Back in the news again for the third time in three weeks. Just a casual mention in
an Independent article about Lee Hurst breaking a punter's phone. The relevant bit reads "In 2005, the comedian Richard Herring smashed an audience member's mobile. When the owner went on stage to demand £70 for the phone, Herring quipped: "I'm not giving you £70 for that. It's broken.""
Then the story was picked up (and slightly twisted by
The Daily Mail
From my experience of the last couple of weeks I would suggest that most journalists are not getting out on the streets looking for a story, but just reading other papers and then slightly adapting it. My guess is that the Daily Mail journalist knows no more about the phone smashing story than what they have read in the Independent, yet they editorialise and decide to report the story as if I had just gone mad and started breaking things by writing "Comedian Richard Herring not only smashed an audience member's mobile but capped it all by refusing to pay for the damage with the sarcastic words: 'I'm not giving you £70 for that. It's broken.'"
The original Independent journalist has hardly been pounding the streets looking for stories. I have mentioned the mobile phone incident in a couple of interviews, which presumably they found on file or on the internet and indeed have written about it
on here. In fact given that the original article wrongly says the incident happened in 2005 (which is when I wrote about it) I think they probably found it on the blog (which is apparently the main source for news nowadays - I set the agenda), and the quote they use is on there verbatim.
Lazy, lazy journalists. I actually left a comment on the Daily Mail site, chastising them for using this quote out of context, (so unlike them), but they chose not to put it up.
Then the Guardian got in touch with me asking if I could talk to them about how a comedian controls his emotions (or fails to) on stage. At least this reporter was bothering to interview me, though still, slightly lazily, was only getting in touch because I was mentioned in the original article. I was, at least, able to tell the whole story, but am sure they will lead with the more lurid admissions that I once nearly had a fight with an audience member during a preview of Ra-Ra-Rasputin because he'd been heckling the dancing (and fair enough, he'd turned up at a club expecting stand up and had instead got a slapdash version of a play involving the music of Boney M) and I had thought "What would Rasputin do?" before rushing down into the audience to have a go at him face to face and threaten to fight him. Once there I remembered I wasn't Rasputin and couldn't fight and had better back off a bit. Or the time in 1990 when I was a fledgling open spot and was getting some grief from a guy seated right by the stage, whose head was at about the height of my feet. I tried to get him to shut up by tapping him in the head with my foot, but did it a little bit harder than I meant to. Not so it really hurt him, just so it looked like a bit of a violent over-reaction.
It sounds like Lee Hurst over-reacted, but then everything I have heard so far comes from the newspapers and they haven't been all that fair with my story, so who knows. In any case I can empathise with him about the worry that people are filming your act all the time. What if you have a bad one and it ends up on
on Youtube and 140,000 people see it? Way more people have seen this seven minutes of material than have seen the rest of my live work put together. Luckily I do OKish in this case, but there have been plenty of other gigs I wouldn't want to be filmed. Probably best to check a person is filming before you destroy their phone though. But having your mobile phone on during any kind of performance, especially if you start using it, is very bad form and it would be good to get the word out to the world that if they are so rude as to be using their mobile during a performance that it will be smashed to bits. My own experience of phone smashing, where the person had really done nothing to try and stop the interruption was certainly greeted with delight by the rest of the audience, which suggests that most people are just as annoyed by this as comics.
