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Into London today, with my first test of walking to the station to take the train. That all worked out well and I got taken directly to Blackfriars, just a ten minute walk from the studio I was recording in. I could see Tower Bridge from the platform and felt like a tourist. The Shard was partially in cloud. I nearly took photos.
I was doing a radio record with Dara O Briain and Isy Suttie. What a delight. We goofed around for an hour, talking around the subject of (in part) yoghurt (I don't know why they asked me to do this show - I did a whole hour long routine about how I am not obsessed with the stuff), but the conversation sprawled and went at tangents, none of which was prepared, but all of which was entertaining. They were funny, I was funny, none of us having to work for it. What a joy. When you're with people you like and trust and know will pick up the ball if you fumble it, comedy can be effortless.
The producer had left a copy of the programme for Someone Likes Yoghurt on my desk. It was an important show for me as it was first proper foray into pure stand up in a 90+ minute format and it was quite an experimental and risk taking show, playing around with being pedantic and irritating, but with some good flights of fancy. When I came to do all my shows again in 2015 at the Leicester Square Theatre it was perhaps my least favourite show, but only because it was so relentless in its desire to batter the audience and the stuff about applying for Pope went on way too long. It was though the show of mine that sold the most DVD and download copies, so I think the fans liked it. And it set me on the road to the stand up shows that would follow that were usually less deliberately annoying.
But my main memory of it and the one I shared with Dara and Isy is that it won the Daily Telegraph Worst Comedy Experience of 2005. I didn't blog about that at the time, just briefly mentioning it in a subsequent blog,
http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/28/12/2005/index.html, but at the time it was quite a blow.
I was at home in Cheddar, either just before or just after Christmas and presumably saw a link to the Daily Telegraph comedy round up of the year on Chortle and clicked the link. I had not had a spectacular 2005- I'd enjoyed the Edinburgh run (though there had been one performance that had gone down to near silence and I suspect the Telegraph were in that day) - but I was sure my own name would not feature in a best of. It never usually did even if i'd done something that had gone really well. I was at a sensitive time in my career, where I had spent a year or two trying to get back into solo stand up, something I had not enjoyed doing in the early 90s and I thought I had done a good job of being inventive and interesting with the format. I had sometimes managed to make a routine about not caring about yoghurt last 60 minutes and had also done these kind of routines in regular comedy clubs in front of audiences who did not know me, and usually make them laugh.
Anyway, it had been a shock to see, amongst the accolades , that the journalist had chosen to highlight the worst thing he'd seen in comedy that year - and remember in 2005 you could hae watched the likes of Tittybangbang and Balls of Steel- but instead the reviewer (who I don't think had mentioned the show at the time) waited five months to let the readers of the Telegraph know that Someone Likes Yoghurt was not only the worst thing he'd seen, but also made him question if Richard Herring had ever been funny.
It seemed unnecessarily cruel. Not only was I trying to reinvent myself and get used to performing alone and feeling a bit insecure about where my career might be going, my ex comedy partner was already being feted as the best stand up of his generation. Even had the journalist been at the one silent performance, surely as a reviewer he would have seen that I was at least attempting something daring and different, but no.
It didn't entirely ruin my Christmas but it wasn't a great thing to happen with so little warning and the timing might well have caused me to think everything was over and chuck the whole thing in.
Within a few days I had weathered the storm and realised that being the worst comedy according to the Daily Telegraph might not be the worst thing. Also you have to marvel at the fact that I had created a show, that was supposed to be at least a little bit irritating (if funny as well) that had so got under a journalist's skin that he was still talking about it five months later. I couldn't really count it as a success, but it didn't feel like such a massive failure.
Nonetheless it was a very nasty thing to write and had I been a rung or two lower on the ladder of self-worth it might have prompted me to give up or possibly something worse. I can still feel the impact and loneliness of the moment. It's only one person's opinion and perhaps it came with some agenda (often people react like this if your comedy has hit a nerve and maybe the reviewer was a Catholic or had at some point sexually molested a monkey- another routine in the show- or bathed in yoghurt and had felt kink-shamed).
I didn't give up comedy or living, but it is probably the abiding memory associated with that show.
It probably happens to everyone at some point (another reviewer called my ITV comedy drama "You Can Choose Your Friends" something like the worst thing that had ever been on TV, which again ignored Tittybangbang and Balls of Steel (also by me making these jokes I may be causing the same trauma to the creators of those terrible shows, so I can't really complain). I know that in 1999 Stewart Lee, who had been doing his amazing stand up shows over the previous few years and which had done well, but not got the acclaim that would soon come to him, got a review that said something like "When is Stewart Lee going to finally fuck off and stop doing the Fringe?" I don't think it's a coincidence that he didn't do a stand up show at the Fringe for a few years after that - though when he returned, well the rest if comedy history.
Dara recalled sitting in the back of a cab with Stew at some point in the early Noughties, both feeling things were over for them. So these things happen and don't have much effect, though the wounds still throb decades on.
Was I ever funny? I question this enough myself without journalistic intervention and nothing anyone can say about me is as mean or frightening or bleak as the voice in my head that sometimes seems to want to harm me physically as well as mentally.
But yes, objectively, I have been funny sometimes. And if I haven't then even my career up to 2005 would have been a remarkable achievement - even more so now I've kept going for another 20 years.
I was funny today, at least. Will let you know when the episode is out!
