It was camera rehearsal day for my first TV show since 1999. Yes, I am back! This is it! I need this!
All right so it's "only" a poker channel and it's just me interviewing some C-list celebrities, but it's my door back into TV, which according to Stewart Lee at least is all that I want from my life.
In fact I do really like this idea and I am hoping that I can carve myself a career in poker broadcasting, which should at least help pay for the massive losses I make at the poker table. I am possibly the funniest person in Britain who also knows enough about poker to talk about it and look knowledgeable. Oh, apart from Norman "
No Moustache" Pace who is a guest on show 2. Maybe we could form a poker based double act of the two less funny blokes from defunct double acts. I will ask him, but if we do then he'll have to grow the moustache, because I am NOT doing that.
Also it should help with my book because along with brilliant celebrities like Nasty Nick and Grub Smith, I will be talking to some professional players too, who hopefully can tell me where I am going wrong. You never know.
The show (in case you have missed the banners on the site) is called "Heads Up with Richard Herring" and we're recording a couple of episodes over most of the next few Saturdays. Click on that banner and book yourself some tickets if you like, there are still some left.
The studio is tiny and is in a shopping centre in Queensway - the same place they filmed RISE and the Friday Night Project - that's right, look impressed, because those are my two favourite shows after "Balls of Steel". It was a bit weird getting back into the presenting thing, as I haven't done any of this so far this millennium and even though it was just a camera run through I felt a bit nervous and stilted. I had an ear-piece in so the producer could give me notes, but it kept on falling out, so I had to hold it in David Coleman-style.
As it was just the run through none of the actual amazing celebrities were there, so I had to interview the writer on the show (who I found out had written for both the Friday Night Project and Balls of Steel, so you can imagine how impressed I was) and then a bloke who was pretending to be Keith out of the Office (or rather Ewen MacIntosh who plays him). Not just for the fun of it, Ewen is on the first show. It was weird asking a bloke who wasn't Keith out of the Office, what it was like to be in the Office. I don't think the man playing him had done much research. If I was standing in for Keith out of the Office I would at least have grown a beard and eaten a couple of pies beforehand. I hope Ewen is as funny as the bloke pretending to be him. If so we will have an excellent show on our hands!
Once we were up and running I remembered how you are supposed to do this and ended up enjoying myself. I get to do five minutes of poker based stand up at the start of each show and it's going to be a challenge to think of 50 minutes of poker gags, but I am hoping that when we're up and running we'll realise that it's more sensible to do about 3 minutes at the top. I am quite pleased with what I've written so far, though some of it (like Jesus being tempted by the Devilfish) will require a small amount of poker knowledge. But you can ignore the poker and just enjoy me being sarcastic to Roberto from Big Brother instead. I think it's going to be fun.
It is an eclectic mixture of guests and I think at the very least this should lead to some amusing Warming Up entries that are both poker based and
notpoker based, thus pleasing all or none of you. I don't know.
In the mean time - I am back Lee. Have you got your own poker based interview show on satellite TV? Have you? I will answer that for you. No, you haven't. I don't think there can be any doubting which of us is doing the best without the other dragging them down.
