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I was at Broadcasting House being interviewed by Arthur Smith for his Comedy Club radio show. It’s always a pleasure to see this legend of British comedy, already guaranteed national treasure status and an eccentric, but one with a film grasp of reality (which is a nice mixture). He wears slippers with pom poms on them in the studio. You don’t get that with Steve Wright. I also enjoy the way his interview technique is designed as much for him to tell interesting stories as to get anything out of you. It makes the experience fun for the interviewee!
Arthur was one of the first stand up comedians that I ever saw live, during my first Edinburgh Fringe in 1987. He seemed so grown-up to us then, though he would only have been 33. But he was already a hero to me, enough that when I saw him propping up the bar at the Fringe Club, drinking alone, lost in his thoughts I worried that that might be my fate too, if I followed my dream to be a professional. It absolutely was my fate as it turned out, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked from outside. He is also the main person I remember from the next year’s Fringe when we were booked to play the Gilded Balloon and heckled by seemingly every stand-up in the world for being posh Oxbridge nobs. I saw him making his way to his seat, carrying a beer or two, shouting and laughing. I remembered him because I had liked him so much so had been sad to see him being part of this. Though in hindsight I totally understand his motivations and don’t hold any grudge and he has rather sportingly apologised on a number of occasions.
His mid-nineties Fringe plays and Edinburgh events were hugely influential on me, even though one of them had a thinly veiled attack on me from my recently ex-girlfriend Sally Phillips. I actually felt quite honoured to be mocked in an Arthur Smith show. His one-off and elaborate happening show in the Botanical Gardens in 1998 remains my favourite ever Edinburgh show. And I saw him a lot in various pubs and tube trains when we both lived in Balham. I like that sometimes he wanted to chat and sometimes he’d just say, “Oh we don’t have to talk to each other do we?” Looking back at this I might conclude that Arthur doesn’t particularly care for me. That’s probably accurate. He doesn’t particularly not care for me either. He is a man for whom caring about a lot of things is not worth the effort.
He crashed my 30th birthday party and wrote me a poem (which I had on my notice board for a long time) which read, “rage and balloon, sage and buffoon”, which I like a lot. And he has carved out a smart career for himself where he does what he likes, creates interesting stuff, but remains largely anonymous - there’s a great quote of his about how he has the greatest kind of fame, mild fame. It opens doors without affecting his day to day life.
What I am saying is he’s right up there with my all time comedy greats. Him, Michael Palin and Barry Cryer have the careers and lives that I most covet.
I think the interviews go up over a few days in a couple of weeks. They are more rambling conversations, as is befitting of the particular radio slot. But I did get a nice surprise. The producer of the show turned out to be a big Lee and Herring fan (though he hid his admiration for me less successfully than I did for Arthur - who in turn talked about how star struck he’d been to meet Alan Bennett). But as with many people who now work at the heart of the British comedy media, the producer had been a big enough fan to write to us regularly and come to our gigs and it turned out that he had made a crackly and muffled recording of one of the performances of Punk’s Not Dead. We'd been incredibly bad at recording stuff in the 1990s and there is scarcely a record of anything we did, so it was a real surprise to hear myself reciting this vaguely familiar script. He only recorded about 35 minutes (before presumably the tape ran out), but it’s still a nice thing to have. We’re going to release it as one of the extras to the monthly subscribers (in a couple of weeks when the RHLSTP ones run out). So sign up if you want to hear this and see the other extras (and be in with a chance of winning the end of the month draw - I am going to be designing one of my highly sought after one-off fabric painted T shirts for this one -
then sign up for a pound or more a month here.
A fun Burns night gig at the Richard Herring Leicester Square Theatre for the Glasgow Comedy Festival tonight, though I’d got a tiny bit drunk and began by saying, “the show I am taking to Edinburgh… I mean Glasgow…. Same thing really.” This accidental bit of crapulous audience baiting got a lovely response of anger. I wish I’d pushed it further and said, “Yeah, you should be offended by that if you’re from Glasgow, but if you’re from Edinburgh that’s one Hell of a compliment”. It’s fun to play with an audience reaction in that way. The Glaswegians would have cheered and the Edinburghers would have booed more. Instead I blamed the mistake on them all, not taking the chance to leave us when they could (though how many of the audience were Scottish is questionable anyway). Now I am so good at stand up I need to try and derail myself to make it interesting. Ten years ago an error like that would have destroyed me, but I used it to my advantage and had fun with it. But it reminded me why I had stopped doing gigs even with a minimal amount of booze - I made little errors and lost control in the wrong way (though sometimes that led to a loss of control in a good way)
I added some more items to my eBay page. These are all going towards paying for the editing of the last series of RHLSTP, which feels like a good use of these bits of memorabilia - the old pays for the new. There are some great items for fans of Lee and/or Herring including one of the actual prop copies of the Ironic Review from TMWRNJ (it’s a copy of Loaded with a fake cover!), some original Fist of Fun and Lionel Nimrod scripts, a press release from the first TV series and an “I Like Fist of Fun” badge, perfect for advertising your love of the unpopular 1990s TV show or perverse sexual interests or both. And that This Morning With Richard Not Judy programme is a thing of beauty, packed with content and going cheaply at the moment.
Bid here. One of us is bound to die soon, massively increasing the value of your investment (as long as it is Stew).
