (for the recipient, I imagine). This took the second half up to an impressive 80 or so minutes and served as a quite effective wind down period, sort of a positive anti-climax, which meant I left the stage feeling like we hadn't even done a gig. But maybe that was also down to the fact that the meat of the show is just two colleagues (we have never been friends) chatting about stuff as they fancy. Collings in the live situation again raised his game and produced three or four of the best one-liners of the night, but also got two bouts of the now traditional booing from the crowd, the first time for daring to question whether there had been any romances amongst the Chilean miners trapped down that mine. Perhaps this one was undeserved, as there is no reason why miners should not also be homosexual. And also even heterosexual men will seek any port in a storm, even if they already find themselves trapped in a tiny space, they will still seek out an even smaller cavity to push themselves into. Who knows?
I hope we can do more of these and if we could guarantee that more people would come we could possibly make them a regular occurrence. I don't think we would give up on the attic ones completely, but the live ones, when they work, have a lovely feel to them, make us raise our comedic game a little and give us (well me) the opportunity to be inappropriate towards our audience. Plus, we make some money from them, which is a welcome extra.
By a neat coincidence tonight, a woman I spoke to on the front row had just sent me a friend request on Facebook, which not only gave me a chance to explain that that page is only for people I know, but also to establish that I didn't know the woman (I hadn't been sure when the request had come in) and to ignore her friend request in front of her face as I was speaking to her. I doubt this happens very often and probably has never happened on stage in front of 200 witnesses. It was a special moment that could only have come about in a ramshackle show like this.
Another social media based future shock event was that people were also able to heckle us via Twitter. @doktorG had commented in the interval "Slightly surprised to see that @herring1967 and @collingsa both seem to have over sized heads in real life. Like giant 40 something toddlers." When I read this out it got such a big laugh that I can only presume the observation is true. It was the laughter of recognition.
So maybe at some point (though not for a while thanks to AIOTM and touring duties) we will be able to put on a semi-regular night at the wonderful Bloomsbury theatre. It at least gives us a gauge of how popular we are and when we should stop doing these. For the moment you will have to content yourselves with the podcasts we are doing on the road in the next month or so.
The Old Vic Studio in Bristol on 27th October (50 extra tickets just released, so buy now to avoid disappointment) and
Cardiff Masonic Hall on 3rd November (we will also be recording four more exclusive podcasts that day which will be released on GFS, hopefully in time for Christmas).
And book now for the last 3 AIOTMs for a while, 11th October and 1st November
at the Bloomsbury and 18th October at
The Leicester Square Theatre.
