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My son, Ernest Herring is my clone. He's really into history and this morning we were awake before everyone else and watched a documentary about Pompeii that he'd found. What a delight for me to have a tiny version of myself to do things I like with. Poor Ernie. I know everything that's coming up for him and it's not going to be easy. You're so much like me. I'm sorry.
It's a big relief to not be spending July preparing for Edinburgh and then August doing Edinburgh. I have got a show without having done the Fringe and it's less hassle to drive ridiculous distances round the country than to do it 25 times in one place.
But I still like to keep my oar in via the podcasts and again it saves a shit load of money and effort to do them all beforehand. Quite a few of my tour guests are doing the Fringe and we managed to fill up 8 of the 12 slots with those (which also helps us get through the ridiculous back log that the tour has given us!).
So today I remotely recorded two interviews for Edinburgh with two of my favourite online content providers (who thankfully are also live performers) Nerine Skinner and Stevie Martin. I'd never spoken to Nerine before but love her Liz Truss impression and
excellent Britain's Got Talent appearance with the Dots (the thing I like best about this, that I hadn't noticed before, is how they all stay in character during the judging) but she's very funny and modest as herself as well. And I love the double-edged sword of discovering you can do a good impression of a politician who'd become PM and the politician being so shit that they only last a month and a bit. Janet Brown got years out of Thatcher, Jeanette Charles almost a life time out of the Queen, but Nerine got less than 50 days. Though there's still a bit of life left in the character and luckily she has many more strings to her bow.
I love Stevie Martin and enjoyed the work we did together online during lockdown and
in this short film afterwards and it was nice to see we had a good comedic chemistry still as we shared too much about Ring doorbells and mooning. She's a fantastic improviser, actor and comedian and I am absolutely certain she'll be a huge star very soon. Hopefully I can do more stuff with her before she is too famous.
These podcasts will be out during August. Do go and see their shows if you're rich enough to visit the Fringe.
